On Global Justice by Risse Mathias

Author:Risse, Mathias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

3. Let us consider arguments for more extensive rights to private intellectual property than what compensation or incentives require. For now, I assume an Intellectual Common, as well as realism about ideas. One argument for more extensive rights is that protecting inventions does not make anybody worse off. Inventions, as argued by Robert Nozick, would not exist without the inventor.9 Jeremy Waldron (1993b) replies that one might well be made worse off by inventions. Suppose I am dying of a disease for which there is no cure yet. Suppose somebody finds one, but that cure is inaccessible to me. Then I die knowing I can be cured. Yet while this reply goes a long way toward answering Nozick, the issue is moot if realism about ideas is true. Consider the following excerpt from an influential 1907 textbook by economist John Bates Clark that Waldron quotes to illustrate Nozick’s view (a view capturing an attitude opposite Jefferson’s):

It is as though in some magical way [a patent holder] had caused springs of water to flow in the desert or loam to cover barren mountains or fertile islands to rise from the bottom of the sea. His gains consist in something which no one loses, even while he enjoys them.10

Crucially, however, if realism is true, the person who made the water flow hit on something that was standing under a presumption against privatization. That person should receive compensation, but cannot demand additional rewards based on the fact that nobody is worse off.

However, my rebuttal might seem implausible, at least for achievements that appear utterly disconnected from the societal state of knowledge. To make this point, Becker (1993) refers to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” about a linguist devoted to rewriting Don Quixote (Borges 1998, 88–95). Menard endeavors to mimic Cervantes’s mindset at the time of writing his masterpiece and to reproduce it, not from memory but from scratch. The reason why this is absurd—in ways in which it is not absurd that Scott and Amundsen simultaneously raced toward the South Pole, or that Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at about the same time—is that Cervantes’s achievements seem so essentially tied to the functioning of his mind that even somebody who knows precisely what he knew would write a different novel.11

To defend the view that, still, there should be no private rights beyond compensation and incentive setting, one might insist that anybody who makes a discovery benefits from the labor of predecessors, no matter how big a leap to the invention. Moreover, the social context determines the usefulness of, or appreciation for, an invention (Hettinger 1989). But the main reply to the point of the Borges story remains that if indeed realism is true, there will be more or less demanding discoveries, but no inventions.12 The ludicrous nature of efforts to recreate the Quixote does not rebut this point, any more than we could rebut the idea that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first reached, and in that sense

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