Bruno Goes: 'On the Justice of Voluntary Ownership Exchange'
Are markets, preliminarily defined as social institutions of voluntary ownership exchange, just? According to dominant liberal egalitarian theories of justice, they are. Markets make the initially equal distribution of the distribuendum “ambition-sensitive”: They allow for any deviation from the initial distribution which reflects different individuals’ freely chosen pursuit of different conceptions of the good life. Recent interest in republican theories of justice scrutinize markets not under the lens of distributive equality but of freedom as non-domination. Claassen and Herzog (2021a/2021b) argue that liberal egalitarians have trouble accommodating such republican demands in their justification of markets. I argue that they do not. However, even with the republican concern about domination addressed by liberal egalitarianism, two objections to the legitimacy of voluntary ownership exchange remain. On the republican view, trading ownership is not enough: Free ownership exchange is unjust if it isn’t reliably protected from de-facto dominating ownership alienation. On the liberal egalitarian view, trading ownership rather than some other rights-bundle is too much: Ownership rights grant their holder the sovereignty not only to align their individual exercise but also their distribution – a process supposedly guided by considerations of equality – with their self-interest.
