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Sometimes people wonder why we should look at the morality of property at all. Property rights are taken to be legal constructs. Their validity rests, as Hume suggested, on their utility. In this context it makes little sense to focus on the specific provisions of property law and ask about their moral foundation. What has a foundation in morality is the whole system of property itself: laws, distributions, expectations, conventions. And the general usefulness of this arrangement is so large a question, so fraught with uncertainty, that it is almost beyond serious discussion.
1 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York (Basic Books) 1974, p. 175Google Scholar.
2 Nozick, p. 151.
3 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, section 34.
4 See Vlastos, Gregory, ‘Justice and Equality’, in Brandt, Richard, ed., Social Justice, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (Prentice-Hall) 1962, pp. 31-72Google Scholar.
5 This may be confusing because, for some people, the work one puts into something is part of its merit. Not so for Vlastos: if you and I both produce 10 widgets, but yours are better, or produced faster, that’s where your merit exceeds mine. Conceivably but certainly not necessarily, you might deserve something merely because you possess a certain merit, like kindness, apart from its capacity to enhance produced goods. Vlastos's scheme implies no contradiction of the notion that work itself is meritorious; it merely accounts for this sort of merit separately.
6 Note that this might happen in improbable, unforeseeable circumstances, so one cannot say that my good fortune was somehow the result of my meritorious rational prudence after acquiring the item.
7 This degrees-model of property differs in at least three respects from models inspired by the neoclassical notion that one's desert is equivalent to the contribution of my work to the value of aggregate final product.
First, the degrees-model makes it possible to have, in some circumstances, a property in something based on need alone. This possibility can of course be eliminated by setting the weighting of need to 0 in the determination of desert. Second, the degrees of property model breaks down my contribution into distinct elements of work and merit. In theory this may make no difference, but in practice it could affect the calculation, because ‘pure’ merit might be assigned far more weight than ‘pure’ work. A great artist might be supposed to have a very extensive degree of property in some creation even if that creation didn't take a lot of work and didn't have an enormous market value. In this case, merit will have made a contribution to desert that would not be reflected in the marginal-contribution account of value. Third, and most important, the neoclassical calculation of desert requires that the value I contribute is closely tied to the market value of that item. If the house I build will sell for a million dollars more than its raw materials, then I must have added that much value. Not so in the degrees-of-property model: the value of my contribution is to be determined by some assessment of my merit and work in which market values do not play a decisive role. If, in a different market, that house would have sold for only ten thousand dollars more, then my desert can be expected to fall somewhere between the two. Work and merit have to be assessed according to some standard independent of current market forces – something along the lines of what comes up in pay equity disputes – and therefore will deviate from a neoclassical assessment. Here, obviously, a distinction is made between moral and economic value, and non-utilitarian moral considerations are given their due. From a the standpoint of justice, it simply isn't plausible that two people who perform the same work with the same skill and diligence should have different deserts merely because of their different positions in the market.
