Bruno Goes: 'Republicanism and the Right to Private Property'
In his book On the People’s Terms, Philipp Pettit argues that the state must guarantee equal freedom for its citizens, and that it must do so by endowing them with certain equal rights to protect certain of their choices from domination. I argue that current forms of the right to private property are incompatible with this demand. In fact, the right to private property facilitates domination because it protects the choices of the powerful to interfere with those choices of the powerless which are supposedly protected by that very same right. The reason for why current institutions of private property are unjust, on Pettit’s standard of justice, is not that they unequally promote the welfare associated with the status of a free person amongst the people who live under them. They are unjust because they allow some of those people to control whether such institutions do so for others. Hence, they are incompatible with Pettit’s goal of the free republic.
