nagel is perhaps the least rigorous philosopher in the past 50 years. he has an obvious smugness that he is somehow above contemporary debates in philosophy and therefore chooses not to engage them directly. maybe posterity will discover nagel's genius, but for now if you read this book surrounded by its peers and rivals (particularly Quine, Dennett, Block, and all those wicked scientificalist/physicalist silly gooses) then you really should come away wondering what he's talking about.

admittedly, nagel angers me on a somewhat personal level. it seems as though since jack smart and david armstrong came along with overtly physical theories of mind, that philosophers of mind have been working to make sense of explanatory gaps, hard problems of consciousness, etc. And much of this work is very interesting and makes significant progress. But then Nagel comes along, calls everyone stupid and yells, "WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?". Then he fills it in with some mucky muck and unknowing philosophy students take him seriously...

Please don't be confused by an earlier post (which, thankfully, no one seems to have taken seriously) stating that there is some confusion in Nagel's own ideas about the possibility of objective knowledge. Nagel is a smart man, and it is not surprising that the subtleties of his arguments may be lost on some. He says it doesn't look like we can ever gain objective knowledge, basically, because we simply _are_ all our personality traits etc. that all go into determining how we see the world. His arguments about free will are very good and strangely overlooked. This is quite simply one of the best books on philosophy I have ever read, despite the fact that I agree with almost none of it; well composed, well thought-out, and well argued.

This is one of the ten or so most important works of philosophy of the past twenty-five years. Nagel, more than anyone else, is responsible for the re-examination now going on within Anglo-American philosophy of scientific materialism and of the reductionism and scientism that has gone along with it. Across a wide variety of philosophical problems, the book examines the hold that scientific materialism has had on recent thinking, and it suggests a number of ways that we can loosen that hold. Some of the suggestions are dazzling; even more dazzling are some of the problems themselves, which are discussed nowhere else. Be wary of critics of the book who rate it low; not only do they display their bias against the book's positions but also their inability to appreciate insight in somebody with whom they disagree.

The short version of this dopey book is this: Without Uncle Sam to protect your stuff you'd probably get mugged without hope of getting it back. Therefore you dont actually own it. I think most mafia dons think along these lines.
In another context, the money sitting in your banks safe doesn't actually belong to you. It belongs to the security guard who keeps it from getting stolen.
John Locke is spinning in his grave. The Sophists are laughing their butts off.

I was very disappointed and wrote to the authors without reply (to date). They seem unaware of the Lockean tradition and its handling by writers such as Henry George (who wrote far more clearly than they over 100 years ago).

The entitlements approach to justice is more in tune with the common law and history than the idea of collectivist "creation" of "rights", "offences" or "social mortgages".

As Pitt the Elder observed, taxation and the common law are strangers (which is why taxation statutes reeived a strict construction against the Crown).

I could go on but why? If this sort of stuff gets published I should have a go myself!

In the Myth of Ownership, Murphy and Nagel attempt to invert the baseline for determining tax fairness. Instead of using the more or less pure market distribution of social welfare as the baseline from which to discuss the equity of the existing tax scheme (Should we tax the wealthy more? Should we tax capital gains? Is taxation of dividends equitable to those receiving dividends?), the authors believe it is more appropriate to proceed from another baseline. Their preferred baseline can be, in my view, formulated succinctly by reference to Ronald Dworkin's claim regarding the nature of a just state, i.e. that the 'sovereign virtue' of the state is equal concern for the fate of all citizens. Thus, in Murphy's and Nagel's view, any discussion of tax fairness must begin with this imperative, the fate of all citizens, and must keep it in mind where there is any serious discussion of tax equity since such discussions are really discussion of economic and social justice.

In the authors' view, to proceed from the baseline of market distributions of social welfare - - which most people agree would allow serious and troubling social outcomes - - is to utilize a market-centric conception of social justice. As all citizens are first that, i.e. citizens, all have a stake in the social compact and all must be the equal concern of the governing organs of the state. Thus, all have a right to live lives free of poverty and the inequalities allowed by pure market outcomes.

Those tax commentators proceeding from the market baseline are those whom the authors call 'unreflective libertarians.' They are those who believe that they first owneth, and the government taketh away, and that their claims to ownership of their incomes and assets do not require government validation. The authors argue, conversely, that the only ownership we have is what government considers permissible (after taking Dworkin's maxim into account).

Murphy and Nagel argue that ownership, since only legitimized by government, is almost completely dependent upon government. To justify their position they invoke Hobbes and they assert that the 'state of nature' prior to the formation of government was a Hobbesian war of all against all. Thus, government, and robust government at that, performs more than a regulative role but is the condition sine qua non for the possibility of ownership, property rights, wealth and even civility.

While one might have sympathy for where Murphy and Nagel want to take us, their utilization of Hobbes to demonstrate the near heirophanic role of government is precisely what leads to many of their critics' charges of statism. Their argument could have proceeded without such strong claims (assertions, really) about human nature and government. Many conservatives would argue that government does not only NOT provide OF ITSELF the conditions for the possibility of ownership and property, they would argue that government at times impedes those conditions in unfair and inappropriate ways. As well, there are those who would argue that the authors' assessment of human nature is too dark, although convenient to their argument that it is government, and not social actors, that creates the legitimacy for claims of ownership and property rights, etc. Many would point out, in fact, that 'constitutional conventions' precede constitutions and thus that legitimacy flows from the people and the people's moral deliberations and not from government per se (Where, in fact, does non-despotic government obtain its legitimacy but from the people?).

The argument in the Myth of Ownership rests upon philosophical pillars that are unhelpful to its case and which lead to conclusions that are both philosophically problematic and politically fatal in a Western context, and so its central argument fails. Few would disagree with the claim that wealth and ownership are helped along by governmental frameworks, some safeguards against unjust seizures etc. But, I would have to reject Myth's statism, it's dark view of human nature, and so I come away disappointed at what promised to be a rubber-meets-the-road philosophical essay. It would have been a better book if the authors grounded the legitimacy of ownership and property rights claims in the moral imagination of human beings, rather than in Leviathan.