Bas van der Vossen Speaks on the Lockean Proviso

Bas van der Vossen from UNC Greensboro will give a talk on the topic “When Enough and As Good Isn’t Good Enough” at Virginia Tech. The talk takes place on April 06, 2016, from 4-6 PM in Surge 117a. The talk is tailored to appeal to both students and faculty, with plenty of time for discussion and interaction with the guest speaker. You are cordially invited to attend.

Here is the abstract of the talk: The Lockean project in political philosophy aims to justify individual rights of private property. In such a society, people have rights of ownership that enable them to accumulate and exchange possessions, that protect their freedom to use these possessions more or less as they please, and that allow them to exclude others. I will call such a society a propertied society. One of the aims of Lockean theory is to defend the justice of propertied societies. Traditionally, Locke’s enough and as good proviso forms, in one way or another, an important part of this defense. In this paper, I argue that our standard conceptions of the proviso are mistaken and need to be replaced with one that focuses on a particularly Lockean idea of freedom. This idea of freedom requires the non-subjection to the wills of others. The point of the proviso, then, is to ensure this non-subjection in propertied society. I close by exploring the ways in which robustly competitive labor markets may help societies approach this Lockean ideal.