Geoffery, I’m not sure if I can give perfect clarification of the term “fairness.” I can see why you’d want me to, and I agree that it could present some difficulties if we think of different kinds of things as “fair,” so I’ll give it a shot. But ultimately, I think that we pretty much know what it means to look at something and say, “That’s not fair.” In any case, a working definition of fairness would have to have something to do with impartiality, respect, and flexibility. I’ll say that fairness is that which, taking into account the particular features of the situation at hand, best respects the individuality of everyone involved, and does not create systemic bias which favors anyone on irrelevant grounds. I’m not going to war with that definition, so feel free to object and to offer an alternative.
As for what “egalitarian” means in this context, I’d say it means that there’s some share of natural resources (considered abstractly) which everyone should have a claim to, simply on the basis of being a person. At the very least, we act unfairly if we completely deny some individual the use of all natural resources. It should be clear that in the island example, I imply a stricter egalitarian constraint by saying that it is unfair for you to appropriate the overwhelming share of the coconut trees, even though I have enough to survive. That’s not a necessary feature of left-libertarianism, but to some degree, it is part of my own (relatively undeveloped) views.
To demonstrate that the left-libertarian program is at least worthy of consideration, imagine if you appropriated so much of the island that I wouldn’t be able to survive with what you didn’t appropriate. You could counter with the claim that by stealing some of your property, I would infringe your rights, but not unjustly–that’s the lifeboat side of the equation. But I think I’d be comfortable saying that you simply have no right to take everything, and so I infringe no right of yours by taking some of the resources you wrongly appropriated. If you disagree, then we’re simply at an impasse.
By stopping short of a “principle X” of justice in appropriation, I didn’t mean to imply that we ought not to search for such a principle. I only meant that attempting to craft a principle in a message board conversation would be absurd. Lots of people have spent their careers on this project; I’m an undergraduate with no delusions of grandeur. In order to establish simply that Rothbard is wrong, and not anything about my own position, I pose the following argument.
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Rothbard’s principle of justice in appropriation relies on the idea that the only thing that matters when determining whether an act of appropriation from nature is legitimate is whether or not the would-be appropriator mixed her labor with the previously unowned object in a meaningful way.
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If this is the only thing that matters in determining the legitimacy of an act of appropriation, then it is perfectly fair if while I’m asleep, you appropriate all of the coconut trees on the island, even if I need a share of coconuts in order to survive.
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It is not fair for you to appropriate all of the trees if I need a share of coconuts in order to survive.
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Therefore, Rothbard’s principle of justice in appropriation is false.
Can we at least agree on that? To address the three objections to the scenario you raise later: I’m now saying that you appropriate all of the trees, yes. If crabs aren’t realistic, then perhaps there are birds that eat the coconuts when they’re very small, so the only way to get the coconuts is to build a cage around them so that the birds can’t get to them. If that’s not realistic, then just think of any other way that a natural process would prevent us from getting the coconuts unless we found some way to protect them. That’s a really bad objection; it’s a thought experiment. On your third objection, I’ll reiterate that at the very minimum, I’m saying that it’s “unfair” for you to appropriate all of the resources, and the reason is that I should have a right to at least some of them. I can’t respond to your fourth objection until I read Schmidtz, but for what it’s worth, that won’t save you from the argument I present above, unless you’re willing to say that (1) is false.
Stranger, I feel like calling you a mean name, but I’ll restrain myself. Instead, I’ll quote Mary Midgley, from her essay “Duties Concerning Islands.” Midgley might say about our argument, as she said in her essay:
“We have here one of those clashes between the language of common morality (which is of course always to some extent confused and inarticulate) and an intellectual scheme which arose in the first place from a part of that morality, but has now taken off on its own claims of authority to correct other parts of its source. There are always real difficulties here. As ordinary citizens, we have to guard against dismissing such intellectual schemes too casually; we have to do justice to the point of them. But, as philosophers, we have to resist the opposite temptation of taking the intellectual schemes as decisive, just because it is elegant and satisfying, or because the moral insight which is its starting-point is specially familiar to us. Today, this intellectualist bias is often expressed by calling the insights of common morality mere “intuitions.” This is quite misleading, since it gives the impression that they have been reached without thought, and that there is, by contrast, a scientific solution somewhere else to which they ought to bow–as there might be if we were contrasting commonsense “intuitions” about the physical world with physics or astronomy. Even without that word, philosophers often manage to give the impression that whenever our moral views clash with any simple, convenient scheme, it is our duty to abandon them.”
Midgley might continue:
“An ethical theory which, when consistently followed through, has iniquitous consequences, is a bad theory and must be changed. Certainly we can ask whether these consequences are really iniquitous, but this question must be handled seriously. We cannot directly conclude that the consequences cease to stink the moment they are seen to follow from our theory.”
What I’m implying here is that when you say, “your feelings and intuitions are of absolutely no interest or value to anyone and should never be the basis of any principle of justice,” you come off sounding like a religious ideologue; I expect this from Marxists, not libertarians. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent studying this issue, but I’ve spent a pretty good deal. That you’ve read Rothbard (assuming you’ve even done that) and weren’t perceptive enough to object to anything he said doesn’t prove that you understand what’s going on. I promise you, this isn’t a debate that can be brushed off easily. It’s one that’s been going on rather intensely for some 40 years, and on a slightly less central scale for centuries before that. If reading Rothbard gave you a different impression, then it only speaks badly about your critical abilities and Rothbard’s explanation of the issue.