Thesis Chapters by Gerrit Schaafsma
The aim of this thesis is to place the debate about the relationship between property rights and ... more The aim of this thesis is to place the debate about the relationship between property rights and justice as fairness on a new footing. I begin by exploring Rawls’s argument that justice as fairness is compatible with both a system of private property rights and a system of collective ownership, before shifting the focus to Rawls’s favoured regime type, namely property-owning democracy. This is a regime type in which property is privately held, but widely distributed. Rawls opts for property-owning democracy, in part, to show that contemporary capitalist welfare states, which also allow the private ownership of property, do not meet the requirements of justice as fairness. In the first part of the thesis, I argue that (i) the methodology behind Rawls’s appeal to property-owning democracy as a regime type is flawed and (ii) the core features of property-owning democracy – that property be both privately owned and widely held – conflict with one another. Having shown that Rawls’s understanding of the relationship between private property rights and justice as fairness fails, I present an alternative approach. First, I argue that the idea of a property-owning democracy should be abandoned and that theorising about the appropriate institutions for a just basic structure must be grounded in the specific circumstances of a given society. This implies that devising just institutions is a matter of non-ideal, rather than ideal theory. If this argument is accepted, it implies that institutions are always only provisionally just. Changing circumstances might require that the institutions of the basic structure be altered in order to maintain background justice. Next, I show that it is possible to justify private property rights within the framework of justice as fairness only if they form part of a larger set of interlocking institutions. Following this, I argue that, if private property can only be justified in this way, and if the institutions of the basic structure may have to be periodically altered, this has implications for the way in which distributive justice is dealt with within justice as fairness. I conclude that the use of pure procedural justice to settle questions about what constitutes a just distribution must be abandoned and replaced with imperfect procedural justice in order to deal with my findings about how the justness of the basic structure can be maintained over time. The notion of imperfect procedural justice offers proponents of justice as fairness a more viable approach to the difficult questions of distributive justice.
Papers by Gerrit Schaafsma
The aim of this thesis is to place the debate about the relationship between property rights and ... more The aim of this thesis is to place the debate about the relationship between property rights and justice as fairness on a new footing. I begin by exploring Rawls’s argument that justice as fairness is compatible with both a system of private property rights and a system of collective ownership, before shifting the focus to Rawls’s favoured regime type, namely property-owning democracy. This is a regime type in which property is privately held, but widely distributed. Rawls opts for property-owning democracy, in part, to show that contemporary capitalist welfare states, which also allow the private ownership of property, do not meet the requirements of justice as fairness. In the first part of the thesis, I argue that (i) the methodology behind Rawls’s appeal to property-owning democracy as a regime type is flawed and (ii) the core features of property-owning democracy – that property be both privately owned and widely held – conflict with one another. Having shown that Rawls’s under...
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Thesis Chapters by Gerrit Schaafsma
Papers by Gerrit Schaafsma