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Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike the more familiar right-libertarianism (which also endorses full self-ownership), it holds that natural resources—resources which are not the results of anyone's choices and which are necessary for any form of activity—may be privately appropriated only with the permission of, or with a significant payment to, the members of society. Like right-libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that the basic rights of individuals are ownership rights. Such rights can endow agents—as liberalism requires—with spheres of personal liberty where they may each pursue their conceptions of “the good life”. Left libertarianism is promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality. It is promising, that is, because it is a form of liberal egalitarianism....
Libertarianism (both left and right) holds that all agents are, initially at least (e.g., prior to engaging in any commitments or unjust actions), full self-owners, and that any violation of full self-ownership is unjust. The core idea of full self-ownership is that agents own themselves in just the same way that they can fully own inanimate objects....
At the core of full self-ownership are the constraints on how individuals may be used. Killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent individuals without their consent is unjust no matter how effective these actions are as means to equality or other moral goals. More generally, agents have the right to control the use of their person....
According to one version of left-libertarianism, natural resources are jointly owned in the sense that authorization to use, or to appropriate, is given through some specified collective decision-making process (e.g., by majority or unanimous decision)....
A different sort of approach holds that agents may use, or appropriate, unappropriated natural resources without the permission of others, but if they do so, they acquire certain enforceable obligations. This is the most common approach taken by left-libertarians, and we shall presently examine some of the different forms that it can take....
A plausible conception of the ownership of natural resources must be compatible with reasonably secure (not easily lost) self-ownership. At a minimum it should allow unappropriated resources to be used by agents without the permission of others and without any loss of the rights of self-ownership....
In addition, a plausible conception of the ownership of natural resources, many will argue, should be unilateralist in the sense of allowing agents to appropriate unappropriated natural resources without the consent of others—and with no loss of self-ownership—as long as they make an appropriate payment (to be discussed below)....
Radical right-libertarians—such as Rothbard (1978, 1982) and Kirzner (1978)—hold that that there are no payment requirements for the appropriation of unappropriated resources....Other right-libertarians—such as Nozick (1974)—hold that the only payment requirements are those of a quasi-Lockean proviso, which requires roughly that no individual be made worse off (in some appropriate sense) by the appropriation (compared with the situation before appropriation). It seems quite plausible that satisfaction of some form of such a proviso is a necessary condition for just unilateral appropriation, but it is surely not sufficient for just appropriation. For private property rights over natural resources typically bring the owners benefits (even after making a payment to ensure that no one is made worse off). Consequently, people are willing to pay for these rights, and the rights have—relative to some specification of the morally relevant market conditions—a competitive value (based on demand and supply). There is no reason why an appropriator should be immune from paying for this competitive value. [From "Left-Libertarianism: A Primer" by Peter Vallentyne, included in Left-Libertarianism and its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner.]