Topics Ethics

Question Is there the right to breathe and occupy space, the right to occupancy as a living being? Does having to pay rent and pay mortgages infringe on the right to life by having to pay to be in a space and to have your personal space? From Collis Huntington USA Fast Food Worker

Accepted:
December 30, 2005

Comments

Think of a world in which everyone -- at least initially, when they come of age -- is entitled to a space of their own with enough space left over for roads, markets, and the like. In that world, it might be fair to ask anyone who wants to occupy more than a fair share of privately occupied land to pay compensation to those who occupy less than a fair share. In that world, you would be entitled to occupy up to a fair share of privately occupied land without paying any rent or mortgage to anyone.

Do you have a right that our world be organized in the way just sketched? I think in one sense yes and in one sense no.

Yes in the sense that you cannot rightly be forced to make do with less than what you would have in that imaginary world. Many people growing up under feudalism were forced to work for a landowner, and accept his near-complete personal domination, in order to survive. And this was unjust coercion based on leaving people no option as good as what they would have in the imaginary world. Feudalism was justified by historical stories about how the noble families once acquired large tracts of land in legitimate ways. But such stories provide no good answer, I think, to the question you are asking as a person who has recently come of age: "Where is my fair share? Whatever you people may have done or agreed to before I came into this world could not have taken away, or diminished, the fair share to which I am entitled."

No in the sense that there does seem to be one good way of answering your challenge: It seems permissible to arrange the world in such a way that all have better opportunities than they would have in the imaginary world. If this has been achieved, then your question "Where is my fair share?" can be answered this way: We do not have a fair share of land for you to occupy. But we have an economic system that is functioning much better than it would if we had the land tenure system of the imaginary world. As a result, everyone born into this world has better economic prospects than people born into the imaginary world would have.

I think this response is plausible in principle. I am doubtful, however, whether it can plausibly be made in behalf of the existing economic order. To check this, we must look at those who grow up into the lowest economic positions under the present economic order. If we confine ourselves to the US, these worst-off are those who cannot find a job above minimum wage or perhaps any job at all. If we consider the world at large, the worst-off are those who live malnourished and without access to clean water in the slums of cities of the poor countries.

Admittedly, the imaginary world would be economically inefficient in various ways. Reserving some private space for everyone would impede large-scale agriculture, perhaps, because parcels of land must always be kept ready to be given to those newly of age. I am willing to believe that the average income and well-being in such a world would be below that in the US today, and even below that of the world today. But I think that pointing this out is not a good justification to the worst-off. They can reply: "You have instituted a very efficient economic system that greatly raises the average income relative to the imaginary world. Congratulations. But if the population as a whole has really gained so much from the reform, then it should be possible to use some of this wealth to ensure that no one is worse off than people would be in the imaginary world. It's not enough that those who gain from the reform gain much more than the losers lose and therefore could compensate the losers. Such compensation must actually take place for the reform to be justifiable to all."

What form could such compensation take? People coming of age might get a basic grant -- something like the $80,000 grant for each citizen that Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman have proposed in The Stakeholder Society, or something like a basic income proposed by Philippe van Parijs in his Real Freedom for All. Most importantly, we would have to eradicate the horrendous poverty into which so many people in the poor countries are born.