Fabian Wendt Publishes on The Project Pursuit Argument for Self-Ownership

Fabian Wendt, core faculty member of the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a faculty member of the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, published an article with the title, “The Project Pursuit Argument for Self-Ownership and Private Property.” The article appeared in Social Theory and Practice, a journal that provides a forum for the discussion of theoretical and applied questions in social, political, legal, economic, educational, and moral philosophy.  

Here is a link to the article and abstract. The article argues that persons should be conceived as self-owners and entitled to acquire private property within justifiable property conventions because they should be able to live as project pursuers. This is the ‘project pursuit argument’. It leads to a conception of self-ownership that is stringent, but weaker than standard libertarian notions of self-ownership, and to an understanding of private property as a convention that has to meet a sufficientarian threshold in order to be justifiable.