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Foundations of Economic Justice. By Morris
Silver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

review, but I find myself unable to do so. Silver defends the

following rights principle: “Individuals ought to hold the objects
they have produced; they ought not to be forcibly deprived of these
objects” (p. 123). Not even the most resolute libertarian could find
fault with the way he interprets this principle. Further, Silver co-
gently criticizes utilitarianism and Rawls’s theory of justice. The
author shows a remarkable acquaintance with the literature of eco-
nomics, philosophy, history, biology, and anthropology.

What then is the problem? I am sorry to say that Silver’s approach
to economic justice seems to me unmitigated nonsense. He rightly
points out that people strongly resent others’ taking their property
from them. This feeling of indignation he contends has been built into
us by evolution. It forms the basis of morality. The good, at least so
far as economic justice is concerned, is constituted by this feeling.
Thus, redistributionist programs clearly violate justice, since people
resent having to surrender their money for such programs. People
are, of course, free to agree to transfer their money to the poor on a
voluntary basis, but the agreement must be genuinely voluntary.
Otherwise, resentment, the sure sign of immorality, will ensue.

People do indeed resent having their property stolen. But Silver
has not shown that those feelings of resentment always express
commitment to the natural rights system he favors. Suppose that
someone is a member of a socialist cooperative, the owners of which
are supposed to distribute revenues on an equal basis. Someone who
does not receive his equal share will probably resent it. Why will his
resentment be limited to cases in which he was also entitled to the
share he has been deprived of by Silver’s natural rights criterion?

Also, thieves will tend to feel resentful if people take from them
what they have stolen. Criminals often have a very firm sense of their

I would like very much to be able to give this book a favorable

The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1991): 135-137
ISSN 0889-3047

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136 The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 5, No. 1

rights: they simply fail to apply the restrictions they wish to impose
on others to their own behavior. Once more, resentment over property
taken has no direct relation with the system of natural rights that
Silver defends.

One might reply to this that criminals will object only to
someone’s depriving them of their ill-gotten gains. They will not care
about other thieves, or about anyone else, for that matter. But this
objection serves to point up another weakness in Silver’s argument.
People generally resent injuries to themselves and those close to
them: violations of other people’s rights will hardly elicit the same
degree of indignation. Will it bother me very much if a neighbor I
dislike has his car radio stolen?

For the sake of argument, however, let us grant that people do
feel resentment in exactly the cases Silver thinks they do, i.e.,
violations of his natural rights system. His argument still does not
succeed. People feel resentment over all sorts of things—losing a job
to a rival, being rejected by the person one wishes to marry, failing to
get sufficient admiration from others, receiving criticism, etc. Many
of these reactions have nothing to do with morality: if I resent the
success of someone who has achieved more than I, this hardly quali-
fies as moral indignation. Silver needs to show what is supposed to
be moral about his favored sort of resentment, in a way that dis-
tinguishes it from other instances of that feeling.

One way not to do this is to say that resentment in the natural
rights case is moral indignation because taking the property of others
is unjust. Exactly what Silver claims to be doing is to show by appeal
to resentment what behavior is unjust. To distinguish some instances
of resentment from others by references to a view of justice would be
a blatant circularity. This argument can be generalized to any theory
that attempts to reduce morality to feelings. Why are some feelings
moral, when others, phenomenologically similar, are not? It is exactly
this point that Charles Fried raises in a passage quoted by Silver (p.
113). Silver’s comment on this argument must be read to be believed:
~ he has utterly failed to grasp the point at issue.

Once more, though, let us assume that Silver has overcome this
difficulty. In addition to resentment, people have all sorts of other
feelings. Some people, e.g., feel strongly that poor people deserve aid,
even if resources must be taken from others to support them. These
people will of course resent it if their property is taken from them
without their consent. But by hypothesis, they do consent. Why
should their redistributionist feelings be outweighed by whatever
resentment they feel at others’ having their property taken? Or is the
argument not that one feeling is stronger than the other, but that one


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Book Reviews 137

is morally right while the other is not? If so, what is the basis for the
distinction? It cannot just lie in the fact that one is a strong feeling.
Actually, I think that the first construal is correct. Silver thinks that
resentment over lost property will tend to dominate other feelings: so
far as I can see, he offers no argument. He does present evidence that
people will fight to defend their property, but this hardly shows that
no other feeling is as strong.

Am I unable to say anything favorable about this book? Not at all.
Silver has very good objections to Richard Posner’s wealth-maximi-
zation view of justice. As he notes, on Posner’s theory people might
end up not owning the services of their own bodies (p. 150). Another
good point is the distinction he makes between von Neumann-
Morgenstern utility and utility as a measure of the satisfaction of
desire (p. 147). In these instances, Silver’s wide knowledge of the
literature emerges to best effect: he has correctly reported arguments
that strike to the heart of the issues he addresses.

Too often, though, Silver is in over his head. A last instance must
suffice. He draws a parallel between the view of morality he favors
and a view about secondary qualities popular in recent philosophy.
Silver thinks that “the ultimate criterion of the goodness of an action
is how it feels to perceivers. The presence of the feeling of approval
is constitutive . . . (p. 123, emphasis in original). He draws a parallel
with philosophical views that explain “red” in terms of “looking red.”
Neither of the two accounts Silver cites displays the parallel with his
own theory which he thinks is present. The first of the passages he
quotes, by John Pollock, claims that there are no entailments between
“red” and “looking red” (p. 122). Just the point of Silver’s theory is
that “feeling good” does entail “being good”: the first constitutes the
second, on his view. Oddly, after the passage about the criterion of
goodness I have previously quoted, Silver states that “there are no
entailments relating good and feeling good” (p. 123). Is he this
incapable of grasping his own theory? The second passage (pp. 122-
23) by Colin McGinn, contends that an experience of red must repre-
sent the world as being red. Silver’s account, by contrast, reduces the
good to feelings. A view in which feelings refer to the good as an
intentional object is just what Silver does not want, since it intro-
duces into the analysis a term he wishes to reduce to something else.
I shall leave it to the interested reader to locate the remaining few
valuable points in the morass of confusion that constitutes Silver’s
book. My advice is not to bother.

David Gordon
The Ludwig von Mises Institute