Hillel Steiner

Judith Jarvis Thomson and others contend that rights are pro-tanto rather than absolute, that is, that rights may permissibly be infringed in some circumstances. Alan Gewirth maintains that there are some rights that are absolute because infringing them would amount to unspeakable evil. However, there seem to be possible circumstances in which it would be permissible to infringe even those rights. Specificationists, such as Gerald Gaus, Russ Shafer-Landau, Hillel Steiner and Kit Wellman, argue that all rights are absolute because they have implicit exceptions, the exceptions being either right-voiding or right-compatible. Specificationists have charged pro-tantoism with preventing rights from being action-guiding, and pro-tantoists have levelled the same charge against specificationism. I show that both charges are mistaken. Pro-tantoists claim that specificationists cannot account for the moral remainder that we recognise in some circumstances and which can be explained by reference to a permissible right-infringement. Specificationists retort that the moral remainder can be explained by invoking compensation-rights. I show that the pro-tantoist claim is true and that the specificationist retort is false on two counts: explanation in terms of compensation-rights is not applicable to all cases; and it fails to account for the moral dynamic in the cases to which it is applicable. The contention that rights are pro-tanto does not conflict with the substance of the contention that rights are trumps, despite claims of specificationists to the contrary.

I present a diversity of theories of freedom which I compare and contrast. I begin with a brief summary of my own recently published theory, which I show to be superior to the other theories considered. I find that there are various weaknesses or errors in the other theories and that my own theory is the only one that gives an adequate explanation of why freedom, or a free society, is desirable.

The permissibility of actions depends upon facts about the flourishing and separateness of persons. Persons differ from other creatures in having the task of discovering for themselves, by conjecture and refutation, what sort of life will fulfil them. Compulsory slavery impermissibly prevents some persons from pursuing this task. However, many people may conjecture that they are natural slaves. Some of these conjectures may turn out to be correct. In consequence, voluntary slavery, in which one person welcomes the duty to fulfil all the commands of another, is permissible. Life-long voluntary slavery contracts are impermissible because of human fallibility; but fixed-term slavery contracts should be legally enforceable. Each person has the temporarily alienable moral right to direct her own life.

I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the conflation of legitimacy with stability, the undesirability of “public justification” and the apparent blindness to the evolutionary critical-rationalist approach of Hayek and Popper. I employ that approach to sketch answers to the theoretical, historical and practical questions about the legitimacy of government or of systems of moral rules.

Thomas Pogge's Global Resources Dividend relies on a flat tax on the use of natural resources to fund the eradication of world poverty. Hillel Steiner's Global Fund taxes the full rental value of owned natural resources and distributes the proceeds equally. The paper compares the Dividend and the Fund and defends the Global Share, a novel proposal that taxes either use or ownership, does so (when possible) progressively, and distributes the revenue according to a prioritarian rather than a sufficientarian or egalitarian principle.

Proposals for resource taxes and associated transfers have played a very prominent role in contemporary debates about global justice, from Beitz's 'resource redistribution principle,' to Steiner's Global Fund, to Pogge's Global Resources Dividend. But such proposals have also attracted some important criticisms, including the claim that resource taxes are unmotivated, or that their impact would be regressive. This paper responds to these challenges, and at the same time it seeks to clarify the role resource taxes should play in an egalitarian project. Still, when we evaluate their potential impact much may turn out to hang on just which resources should be taxed, and which of the ways in which we engage with resources – owning them, extracting them, or consuming them – should render us liable to paying taxes. I will have rather less to say in response to this question, but I shall suggest that in light of the diverse goals which resource taxes are likely to be charged with advancing, a single undifferentiated global tax on natural resources (undifferentiated, that is, either in the sense that it targets all resources, or in the sense that it is exclusively targeted at for instance ownership or consumption) is unlikely to promote justice most effectively. On the assumption that a more fine-grained approach may be desirable, the paper ends with a discussion of several proposals for specific resource taxes.

In this piece, Mario Ricciardi conducts an interview with Hillel Steiner centred around Steiner's prize winning book, An Essay on Rights. Steiner responds to questions on the development of his views, their practical implications and on key aspects of his theoretical standpoint.

In contrast to eminent historical philosophers, almost all contemporary philosophers maintain that slavery is impermissible. In the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment a number of arguments gained currency which were intended to show that contractual slavery is not merely impermissible but impossible. Those arguments are influential today in moral, legal and political philosophy, even in discussions that go beyond the issue of contractual slavery. I explain what slavery is, giving historical and other illustrations. I examine the arguments for the impossibility of contractual slavery propounded in the Enlightenment and their offspring expounded in recent writings, including those by Barnett, Cassirer, Ellerman, Rawls, Roberts-Thomson, Satz and Steiner. I show that they involve confusions between abilities and rights, free will and freedom, directing and doing, what may be true sequentially and what may be true simultaneously, default rights and universal rights, impermissibility and impossibility, and metaphorical and literal uses of language.

Benjamin Ferguson (Ferguson 2013) recently proposed an account of exploitation that is based on Hillel Steiner's libertarian account of Exploitation (Steiner 1984, 1987). In this paper, I argue that Ferguson's account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for exploitation due to the libertarian framework that underlies his account. An additional claim is that Ferguson's account of exploitation is faced with a trilemma: It is either an account of the concept of exploitation, or an account of a libertarian conception of exploitation, or an account of a non-libertarian conception of exploitation. In the first case, it does provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for exploitation. In the second case, the amendments that Ferguson makes to Steiner's account make it inconsistent with libertarianism. In the third case, Ferguson fails to spell out the conceptual framework that underlies his account.

This paper is a rejoinder to Thomas Pogge's and Hillel Steiner's replies to my earlier paper “Global Taxes on Natural Resources”, and summarizes my understanding of the outcome of our exchange. Regarding the tax base, I argue that we now converge in endorsing what I term a hybrid option. Regarding revenue distribution, I discuss Pogge's claim that he relies on an ecumenical rather than sufficientarian approach to distribution. I argue that the claim resolves an unclarity in earlier statements of Pogge's view but that the ecumenical approach is unsatisfactory. The rejoinder also questions the characterization of my proposal that Pogge employs to criticise it.

This is a short blog-post explaining some themes from my article, ‘The Possibility of Contractual Slavery,’ which was published by OUP in The Philosophical Quarterly. In the blog piece, and in more detail in the article, I criticise Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Cassirer and Rawls, as well as the libertarians Randy Barnet and Hillel Steiner. The blog piece is available (free) here:

http://blog.oup.com/2016/02/slavery-contracts/