The role of nature in the self-ownership proviso

Eric Mack defends a version of John Locke’s proviso. Mack applies his proviso to original appropriations, uses, and systems of private property. His proviso precludes severely disabling the world-interactive powers of others. Mack specifically warns against using concrete features of the natural world as a baseline for determine whether the proviso has been violated. While his proviso is plausible, I argue that he cannot. eschew employing the receptivity of the natural, unowned world to the extent that he suggests. We cannot determine whether one’s powers are disabled or diminished without knowing how receptive the world would be to those powers had a system of private property not arisen. The upshot of this paper is that the requirements of a well-formulated proviso is an empirical matter.

The self-ownership proviso

Recently, Eric Mack, Edward Feser, and Daniel Russell have argued that self-ownership justifies a constraint on the use of property such that an owner’s use of property may not severely negate the ability of others to interact with the world. Mack has labeled this constraint the self-ownership proviso. Adopting this proviso promises right-libertarians a way of avoiding the extreme implications of a no-proviso view, while maintaining a consistent and cohesive position (in contrast, arguably, to Nozick’s understanding and endorsement of Locke’s proviso). Nevertheless, I argue that self-ownership cannot ground the constraint on property use that Mack, Feser, and Russell think that it can.

The Point of Self-Ownership

Traditional Libertarian Self-Ownership views suffer from the Conflation Problem—they fail to adequately distinguish serious from trivial infringements on our rights. Eric Mack has responded to this general concern. He argues that if we properly understand the point of rights, we can successfully distinguish between boundaries that it is morally crucial that we not cross from boundaries that are more flexible. This chapter argues that Mack’s proposed understanding of the point of rights—allowing people to live their own lives in their own way, uninterfered with—is ambiguous. Either we understand Mack’s notion of the point of rights in a moralized way or we do not. Either way, Mack’s view is inadequate, and thus he has not solved the general problem of distinguishing serious and trivial infringements on rights.