Ben, I worry you are making a symmetrical mistake to the one Nozick makes and this leads to conclusions that would put you well to the right in Canada for example.
Aristotle made the deep distinction between corrective justice (defined by restoring two parties to the position they would have been in had the transactions between them been conducted properly) and distributive justice. Rawls’s theory is one of distributive Justice but this isn’t because he thinks corrective justice is irrelevant in practice. Once there is a “basic structure” that is compatible with distributive justice, there will be transactions that are consistent with this basic structure and ones that aren’t. The latter would still have to be remedied, and corrective justice would govern.
So in the co-operative commonwealth, if I took your People’s Smartphone or my co-operative failed to deliver the number of widgets promised to your co-operative, corrective justice would be relevant.
The conceptual problem with Nozick is he tries to justify the rules for how transactions ought to go with corrective justice. This doesn’t work unless we accept his intuitions that Wilt Chamberlin shouldn’t have to pay taxes or that resource rents can be appropriated as long as the Lockean proviso is met. If we don’t share his intuitions he has no non-circular argument because corrective justice requires a background set of entitlements to get off the ground.
But it doesn’t follow from recognizing this that a people who has been dispossessed have no claims in corrective justice. If we are going to be strict Rawlsians, he wouldn’t even acknowledge that the Theory of Justice applies between peoples and instead has a far less developed and far thinner theory, which is primarily about corrective justice (respect borders and remedy violations).
To be sure, what corrective justice requires of settler colonies is complicated by the impossibility of restoring the status quo ante. If your theory of justice requires everyone not of 100% indigenous descent to leave North America, then that is a problem not just with the practicality of your theory but with its justice as well. But these problems are endemic to the application of corrective justice. It is a bad dichotomy to say either there is a complete dispossession of the settlers or no land back at all.
The socialist tradition had a principle of “hegemony” for addressing the unfulfilled democratic tasks. The principle was that unity of the working class could only be constituted based on taking up the legitimate democratic demands of all the oppressed, which included indigenous groups that had been dispossessed. Obviously the practice wasn’t great but there were attempts to establish a land base and promote indigenous languages.
Even if control over resources and the rents that go with them are restored (and this process has shown some, very imperfect, progress in Canada since 1982 when aboriginal and treaty rights were constitutionalized, very much against liberal objection), this won’t solve the problems endemic to capitalism nor will it change that some land bases deliver more economic rents than others. There will be (and already are) contradictions between planning for the whole community and the autonomy of small Indigenous national communities. But this sort of thing is true with any “democratic” task.
Ben, I worry you are making a symmetrical mistake to the one Nozick makes and this leads to conclusions that would put you well to the right in Canada for example.
Aristotle made the deep distinction between corrective justice (defined by restoring two parties to the position they would have been in had the transactions between them been conducted properly) and distributive justice. Rawls’s theory is one of distributive Justice but this isn’t because he thinks corrective justice is irrelevant in practice. Once there is a “basic structure” that is compatible with distributive justice, there will be transactions that are consistent with this basic structure and ones that aren’t. The latter would still have to be remedied, and corrective justice would govern.
So in the co-operative commonwealth, if I took your People’s Smartphone or my co-operative failed to deliver the number of widgets promised to your co-operative, corrective justice would be relevant.
The conceptual problem with Nozick is he tries to justify the rules for how transactions ought to go with corrective justice. This doesn’t work unless we accept his intuitions that Wilt Chamberlin shouldn’t have to pay taxes or that resource rents can be appropriated as long as the Lockean proviso is met. If we don’t share his intuitions he has no non-circular argument because corrective justice requires a background set of entitlements to get off the ground.
But it doesn’t follow from recognizing this that a people who has been dispossessed have no claims in corrective justice. If we are going to be strict Rawlsians, he wouldn’t even acknowledge that the Theory of Justice applies between peoples and instead has a far less developed and far thinner theory, which is primarily about corrective justice (respect borders and remedy violations).
To be sure, what corrective justice requires of settler colonies is complicated by the impossibility of restoring the status quo ante. If your theory of justice requires everyone not of 100% indigenous descent to leave North America, then that is a problem not just with the practicality of your theory but with its justice as well. But these problems are endemic to the application of corrective justice. It is a bad dichotomy to say either there is a complete dispossession of the settlers or no land back at all.
The socialist tradition had a principle of “hegemony” for addressing the unfulfilled democratic tasks. The principle was that unity of the working class could only be constituted based on taking up the legitimate democratic demands of all the oppressed, which included indigenous groups that had been dispossessed. Obviously the practice wasn’t great but there were attempts to establish a land base and promote indigenous languages.
Even if control over resources and the rents that go with them are restored (and this process has shown some, very imperfect, progress in Canada since 1982 when aboriginal and treaty rights were constitutionalized, very much against liberal objection), this won’t solve the problems endemic to capitalism nor will it change that some land bases deliver more economic rents than others. There will be (and already are) contradictions between planning for the whole community and the autonomy of small Indigenous national communities. But this sort of thing is true with any “democratic” task.