¹ See my “The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights,” Journal of Philosophy vol. 74 (1977), pp. 765–777, and An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), ch. 3.

² Filmer, Sir Robert, Patriarcha, ed. P., Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949).Google Scholar

³ Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. M., Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), p. 84Google Scholar: “The Right of Nature … is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself.… Right consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear.”

⁴ See Mack, Eric, “Natural and Contractual Rights,” Ethics, vol. 87 (1977), pp. 153–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Rights, Liberties and Expectations: A Reply to Sterba and Markie,” Ethics, vol. 89 (1979), pp. 301–305; “A Comment on Steiner on Presupposed Rights,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 33 (1978), pp. 423–424; “Purely Historical Justice,” unpublished; and “Distributive Justice and the Tensions of Lockeanism,” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 1 (1983), pp. 132–150.

⁵ Mack, “Natural and Contractual Rights,” p. 153.

⁶ See Markie, Peter J., “Mack on Promises and Natural Rights,” Ethics, vol. 88 (1978), pp. 263–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Mack, “Purely Historical Justice,” pp. 2–3 (emphasis added).

⁸ I would argue that they are coercive even if consented to but, in that case, legitimately so. It is clear that for a right against coercion to make any sense at all, coercion must be defined purely empirically and not normatively, i.e., not as some sort of interference with rights. Otherwise such a right would amount to an infinitely regressive right against having one's rights interfered with. Thus, Nozick goes too far in arguing: “Other people's actions place limits on one's available opportunities. Whether this makes one's resulting action non-voluntary [i.e., coerced] depends upon whether these others had the right to act as they did.” Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 262.Google Scholar

⁹ This same difficulty besets Baruch Brody's foundational “right of freedom of action” in an argument which astutely addresses the present set of problems. See “Redistribution Without Egalitarianism,” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 1 (1983), pp. 71–87.

¹⁰ Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 174–182. Your privatization can satisfy this condition, i.e., it can avoid violating others' welfare rights, if you compensate anyone whose welfare would otherwise by thereby diminished. A Pareto-improving or Pareto-superior privatization of O is one that increases die welfare of at least one person without diminishing the welfare of any others. A Pareto-optimal privatization of O is one to which no alternative privatization of O is Pareto-superior.

¹¹ More precisely, die advantages Nozick attributes generally to privatization are ones pertaining only to the subset of unconcentrated or dispersed privatizations. Filmerian privatization, to take an extreme case, could not so obviously surpass nonprivatization in die listed respects.

¹² Mack, “Distributive Justice,” p. 135.

¹³ Nozick, Anarchy, p. 175.

¹⁴ Fressola, Anthony, “Liberty and Property,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 18 (1981), p. 318.Google Scholar

¹⁵ ibid., pp. 319ff.

¹⁶ ibid., p. 320.

¹⁷ ibid., pp. 320–321 (emphasis added).

¹⁸ See Nozick, Anarchy, p. 174.

¹⁹ I try to provide a more comprehensive account in An Essay on Rights, ch. 3, and in “Compossible Rights,” which does however contain several errors.

²⁰ Hart, H. L. A., “Bentham on Legal Rights,” Simpson, A. W. B., ed., Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Second Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 175–176.Google Scholar

²¹ Two concessions must be noted. In their own arguments for the Pufendorf solution, both Mack and Fressola explicitly reserve judgment on whether and, if so, how this solution can be adjusted for latecomers. See Mack, “Purely Historical Justice,” p. 4, and Fressola, “Liberty,” p. 319. The need for such an explanation is both present and pressing. Conversely, it must be conceded that in the absence of latecomers – of successive, temporally-overlapping generations – the above argument against the Pufendorf solution would be invalid.

²² Fressola, “Liberty,” p. 318. Fressola himself attributes this view to Proudhon.

²³ ibid., p. 319.

²⁴ ibid., see also my “Liberty and Equality,” Political Studies, vol. 29 (1981), pp. 555–569, esp. p. 563.

²⁵ See Luce, R. Duncan and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957), pp. 364–365.Google Scholar

²⁶ The welfare-distributing implications of several variants of the Locke and Grotius solutions are penetratingly discussed by Cohen, G. A. in “Self-Ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality,” F., Lucash, ed., Justice and Equality Here and Now (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and “Self-Ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality: Part II,” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 3 (1986), pp. 77–96.

²⁷ On the ramified and compounded financial losses generated by unrestituted rights violations, see my “Exploitation: A Liberal Theory Amended, Defended and Extended,” A., Reeve, ed., Modern Theories of Exploitation (London and Los Angeles: Sage, 1987)Google Scholar and An Essay on Rights, ch. 5. Current assignees of past victims of injustice are any current persons who would have been better off, via a succession of transfers originating in the victims, in the absence of the unrectified injustices that deprived their victims of the value that would have been transferred. Some literature on this subject has tended to suggest that the restitution owed to such assignees is less than the restitution owed, but never paid, to the victims themselves. The motivation for this suggestion lies in some personal identity problems inherent in the “paradox of future individuals.” It purports to rest on the indisputable fact that, in the absence of the past circumstances created by these injustices, many of their victims' current successors would never have come to exist at all and, hence, cannot claim that they would have been better off had the injustices not occurred. The belief that currently owed restitution is therefore less than what was owed but never paid to the original victims is, however, based on an unwarranted assumption, namely, that the possible set of those victims' current assignees is confined to those victims' descendants. Thus, for example, Fishkin, James plausibly argued in Justice, Equal Opportunity and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 101Google Scholar, that

while my grandmother may have suffered from sex discrimination and while certain disadvantages to her descendants may have causally followed, she would clearly have had different descendants had it not been for the sex discrimination. If we imagine her pursuing a professional career rather than that of a full-time housewife, she would surely have had fewer than the five children she did have; she might not have had any at all.…

While this may show that Fishkin is not entitled to restitution for die discriminatory injustice suffered by his grandmother, it does not show that there can be no current claimant to that restitution. The injustice deprived his grandmother of something valuable. Had she not suffered that loss, that value would have found its way into the hands of various persons whose goods and services she would have purchased with her professional income, or into the hands of her various (related or unrelated) heirs and beneficiaries, or both – and eventually into the hands of some set of current persons different from the set of current persons in whose hands it has actually wound up. That former set may be empirically difficult to identify. But that is no reason to doubt its existence nor, therefore, to deny the debt owed to it by the latter set. Injustices redistribute value; they do not destroy it.