Is land special?  

Full-Length Article

Is land special?  

Abstract

Recent theories of territorial justice, such as those of Avery Kolers, Margaret Moore, and Anna Stilz, are internalist accounts: they argue for distributive principles that are tailor-made for the domain of land, on the grounds that we should construct our theory of territorial justice on the basis of people’s specifically place-based interests. An alternative view is integrationist: land should be integrated into our more general account of justice, one capable of exchanging between the different domains of justice, and where locational interests are given no special priority. In this essay, I argue for the integrationist and against the internalist view. The problem for the internalist is that treating locational interests as sui generis leads to an unfair privileging of place-based over non-place-based claims. The integrationist avoids this problem but faces a natural worry: how can we distribute fairly between landowners and the landless when we cannot simply move people or land? To deal with this worry, I develop a proposal for a fair tax on land, and I defend this proposal against the objection that it is harsh to tax people for their land-holdings when this forces them to change their land-based practices or sell their land. Finally, I also consider how the rights of indigenous people fit into the integrationist account.

Keywords:

  • Keyword: Territorial justice
  • Keyword: integrationism
  • Keyword: isolationism
  • Keyword: distributive justice
  • Keyword: taxation
  • Keyword: natural resources

How to Cite:

Rischel, D., (2026) “Is land special?  ”, Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs 2(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/fe.20008

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IS LAND SPECIAL?

David Rischel

Recent theories of territorial justice, such as those of Avery Kolers, Margaret Moore, and Anna Stilz, are internalist accounts: they argue for distributive principles that are tailor-made for the domain of land, on the grounds that we should construct our theory of territorial justice on the basis of people’s specifically place-based interests. An alternative view is integrationist: land should be integrated into our more general account of justice, one capable of exchanging between the different domains of justice, and where locational interests are given no special priority. In this essay, I argue for the integrationist and against the internalist view. The problem for the internalist is that treating locational interests as sui generis leads to an unfair privileging of place-based over non-place-based claims. The integrationist avoids this problem but faces a natural worry: how can we distribute fairly between landowners and the landless when we cannot simply move people or land? To deal with this worry, I develop a proposal for a fair tax on land, and I defend this proposal against the objection that it is harsh to tax people for their landholdings when this forces them to change their land-based practices or sell their land. Finally, I also consider how the rights of indigenous people fit into the integrationist account.

I. Introduction

It is trivially true that land is critically important. We need it for any activity we engage in. We need it for housing, renewable energy, infrastructure, and resource extraction, but it also provides people with a sense of place and belonging. It might form part of a spiritual or religious world view. And yet, its distributional implications are underappreciated. The supply of land is strictly limited, and so, as the demand for land grows as societies get richer, no new land can be produced to meet this demand. The result has been an explosion in land and house prices1 and—consequently—economic inequality.2 We face, then, an intractable distributional issue: what does a fair “distribution of the earth’s spaces,” i.e., land, look like?3 How should we weigh the interests of different people in the use and occupancy of land?

Before deciding what principle should govern the distribution of land, we face a prior, methodological question. Namely, which interests count in justifying agents’ claims to land? Some interests in land are distinctly place-based—such as the interest of someone in maintaining the attachment to the place they grew up. Some other interests in land are not place-based. For example, we all have an interest in the adequate supply of housing, because an adequate supply of housing translates into lower house prices. We face the question: how do we prioritize between these different types of interests?

There are two kinds of answers to this question. Some prominent philosophers answer that we should give special weight to certain place-based interests in land, while non-place-based interests should be given less weight. This type of view picks out land for special treatment: instead of integrating land into our more general theory of distribution, it adopts a tailor-made principle exclusively for land. Further, these philosophers reject existing distributive theories of justice as inapplicable to land.

Margaret Moore argues that land should not “be distributed in accordance with our favored theory of distributive justice,” while Avery Kolers writes that “uniform theories of global distributive justice are inapplicable to territory.”4 As such, because it adopts principles of distribution that are exclusive and internal to the domain of land, I shall, in line with the broader literature, call this orthodox view internalist.5

The second, minority, view is integrationist.6 On this type of view, we should not adopt a goods-specific principle for the distribution of land. Instead, the distribution of land should be governed by our more general theory of justice. In this paper, I defend the minority integrationist view, and I argue against internalism. Integrating land into our more general theory of distributive justice raises the question of how it is possible, in practice, to redistribute between landowners and the landless. Therefore, I also defend the taxation of land as a promising solution to that problem.

The plan is as follows. In Section II, I outline the internalist view. Section III presents an objection to internalism. Section IV presents and defends integrationism. Section V defends a proposal for the taxation of land. Section VI shows why integrationism does not have repugnant implications in cases involving indigenous communities. Section VII concludes.

II. Internalism

Internalism is the view that we should not apply our more general theory of justice to land, and that we should instead treat land separately, according to its own distributive principle(s). It is defended by several prominent contemporary philosophers of territory: Kolers, Moore, and Anna Stilz.7 What motivates this turn towards internalist principles is the idea that there is something morally distinctive about land, which singles land out from other classes of external, scarce goods, such that it demands special treatment. We may have an intuition that land is “special” in this sense, when we consider groups such as the Lakota Sioux, the Bedouin, or the Navajo.8 Such groups, it is argued, have a non-instrumental, spiritual relationship to their land. Insofar as theories of distributive justice treat land as a “mere” resource to be distributed, this may seem wrong and offensive.9

Internalism starts with the idea that we have certain specifically territorial interests. Stilz, for example, distinguishes between our basic and our practice-based territorial interests.10 Our basic territorial interests are those that everyone has in access to land, which provides us with a “decent” standard of living, including “the fulfilment of core human rights, as well as the guarantees of essential material and ecological interests.”11 Stilz mentions several such interests: in “a livable environment, a sustainable ecosystem, (…), and resources necessary to produce essential medicines,” as well as in “infrastructure for subsistence and economic production.”12

But in addition to these interests, we also have practice-based interests in using our local environment in particular ways:

(…) there is a more abstract common interest in the free pursuit of our place-based plans and projects, whatever they are, grounded in the fact that commitments of this shape play a role in the (otherwise morally acceptable) lives of most people, making it possible to achieve wide consensus on their importance. These are our practice-based interests in territory.13

For example, groups such as the Bedouin require access to a specific place—namely Arabia—to carry out their place-specific practices. Given her emphasis that we should be able to pursue our place-based plans and projects, “whatever they are,” our practice-based interests will necessarily cover a wide range of things. This is important because it considerably broadens Stilz’s theory—from one that simply protects our rights to occupancy, to one that protects any practice, which is morally permissible and takes place on land. Stilz argues that our theory of territorial justice, what a fair distribution of the earth’s spaces consists of, should be defined in relation to these two types of interests, and, we may add, not in relation to any other interests.14

Stilz defends a distributive proviso that protects the basic and practice-based territorial interests of sufficiently sized groups of outsiders. There is lexical priority between the two kinds of interests: the practice-based interests of one group can never trump the basic territorial interests of another group. So, if one group’s (B’s) basic territorial interests are unfulfilled, group A—which is best situated to realize the claim of B—has a “stringent duty to grant territorial occupancy to group B (…) up to the point where their own basic territorial interests are threatened.”15 Secondly, if the fundamental territorial interests of two groups are satisfied, but one group’s (B) practice-based interests are unfulfilled whereas the other group’s (A) interests are satisfied, A has a pro tanto duty to secure the practice-based interests of B, e.g., by granting them occupancy on their land.16

The risk with singling out certain interests for protection is that you leave something out. We should ask: what about people’s non-territorial, non-practice-based, and non-basic interests? These might be interests in distributive justice: in the fair distribution of burdens and benefits. These interests are not necessarily tied to a specific place, nor are they related to some practice.

Stilz (and Moore, and Kolers) says precious little about these interests. Should we take this to mean that people’s non-locational, non-practice-based interests are simply discounted when they conflict with people’s practice-based or fundamental territorial interests? This interpretation may seem natural given the way that Stilz formulates her proviso: while the basic interests of outsiders are protected, non-basic interests are only protected by her proviso if they are practice-based and locational.

Of course, if other basic interests were at stake—in basic justice or in autonomy—we could weigh these against our territorial interests. In this way, if it were central to securing basic justice for some people that we infringe on the territorial rights of others, we might have reason to do so. So, land is not so special that outsider interests have no weight. But when it comes to non-basic (but perhaps still important) interests that people may have—in distributive justice, say—these interests are always outweighed. Against the practice-based interests that insiders have to their land, no distributive demand—in excess of a baseline of basic justice—can be pressed. For that reason, the demands of our general theory of (distributive) justice do not apply.17

The main argument that is offered for treating land this way, for treating land as a special type of good, is the argument from particularized attachments. This argument is stated most explicitly by Moore. She argues that land is both a particularized and a universal good. It is a universal good because “everyone has an interest in the benefits that having it brings.”18 But it is also a particularized good in the sense that some people have interests in particular places, and this grounds, as Moore puts it, “normatively significant relationships between peoples and places.”19 It is the fact that we need to protect these normatively significant relationships that justifies treating land as a special type of good.

Since outsiders do not have these interests, but insiders do, this means that we should give priority to the practice-based claims of insiders. Perhaps we should think of it this way: occupants of land have both universal and particularized interests in the use (or non-use) of land. Non-occupants have only universal but not particularized or practice-based interests in its use. Because the occupants have a further set of interests (particularized ones) than the non-occupants, we should give priority to those with the extra set of practice-based interests.

I am not convinced by this argument. Just because we can identify a special normative relationship between an agent and some good does not mean that we should give priority to this relationship over other interests. To do so, we need to know something about the weight of these other interests, and merely identifying an interest says nothing about the weight of this interest compared to other interests. To know whether A or B has a right to X, we should not count the number of interests they have in the use of X. Even if A has ten distinct interests in X whereas B only has one interest, if B’s interest is much weightier, we should not give X to A.

It is quite simply hard to see why the fact that an interest is in land rather than in something else, say, maintaining a particular standard of living, means that the interest in land must always have greater weight than a non-territorial interest, even if the non-territorial interest is non-basic. So, this is not a reason to treat land as special; and it is therefore not a reason to adopt a special principle for its distribution.

There are two reasons to be especially skeptical of principles that give priority to the practice-based interests of insiders. First, land is immobile: if there is a higher demand for land in some area, land cannot move to meet this demand.20 As a result of this, the value of land largely reflects locational externalities: these are benefits we experience from being in a place, because of other people’s actions or investments. The reason that land in a major metropolis like London is so valuable is that it provides access to its job market, its cultural scene, infrastructure, and its people. The owner of a plot of land in London has likely done nothing to deserve the enormous benefit accruing to them. Because the value of the land is socially produced, most of the income the landowner earns from their land is unearned and extractive—economic rent.21 Our principles of territorial justice should be attentive to this fact and should certainly not reflect the inherited privileges of landowners.

Second, land is limitational: we need land for any activity we engage in. This means that, as the demand for land grows (due to an expanding population and economy), land prices increase without reflecting any new production of goods.22 So, as societies get richer, people will have to spend increasing amounts on land. This dynamic explains the ongoing housing crisis across developed countries: 80 percent of the global housing price boom that has taken place since 1945 can be explained by rising land prices.23 Recent economic evidence suggests that this is a major factor behind the rise in wealth inequality in developed countries.24 As such, the distributive implications of landownership are very significant. The cases where landownership is costly to outsiders are not extreme outliers. They constitute the general case. The rejection—by Moore and Kolers especially—of distributive theories of justice seems particularly problematic in this context.25

III. The Unfairness Objection

This way of treating non-territorial interests has implications that other theories of justice would all characterize as paradigmatically unfair. Consider:

Island    Two communities of equal size share an island. One of these communities, Community A, has come, over the course of hundreds of years, to own 90 percent of the land. They have developed a spiritual relationship to their land, and its members all engage in certain religious rituals on it. The other inhabitants of the island, Community B, have a purely instrumental relationship to the land—they just want it to be used in an economically productive and efficient manner. It does not matter to them where this economic development takes place, however. As such, the interest is not a specific, location-based interest. They are, however, being prevented from realizing this interest by the landowning community, since using the land this way would go against Community A’s territorial practices. As a result, both communities are much poorer than they would otherwise be. While Community A is content with this situation, Community B is not—there are many projects they would pursue if they were richer. Everyone’s basic interests, territorial or otherwise, are, however, satisfied. Suppose further that the two communities have an equal amount of goods in all other domains.

On the theories that Stilz, Moore, and Kolers endorse, there is nothing unfair about this distribution of goods. But the landowning community, Community A, has been given much greater opportunity for pursuing and realizing the projects that matter to them than Community B. This seems very unfair.26 True, the projects of Community B are not specifically territorial projects. But why should that matter? Why should it matter for the distribution of people’s rights and duties whether their projects can be described as specifically territorial ones? I do not think this question tracks anything of normative concern. The fact that internalist theories have such implications should make us look elsewhere for an alternative.

IV. Integrationism

On the rival, integrationist view of territorial justice, we integrate territory into our broader, more general theory of justice—for instance, a theory calling for equality (or sufficiency or priority) of welfare, resources, or capabilities. If we consider Island again, the interests of the two communities should be weighted according to whatever more general theory of justice we adopt. Most, if not all, theories of distributive justice will, I think, pick out a relevant unfairness between the two communities.27 Left-libertarians would certainly consider the distribution unfair, while for right-libertarians it would depend on how it came about.28 That is, integrationists, regardless of whatever specific banner they fly under, will be able to identify some unfairness in Island.29 What is the integrationist policy prescription with regards to Island? The policy prescription is to tax the landowning community for the value of their land—a conclusion I defend in greater detail in the next section.

Let me explain what it means to integrate territory into our more general theory of justice. Integrationists are committed to a core substantive claim: no external good is “special” from the point of view of justice, and we should not adopt distributive principles that apply to just one good, such as land. I believe one can endorse this claim for different reasons and from different perspectives. For example, right-libertarians are clearly integrationists, insofar as claims to land (or to other external goods) are not seen as distinct from other property-like claims.30 I will pursue a justification of this core claim that applies specifically to distributive views of justice, that is: views calling for equality, priority, or sufficiency of welfare, resources, or capabilities.31

On such distributive views, the core integrationist claim is backed up by two justificatory claims. First, people’s distributive shares—their rights (or duties) to external goods—are determined by a comparison of their overall relative standing, by which I mean: how do people compare in terms of differential advantage and disadvantage? To know whether agent X or Y deserves some scarce good A, we need to know whether X is worse off than Y—or vice versa (of course, we may need to know other facts too—concerning responsibility, for example).32 I will not argue for this claim here, as it is a corollary of accepting any (re)distributive view.

Second, how people are situated in terms of their overall relative standing is determined by a comparison in terms of an overall “package of goods.”33 To give a concrete example of this assume a maximinning, welfare-egalitarian view of justice. On this view, what people ought to have fair shares of—the “currency” of justice—is welfare. The total package of goods is that package, which we use to determine people’s overall relative standing vis-à-vis their welfare. Suppose that Iman derives one measure of welfare from good A, good B, and good C each. If we take an overall package view, we include all these three goods when determining Iman’s level of welfare. Contrast this with the internalist view: suppose that good C is land. If we are internalists about territorial justice, we exclude this good from our determination of her overall level of welfare.

The problem with excluding land from the total package of goods is that we then exclude a determinant of people’s overall relative standing, and this will result in a false and skewed picture of how people compare. If we then proceed to distribute shares based on this false and skewed picture, the resulting distribution will disadvantage some and benefit others unfairly. For example, suppose that we need to allocate a windfall of three shares between two people, Iman and Josie, and the prior distribution of goods is such that Iman has 18 shares and Josie has 15. Iman derives 5 shares (resources, welfare, or capabilities) from good A, 5 from good B, and 8 from good C (which is land). Josie derives 8 shares from good A, 5 from good B, but just 2 from good C. Suppose all other things are equal. Straightforward egalitarian reasoning suggests that Josie gets the three shares, as she is relatively disadvantaged. However, if we now exclude land from the determination of Iman and Josie’s overall relative standing, it will seem that it is Iman (on 10 shares) who is worse off than Josie (on 13), and that she should get the extra 3 shares. Even if we aren’t egalitarians, excluding determinants of people’s overall relative standing will clearly be problematic for any view that seeks to redistribute between Josie and Iman based on a comparative evaluation of their standing.

Because distributive integrationists accept these two core claims, no good is “special” from the point of view of justice. What matters is that people are equalized (or made sufficiently well off; or are given priority) overall; not in specific classes of goods. Further, when distributing goods, we should proceed according to a distributive principle, which takes into account people’s overall relative standing, and which can make trade-offs between different classes of goods.

Some may continue to insist that land is morally distinctive in two further ways which make integrationism implausible. First, some may think that land is a basic good, i.e., a good which is necessary to live a minimally decent life, and that it should therefore not be distributed in line with a more general principle of justice. Second, some may object that land is a strongly non-substitutable good, in the sense that we cannot substitute land for other goods without some loss of value. Let us deal with each of these questions in turn. As we do, the contours of integrationism become clearer.

IV.A Basic Goods

We may think that some goods are “basic” in the sense of being necessary to living a minimally decent life. Exactly what we take “minimally decent” to mean is not important, but it is plausible to think that there is some threshold below which our concern with the provision of goods becomes much more urgent. For example, this may be the case for housing. While ideal housing justice may require much more than merely the provision of a bed and four walls, our concern will be much more urgent if people do not have access to a stable, safe, and secure dwelling. Similarly, so, we might think, in the case of land.

The critic of integrationism might now argue: “Basic goods, it seems, should not be distributed in line with the same distributive principle as non-basic goods. In particular, they should not be distributed based on a comparison of people’s overall relative standing. If one individual lacks access to one basic good, we should not inquire into their holdings of other goods. Rather, we should just provide them with this basic good as a matter of basic justice. In this way, some goods—such as land—do have special status.” The critic might further charge that this is compatible with large variations in the type and quantity of land necessary to realize a minimally decent life.34 The road is then open to claiming that even large tracts of land may count as a “basic” good and should not be distributed in line with a more general principle of justice.

However, I think it is a mistake to believe that a basic needs threshold should apply to each good individually rather than to the total package of goods. In fact, a comparison of people’s overall relative standing is crucial as to whether someone has a justified claim to be provided with something as a “basic good.” This is because we need to distinguish between being provided with basic goods for free and being provided with some goods by the state, because the state is the only capable provider of that good, but where we must pay for it. We may all be entitled to the latter. For example, suppose a billionaire’s home burns down. Plausibly, the state has a duty to provide temporary shelter, even to billionaires (say, because it is impossible for them to find shelter on a short-term basis). Clearly, however, the state is not required to provide this to the billionaire for free, even if housing is a basic good. Whether anyone is entitled to such a service for free crucially depends on their overall relative standing. (To be clear, I am not claiming that temporary shelter—or any other public service—should be means-tested rather than provided as a universal welfare service funded via taxation. All I claim is that the billionaire must pay for it—whether through taxation or privately.)

And here, integrationists will insist that, when we determine this person’s overall relative standing, we include the value of their existing holdings of land in this determination. The point can be put rather more simply: if I own no land at all, but I own very many fine gold watches, I could sell my fine gold watches to buy the land I need to satisfy my claim to land. If I own lots of fine gold watches, I will not, therefore, have some claim to be provided with some bit of land for free.35

IV.B Non-substitutability

Consider next the issue of non-substitutability. What does it mean for a good to be non-substitutable? Two goods are narrowly substitutable if the goods have the same narrow set of properties and if we can fully compensate the reduction in one with the provision of the other. For example, the provision of heating may be fully compensated for with better insulation of homes. Some goods are partially substitutable if they do not have the same properties, such that some loss remains even if we can partially substitute the one for the other, but this loss can be compensated by the provision of other goods. For example, suppose someone loses their job, because their industry is automated by AI. We cannot provide this individual with a job like the one they had, but we can compensate them with a joblessness-benefit and training to allow them to reskill. Finally, some goods may be non-substitutable if they are the only goods that have their particular properties, such that we cannot substitute one for another without some loss of value.

Some think that the case for integrationism in some domain depends on goods in that domain being fully or partially substitutable with other goods.36 But I do not think this is true, nor does the fact that a good is non-substitutable provide us with a reason to endorse special principles for its distribution.

Clearly, land is a non-substitutable good in the sense that it may not be possible to compensate someone for the loss of their land without some loss of value. For example, to the Lakota Sioux, it simply would not do to provide them with land somewhere else to make up for the loss of the Black Hills—their ancestral homelands. Something, namely their attachment or relationship to the land, would be missing. But the fact that a good is non-substitutable does not mean (a) that we should exclude land from the total package of goods when determining someone’s overall relative standing nor (b) that we should not distribute the benefits and burdens of land with this determination in mind. Let us take (a) first. The reason we should not do so is, as before, that it would result in a false and skewed picture of people’s relative standing. An analogy with a different non-substitutable good may help. Think of a person that owns some expensive family heirloom, say, a piece of jewelry. This person may attach special value to it, such that it is non-substitutable with some other piece of jewelry, even one exactly like it. This does not mean that we should exclude the value of this expensive heirloom when we determine this person’s combined taxable wealth. (Imagine if people could avoid having to pay inheritance tax by ensuring that their wealth was locked up in heirlooms!) The fact that a good is non-substitutable in this sense does not provide us with any reason not to include it in our determination of their overall relative standing.

Nor does it provide us with a reason to endorse any special distributive principles. Some may dispute this. They may think that the fact of non-substitutability means that it is, in practice, impossible to redistribute goods between agents without some loss of value. This does not follow, however. Happily, humans have invented a medium which can be used to conduct exchanges in goods and services without directly exchanging these goods and services: money. If justice requires it, we can tax people for their holdings of non-substitutable goods (such as land). For that reason, there is also no issue with determining the rights and duties of agents based on their holdings of non-substitutable goods. I defend this policy prescription—taxation—in greater detail in the next section.

V. Taxation

We should not, then, adopt a special distributive principle for land. Instead, we should distribute it in line with our more general theory of justice, which allows us to compare agents across domains. But for this conclusion to have any practical relevance, we need to show that it is possible to equalize between landowners and the landless without physically moving people or land around, i.e., by taxing it. But Kolers, Moore, and Stilz all argue that it is unfair to tax rightful occupants for the non-utilization of their land.37 If people decide to leave their land idle, they should not be taxed for this decision, they argue. Such taxes are known, more generally, as Land Value Taxes (LVTs), which are taxes on the rental (unimproved) value of the land, where this includes all naturally occurring resources and opportunities, but not capital improvements to the site itself. So, it is imprecise to say that LVTs tax the non-utilization of land. They tax the rental value, whether the land is utilized or not. Property taxes, in contrast, also tax capital improvements made to the land (housing, infrastructure, and so on).

LVTs are most closely associated with the 19th-century economist and philosopher Henry George and his followers—Georgists—who defend them as a cure for poverty and inequality.38 And we have good reasons to support LVTs. First, LVTs are uniquely efficient taxes, in the sense that they do not lead to a loss of economic value. The reason is that the supply of land is fixed, which means that the supply of land is not determined by its price (it’s “inelastic,” in economist lingo). Therefore, if we tax land, we do not get less of it. In contrast, the supply of labor is determined by its price, so if we tax it, we get less of it. Hence, why the consensus view among economists, from left to right, is that LVTs are the “least bad tax,” as Milton Friedman put it.39 In fact, we have reason to think that the introduction of an LVT would be good for the economy, because it would incentivize the economically optimal use of land. For example, it could incentivize the construction of housing in urban areas, which is crucial to solving the ongoing housing affordability crisis.

Second, an LVT is likely to be a very egalitarian and progressive form of taxation. This is because real estate values are very unequally distributed (we can use real estate as a proxy for land, given that land comprises most of the value of real estate). For example, in the US the top 1 percent owns 13.4 percent of all real estate value; the next 49 percent, around 77 percent.40 The bottom 50 percent holds merely 10 percent.41 If the proceeds of an LVT were shared on an egalitarian basis, it would massively redistribute from the richest to the poorest in society. Further, as noted above, there is a good argument that most of the value of land is socially produced—it is produced by the actions of other people—and so, landowners have little claim to retain this value.42 Even if one rejects, as I do, the libertarian thesis of self-ownership, according to which individuals are entitled to all the value that they produce, one might still think that people retain a stronger claim to the income they earn from their labor than the income they earn from their land, because the income they earn from their land is mostly unearned economic rent.43 If so, one has a good reason of justice to prefer the taxation of land to the taxation of labor.44

It is worth noting, then, that LVTs have some significant advantages over other kinds of taxation, and whether some tax is justifiable or not is always a comparative question. No tax is perfect, but some taxation is necessary, and some taxes are better than others.

To justify the implementation of LVTs, we need to know at what level such taxes should be set. I believe there is a strong, theoretical, resource-egalitarian argument for implementing a full LVT, that is a tax equivalent to the unimproved rental value of land.45 I will therefore, at this point, leave the distributive ecumenicism at the door and sketch a resource-egalitarian proposal for an LVT.46

Resource-egalitarians hold that the fair distribution of goods should be modeled on an idealised fair and competitive market.47 A market is fair and competitive when each participant enters with equal resources—or, equivalently, equal bargaining power—when bidding for the goods on offer. Under these conditions, the resulting distribution reflects individuals’ ambitions for the use of goods rather than inequalities in their initial endowments. In this way, resource egalitarianism is genuinely egalitarian: in a competitive market with symmetric starting positions, the use and ownership of resources are equally determined by everyone’s ambitions for them—not by pre-existing resource inequalities.48

The measure of the fairness of this process is that no one would prefer anyone else’s bundle of resources to their own. When this condition obtains, no one thinks that they are, by their own lights, disadvantaged relative to anyone else, and the distribution is, in this sense, fair. When this is the case, the distribution is said to be “envy-free.”49 To take a land-based example, suppose some group of people—the extractivists—wish to use some plot of land for resource extraction. A different group of people—the non-extractivists—wish to preserve its existing use. Suppose the extractivists win out in this case, either because they are more numerous or because they are willing to spend more resources to satisfy their preference for its use. Does that mean that the non-extractivists have lost out completely? No, because they will now have more resources—greater bargaining power—to satisfy their preferences for other plots of land. If they, on reflection, prefer to preserve their resources rather than pay a higher price for the plot of land, this distribution would preserve envy-freeness.

The purpose of an LVT would, on a resource-egalitarian view, be to preserve envy-freeness. This means that the tax should in an idealized setting, with some exceptions I discuss below, be set at a rate equivalent to the opportunity costs to outsiders of my landownership.50 Let me explain. Suppose the opportunity cost to society of my landownership is X. This means that society—or, more precisely, the marginal alternative bidder—would be willing to pay X to put my land to some alternative use. The rest of society would prefer a distribution in which my land was put to some alternative use if the cost of doing so was <X. However, if the cost of doing so was >X, they would prefer the current distribution of land. This means that X is the rate at which we would need to tax my land to preserve envy-freeness, since taxing at this rate fully internalizes the opportunity cost of my landownership to the rest of society, such that the rest of society is no longer disadvantaged by my continued landownership. If it was taxed at a lower rate, society would still prefer the alternative use.

How do we determine the opportunity cost to outsiders? There are proposals for how to do this, but I will not discuss them here.51 However, the rental (i.e., market) value will often be a rough but sensible guide. For example, the market price for land in urban centers tends to be very high, reflecting the fact that many people wish to live in the city. How to assess the true rental value of land is a complicated but ultimately empirical and tractable question.52

The reader may not be convinced by this proposal, however. They may think that it leads to the Slavery of the Resource Rich.

V.A The Slavery of the Resource Rich

Consider the case of someone living on some plot of land, which contains some highly valuable resource, which is coveted by outsiders. Because the outsiders’ ambition is for the resource to be extracted, this increases the rental value of the land up to the point at which the person(s) living on this land may be required to (a) extract the resource, (b) work some high-paying job to pay for the tax, or (c) sell the land. The objection is that this is deeply unfair to the resource rich. Just like it would be unfair to tax people for their potential earnings—their talents—rather than their actual earnings, it would be unfair to tax people for resources that happen to be located on their land.53 Moore, for example, objects to LVTs on roughly these grounds.54

There are some cases where such taxation seems unproblematic:

Island 2    Same as Island but assume that each community has an income level of 100 units. If the land is not used productively, the income level of both communities will fall to 80 units. The landholding Community A is content with this situation. The landless Community B is discontent with this. So, what should we do?55

I find it unobjectionable to tax Community A for their landholdings, given the unfair distribution of land. Community B would be willing to spend 20 units to use the land more productively, so if we tax Community A for the full rental value of their land, we tax them at a rate of 20 units.

There are harder cases for my view, however. Consider:

Island 3    Same as Island, except that Community A owns only 20 percent of the Island. However, on their 20 percent, a fantastically valuable mineral is now discovered. Community B would prefer for the mineral to be mined. Community A would prefer for the mineral to be kept in the ground. Assume both communities are of an equal size and equally well-off otherwise.

Given the fact that the mineral is so fantastically valuable, does this mean that the tax would be set at a rate, which would force Community A to cede their part of the land? I believe there are cases where this outcome is justified, but whether this is so depends on several circumstances. First, in the case under consideration, we can assume that the two communities are isolated from the outside world. In this highly idealized case with equal numbers of inhabitants and equal bargaining power, the tax rate is set by each community’s willingness to pay for the land. So, Community A would only be forced to cede the land if Community B were willing to pay more for the land than Community A. But the assumption of a closed, isolated world with communities of equal size is obviously very idealizing. Next, I consider cases where we drop this assumption.

V.B The Harshness Objection

So, suppose that Community A is much less populous than Community B, say, one tenth the size of Community B. Or suppose that the two communities are not isolated from the rest of the world, but that outsiders are willing to pay one of the communities to extract the resource. In both cases, the tax rate imposed on Community A would be much higher. Perhaps it would be so high that it would force Community A to cede the land or extract the mineral themselves to pay for the tax. This may seem particularly harsh when communities’ identities are bound up with the land they live on.56 In such cases, a fair LVT may be destructive of the culture and identity of the community. Let us call this the harshness objection to LVTs. I believe that there are cases where we are justified in implementing the tax despite the apparent harshness of this conclusion. But before discussing such cases, we should first note four considerations that may exempt a community from paying the full rate of tax.

First, most importantly, the intuition that it is harsh to tax landowning communities at a high rate may be generated by the idea that the tax will fall on already poor communities. Given my broader, egalitarian convictions, any proposal for an actual LVT should be sensitive to the wider demands of justice. This means that if it turned out that taxing land at its full rental value would, in some case, hit the poorest the hardest, we should be careful about doing it, unless other measures can correct for the pre-existing unjust inequality.57 As already noted, however, empirically speaking, it will rarely be the case that taxing land at its full rental value will be inegalitarian.

Second, just as importantly, we also need to consider the wider, environmental externalities of the proposed land use. Suppose, for example, that the mineral that Community B wishes to extract is oil (or some other harmful resource). Doing so will cause severe harm to both current and future generations via accelerating global warming. Given my integrationist commitments, land use decisions should be taken in the light of our more general theory of justice, including climate justice. Given the enormous importance of halting global warming, we should discount the preferences for the extraction of oil—or impose a full carbon tax on its extraction, which would significantly decrease the value of the land and the incentive to extract.

Third, there are other discountable preferences. Readers may worry that my proposal gives too much weight to the interests of economic output maximizers, i.e., people who would prefer for all land to be used in a maximally efficient economic manner. Consider a variation on the above case, where Community B desires for Community A to use their land in the maximally efficient economic manner, resulting in a much higher tax rate for Community A. This seems problematic. However, we need to disaggregate the various interests that people have in a higher economic output. Some preferences for an increased economic output give rise to concerns of justice and ought be discounted.58

For example, there is a good argument for discounting preferences for the pursuit of positional goods. A pure positional good is a good the value of which is entirely determined by its position in relation to other goods. For example, the utility that a billionaire derives from their superyacht may be entirely down to how it compares to the superyachts of other billionaires. Preferences for positional goods are preferences for higher consumption, not because of the substantive benefits it brings, but merely to showcase one’s position in the income and wealth distribution.59 Notably, this type of conspicuous consumption may trickle down through so-called “expenditure cascades.” These occur when the rich spend increasing resources on goods with a high symbolic value—such as weddings. Because the rich set the standard for what is considered a standout wedding, now everyone else lower down the income distribution may need to spend a higher share of their income on their wedding parties. And so, once the rich start spending more money on expensive ceremonies, what used to seem like a nice wedding now looks a bit pathetic.60 Now, everything from the food to the location to the band will have to be luxurious.

We have at least two reasons to be concerned with these dynamics. First, it is wasteful: resources that could have been spent on, say, better healthcare, are now wasted on positional goods. This is deeply irrational, as everyone would be better off if they did not have to spend their resources on getting one up on the next person in the income hierarchy.61 Second, we should worry about the political psychology of people primarily motivated by the pursuit of positional goods. We may think that realizing a just society requires that individuals are motivated to act on the principles of justice—and not out of pure self-interest, but out of a concern for realizing just institutions.62 A purely materialist, status-oriented fight for one’s place in the income hierarchy may be incompatible with such a motivation. From a policy perspective, it may be better to handle these concerns via the implementation of a progressive luxury consumption tax rather than “discounting” people’s preferences;63 but the point is that there is nothing about the proposal for an LVT that gives undue weight to economic output maximizers.

Fourth, in some cases, the discovery of a resource may count as a case of bad brute luck. Brute luck is a question of how “risks fall out that are not […] deliberate gambles.”64 If I get struck by a piano falling from the fifth floor, this is a case of bad brute luck. Bad option luck is a matter of how “deliberate and calculated gambles turn out.”65 If I decide to bet my annual salary on Tottenham Hotspur winning the Premier League and they don’t, this is a case of bad option luck. Egalitarians believe that whereas we should correct for the impact of bad brute luck, we should not do so (or not do so for egalitarian reasons) in the case of bad option luck.66 Of course, to anyone willing to either extract it or sell their land, discovering an enormously valuable resource would count as good brute luck. However, in cases where people are highly attached to the non-extractive use of their land, discovering such a mineral in the ground might, in contrast, count as bad brute luck.

To see this more clearly, consider the case of a community that maintains a non-extractive use of their land and who live in a society that has implemented an LVT. Up until now, they have been able to pay for the tax quite easily, because of the low rental value of their land. But now suppose they discover some enormously valuable mineral on their land, massively increasing the rental value of their land. If the community were willing to extract the resource or sell their land, this would be very profitable to them. However, they are very reluctant to do so. It would be a great cost to them to give up their land or their traditional way of life. But it seems that they may be forced to do so. Because the wider society taxes land at its full rental value, the tax rate faced by the community suddenly increases enormously, forcing them, we can suppose, to sell their land. Is this fair, on a resource-egalitarian view?

On a resource egalitarian view, we hold people responsible for their ambitions and preferences, but not for their circumstances. Discovering a highly expensive resource on your land is straightforwardly a change in one’s circumstances. For that reason, it would not be fair to hold the community responsible for the discovery. We develop our ambitions and preferences against some background distribution of opportunities and resources, and it is unreasonable to hold people responsible for their choices if the background distribution of opportunities and resources changes suddenly and without warning.67 One way of correcting for this is to provide a way for people to insure themselves against such bad brute luck.68 If a community is highly risk-averse to the discovery of a valuable mineral (because they would then be hit with higher taxes, forcing them to cede the land), they could pay a premium to insure against having to change their land-based practices. For example, we could permit communities (or individuals) to pay a higher rate of tax prior to the discovery of minerals to insure against having to pay a higher tax post-discovery, smoothing out the rate of tax they would be required to pay before and after discovery of the mineral.

Of course, this is no help to communities who already have discovered very valuable resources on their lands. At the point at which we implement an LVT, they will have made decisions under the assumption that no such tax existed and so will not have had the opportunity to insure themselves against it. This is a real and unfortunate transition cost to the implementation of LVTs, which could be lessened by not taxing people at the full rental value of their land immediately, but only doing so after a long implementation period. Whatever the policy solution, the general point is that we can appeal to standard egalitarian reasoning to explain why it is sometimes unfair to massively increase the rate of tax on unsuspecting communities or individuals, at least if they have not had opportunity to insure themselves against this outcome. It is true that this reasoning provides no reprieve for the next generation, who will have had the opportunity to develop their ambitions and preferences against this known background. Is this unfair?

In the case where (a) we have corrected for prior injustices; (b) there are no harmful externalities to the proposed land use; and (c) we do not give undue weight to economic output maximizers; I do not think this is very unfair. Thinking that this is unduly harsh may come from thinking that outsiders could not have genuine and important interests in the use of the land. But when we consider that they do, I think the objection loses most of its power.

Still, there are cases where I concede that the harshness objection retains its bite. These are cases where the preferences of outsiders for the use of land seem trivial. Consider:

Island 4    Same as Island 3 but add the detail that the reason why the mineral is so fantastically valuable is that Community B (who are a community of high-minded aesthetes) wishes to use it for some purely aesthetic purpose (and are willing to pay richly for it).

In responding to this case, there are a few routes the egalitarian could go down. One route is to take a moralized view of people’s preferences: to attempt some objective ranking of activities in terms of their moral importance, and to argue that some purely aesthetic aim could never have higher importance than maintaining the attachment to one’s land. But I am inclined against this view, which I find to be overbearing and illiberal. I do not want to take a stance on what kind of resource-use is better than others.

As such, I am willing to bite the bullet here. Ultimately, assuming both communities are equally well-off, Community A and B have an equal claim to the resource, and Community A is excluding Community B from the use of it, and so we would be justified in taxing Community A for the rental value of their land. I expect that many will find this counterintuitive, and so this is perhaps a cost to my account. However, the choice of theory is always comparative, and I find the option of introducing further arbitrary distinctions between people’s interests—to claim, for example, that people’s locational attachments must always weigh more heavily in our deliberations—indefensible. As I argued in Sections II and III, we should avoid introducing carve-outs and exemptions for certain interests, because the result will, inevitably, be that some interests are advantaged at the expense of other reasonable interests. I do not believe there exists any coherent, non-arbitrary account capable of vindicating both our strong intuition that the landless Community B is treated unfairly in the original Island case and the view that we should prioritize locational attachments over, for example, aesthetic preferences. Faced with that choice, I am happy to stick to my guns.

Before concluding, there is one more matter to turn to. At various points throughout this paper, I have touched upon the rights of indigenous communities. Moore, Stilz, and Kolers all discuss this issue at length, and so it would be remiss of me not to consider how such communities fit into my account.

VI. The Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The principles that Stilz, Moore, and Kolers endorse are at their most attractive when dealing with cases of formerly colonized countries or indigenous peoples. Consider for example the Navajo, whose lands contain valuable uranium deposits, a case that Kolers and Stilz discuss.69 The notion that outsiders have a claim to the resources contained within some territory, even when the inhabitants have no plans to extract them, may seem repugnant in cases involving indigenous groups like the Navajo.70

Let me make a few replies to this very reasonable objection. The first reply is empirical. Land reserves tend to be rather cheap. A land tax would by far affect urban landowners the most, as that is where the overwhelming amount of land value is located. For example, according to one analysis from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the total value of the land of the contiguous United States was $26.2 trillion in 2006. Of this land, only 6% was developed, but these 6% constituted 51% of the total economic value.71 The value of land in Manhattan is (probably) in the hundreds of millions per acre.72 So, most of the (economic) value of land is not locked up in vast expanses but in urban real estate, and if the revenue of an LVT was shared on an egalitarian basis, we should expect Indigenous people to, overall, be net recipients. Would this be true in the specific case of the Navajo? This is a philosophy paper, and therefore not the place to carry out comparative land valuations, but what we can say is that there are severe health and environmental externalities to uranium mining, and the US Environmental Protection Agency has so far entered settlements valued at over $1.7 billion to reduce the risk of radiation exposure from abandoned uranium mines on Navajo lands.73 As discussed above, such externalities need to be accounted for. So, I think it is very unlikely that the average Navajo person would be subject to a high level of taxation under a fully implemented LVT.

Nonetheless, supposing that some indigenous community would be badly hit by an LVT, on an integrationist view, we should be concerned with all the relevant sources of burdens and benefits. American Indian and Alaska Native communities have lower life expectancy than other Americans,74 as well as higher rates of poverty,75 are in worse health, and suffer from living in poorer housing and from a lack of access to a clean and safe environment.76 These are basic injustices that American Indians and Alaska Natives have a right not to suffer. Further, on more demanding, egalitarian, accounts of justice, we are not just entitled to a certain range of basic rights, but also to some measure of distributive equality. Clearly, American Indians and Alaska Natives are not given their due on this measure either.

But suppose that we corrected for all these injustices. Would it then be unfair to tax Indigenous communities for their holdings of valuable land? Even in those cases, we may think that they have some claim to restitution for past injustices, and that such claims should be worked into our more general theory of justice. This may entitle some such communities to a share of the world’s resources over and above what a purely distributive theory of justice would recommend, and this may come in the form of rights to land or resources.77 This leaves cases where formerly colonized people or indigenous groups do not suffer from basic injustices, get their fair share of the world’s resources and have received adequate restitution and compensation for past injustices. In such cases, however, our intuitive concern seems much diminished, and it does not seem impermissible to tax them for very large or very valuable land holdings.

VII. Conclusion

We should, then, be integrationists about territorial justice. The issues that land raises can be dealt with within the remit of our more general theories of justice, and there is no issue with integrating land into an overall package of goods in terms of which we compare people’s overall relative standing. Because we can do so, we should adopt a distributive principle for land, which is capable of making trade-offs across different domains of justice. In practice, we can equalize between landowners and the landless by taxing landowners. Integrating land into our overarching theory of justice, then, is both theoretically and practically appealing. It allows us some more general and consistent basis for adjudicating between our many, varied interests in the use of land; and whatever difficulties it faces, it still seems more plausible than views which arbitrarily pick out certain interests for special protection. So, while land is very important, it is, from the point of view of justice, nothing special.

Notes

  1. Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger, “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012,” American Economic Review 107, no. 2 (2017): 331–53, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20150501. ⮭
  2. Volker Grossmann, Benjamin Larin, and Thomas Steger, “Das House Kapital: A Long-Run Theory of House Prices and Housing Wealth,” Journal of the European Economic Association 23, no. 2 (2025): 705–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvae038. ⮭
  3. Anna Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2019), 174, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198833536.001.0001. ⮭
  4. Margaret Moore, A Political Theory of Territory (Oxford University Press, 2015), 7, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190222246.001.0001. Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511575709. ⮭
  5. Johannes Kniess, “Internalist and Integrationist Theories of (Global) Justice,” The American Political Science Review 119, no. 3 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001114. ⮭
  6. Simon Caney, “Just Emissions,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40, no. 4 (2012): 255–300, https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12005; Simon Caney, “Global Distributive Justice: Seven Theses about Facts and Empirical Research,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory, ed. Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley (Oxford University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746928.013.11; Andrew Walton, “Trade Justice: An Argument for Integrationist, not Internal, Principles,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2020): 51–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12198. ⮭
  7. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty; Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice; Moore, A Political Theory of Territory. ⮭
  8. Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice, 93; Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 175; Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 162–63. ⮭
  9. See also Kerstin Reibold, “Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 40, no. 4 (2023): 624–641, https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12573. ⮭
  10. For the following exposition, I rely primarily on Stilz but note where Kolers and Moore diverge. ⮭
  11. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 167. ⮭
  12. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 166. ⮭
  13. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 169 [italics in original]. Moore makes very similar claims; see Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 6. ⮭
  14. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 169. ⮭
  15. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 175. ⮭
  16. The distributive constraints that Kolers and Moore defend are considerably weaker. See Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice, 280–81. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 180–81. ⮭
  17. Interestingly, this is the reverse position of the one adopted by left-libertarians. Orthodox left-libertarians believe that we have reason to exclude everything but land (and other external resources) from our distributive remit, because whereas we have strong property rights to our talents and labor, we can make no such claim to external resources. See e.g., Michael Otsuka, “Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 27, no. 1 (1998): 65–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00061.x. ⮭
  18. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 6. ⮭
  19. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 6. ⮭
  20. Mason Gaffney, “Land as a Distinctive Factor of Production” in Land and Taxation ed. Nicolaus Tideman (Shepheard-Walwyn 1994), 49–53. ⮭
  21. For a more detailed exposition of this argument, see Paul Forrester, Locke and George on Original Acquisition, unpublished manuscript. ⮭
  22. Gaffney, “Land as a Distinctive Factor of Production,” 47–49. ⮭
  23. Knoll, Schularick, and Steger, “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012.” ⮭
  24. Grossmann, Larin, and Steger, “Das House Kapital.” ⮭
  25. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 7. Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice, 107. ⮭
  26. Stilz discusses a similar case where two similarly sized groups are given an unequal amount of land and argues that such a distribution can be fair, so long as both groups “are content with their pursuits” (Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 185). But crucially, this is a welfare-egalitarian assumption. If both groups are content with their pursuits, many distributive egalitarians would agree that there is no problem of distributive fairness. This is a crucial contrast to Island. Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 182–185. See Armstrong’s discussion of these issues as well, Chris Armstrong, “Land, Resources, and Inequality,” Journal of Social Philosophy 52, no. 1 (2021): 12–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12382. ⮭
  27. Derek Parfit, “Equality and Priority,” Ratio 10, no. 3 (1997): 202–221, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9329.00041; Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Luck Egalitarianism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Robert Huseby, “Sufficiency: Restated and Defended,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2010): 178–197, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2009.00338.x. ⮭
  28. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 150; Otsuka, “Self-Ownership and Equality.” ⮭
  29. Perhaps sufficientarians who accept a low threshold would not identify any unfairness in this example. And perhaps some objective list theories would not do so either, if both communities enjoyed equal levels of goods on the objective goods list. However, in response to different objections that have been levelled against the principle, few—if any—contemporary sufficientarians defend such a low threshold as the only morally relevant threshold (see e.g., Robert Huseby, “Sufficiency and the Threshold Question,” The Journal of Ethics 24, no. 2 (2020): 207–223, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09321-7). Further, the distribution of objective goods could evidently be fair only if access to land was not included on the list of objective goods. I find it hard to think of a (non-libertarian) theory of distributive justice, which is actually defended in the literature by any philosopher, that would characterize the distribution in Island as fair. ⮭
  30. As discussed in footnote 17, left-libertarians may be one group of philosophers who do not endorse this claim, insofar as land and other external resources are not covered by claims to self-ownership. ⮭
  31. Could one be a relational egalitarian integrationist? I do not see why not. There is certainly nothing in relational equality that requires us to adopt special distributive principles for particular goods. At least, it is not clear to me why that would be the case. Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–337, https://doi.org/10.1086/233897. ⮭
  32. An editor for this journal raises two complications. First, it may seem that such a comparative evaluation is necessary only for prioritarian and egalitarian views. A sufficientarian view may seem to be non-comparative: we might think that to know whether some agent has a claim to some good, all we need to know, on a sufficientarian view, is whether this agent falls below the relevant threshold. But this is not the case, because sufficientarians should not be indifferent to differences in people’s comparative standing, either below or above the threshold. If person A falls far below the threshold, but person B only falls marginally below it, person A has a stronger claim to be compensated than person B. Further, if person C is far above the threshold and person D is only marginally above it, person D retains a stronger claim to their holdings, because redistributing goods from person C implies a lower risk of them falling below the threshold. So, sufficientarianism is, just as much as prioritarianism or egalitarianism, a comparative view. Second, it may seem that such a comparative evaluation is not necessary for objective-list theories, because all we need to know is whether some person has access to the goods on the objective list. But insofar as what we are concerned with is equality or priority of access to objective goods, this is clearly not true; insofar, as what we are concerned with is sufficiency of access to these goods, similar reasoning applies here as to other sufficiency-based views: we are not indifferent to variations either above or below the threshold. ⮭
  33. Caney, “Just Emissions,” 265. ⮭
  34. I thank an editor for this journal for pushing me on this issue. ⮭
  35. The preceding discussion raises wider questions. Is integrationism compatible with believing that the basic liberties should be distributed equally and without regard for the distribution of goods in other domains? The answer is yes. This is because, as Caney argues, integrationists can adopt a two-level view. At the lower level, this may be the principle that we ought to treat people with equal moral concern and respect. At the higher level, this principle requires the adoption of a certain principle for the distribution of scarce external goods—such as maximinning welfare egalitarianism—unless the lower-level principle requires us to deviate from this higher-order principle—as it does in the case of the basic liberties. However, this argument is arguably specific to the basic liberties, and I do not think a similar argument can be furnished for land (or for any other external good). It is not the case, then, that this two-level view requires us to adopt different distributive principles for distinct domains. Caney, “Just Emissions,” 272–73, fn. 44. ⮭
  36. E.g., Kniess, “Internalist and Integrationist Theories,” 1325. ⮭
  37. Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice, 281. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 182; Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 163, fn. 20. ⮭
  38. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (Cambridge University Press, 1881). For a recent elucidation of the Georgist view, see Martin Jacobsen, “Land & Liberty: On the Natural Monopoly of Violence” (PhD diss., Uppsala University, 2024). ⮭
  39. Milton Friedman, “‘Is Tax Reform Possible?’ Milton Friedman Speaks. Address given at the Americanism Educational League 51st Anniversary Dinner, Pasadena, CA,” February 6, 1978, posted January 6, 2014, YouTube, https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/objects/57215. Other defenders (apart from Henry George) include Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and, among contemporary economists, Joseph Stiglitz. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Random House Publishing, 2000), book five, part II, article I. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 232-246. Joseph Stiglitz “Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity” Roosevelt Institute (2014): 8, https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_Reforming_Taxation_White_Paper_201405.pdf. ⮭
  40. “Real Estate Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles),” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated June 18, 2026, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01002. ⮭
  41. “Share of Real Estate Held by the Bottom 50% (1st to 50th Wealth Percentiles),” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated June 18, 2026, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50191. ⮭
  42. Most, but not all the value: landowners can improve the land in certain ways (e.g., site remediation, drainage, clearing etc.). ⮭
  43. I reject the self-ownership thesis for reasons outlined in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Against Self-Ownership: There Are No Fact-Insensitive Ownership Rights over One’s Body,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008): 86–118, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.00125.x. ⮭
  44. For discussion of some of these questions, see Darrel Moellendorf, “World-Ownership, Self-Ownership, and Equality in Georgist Philosophy,” International Journal of Social Economics 36, no. 4 (2009): 473–488, https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290910947985. ⮭
  45. Though, as I explain in footnote 50, there are practical considerations that tell against taxing land at its full rental value. ⮭
  46. This is not to say that welfare-egalitarians could not support LVTs—all that needs to be shown is that an LVT would realize equality of opportunity for welfare. As noted above, LVTs have strong egalitarian credentials, so this seems perfectly feasible. ⮭
  47. Ronald M. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Harvard University Press, 2002), Chapter 2. Hal R. Varian, “Dworkin on Equality of Resources,” Economics and Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1985): 110–125, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267100001930. ⮭
  48. Resource egalitarians also believe that the distribution should be insensitive to people’s pre-given marketable talents. We can overlook this complication for current purposes. ⮭
  49. For a defense of this, see Tom Parr, “How to Identify Disadvantage: Taking the Envy Test Seriously,” Political Studies 66, no. 2 (2018): 306–322, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717720377. ⮭
  50. I add the qualifier “in an idealized setting,” because there are practical considerations that mean that we should not tax land at 100 percent of its rental value in the real world. An LVT is supposed to tax only the unimproved value of land. However, the landowner may improve on the value of the land in certain ways by, for example, draining or clearing it, and such improvements may be very hard, if not impossible, to disaggregate from the unimproved value of the land. Unless we can disaggregate these, a 100 percent tax on the value of the land would disincentivize such improvements to the land itself. So, in the real world, we should not tax land at 100 percent of its value, but at a somewhat lower rate. ⮭
  51. The interested reader can look up second-price auctions (also called Vickrey auctions). ⮭
  52. See Lars Doucet, Land is a Big Deal (Simple Press, 2022). ⮭
  53. For the discussion of such endowment-taxation, see Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 311–12. Miriam Cohen Christofidis, “Talent, Slavery and Envy in Dworkin’s Equality of Resources,” Utilitas 16, no. 3 (2004): 267–287, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820804001177. Kristi A. Olson, “The Endowment Tax Puzzle,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 3 (2010): 240–271, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2010.01187.x. ⮭
  54. Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 182. ⮭
  55. In this (and following) examples, I use the term “community,” but this is of course a simplification. An LVT should be applied on an individual, not collectivist basis. ⮭
  56. I thank an editor for this journal for raising this objection. ⮭
  57. Notably, because Georgists are concerned simply with the equalization of access to natural resources, they cannot appeal to such considerations. So, I think the harshness objection is a greater problem for pure Georgists. ⮭
  58. This is not to say that all such interests are problematic. Economic growth can pay for many morally weighty and important goods, and we should not dismiss its importance. ⮭
  59. See Paul Forrester, Collective Incoherence: Unifying the Insights of Thorstein Veblen and Henry George, unpublished manuscript. ⮭
  60. Samuel Arnold, “Contesting the Work-Spend Cycle: the Liberal Egalitarian Case Against Consumerism,” in The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Work (Routledge, 2021), 83, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429243394-6. ⮭
  61. Forrester, Collective Incoherence. ⮭
  62. John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (Columbia University Press, 2005), 19. ⮭
  63. Forrester, Collective Incoherence, 18–23. ⮭
  64. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 74. ⮭
  65. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 74. ⮭
  66. The issue is significantly more complicated, as it is sometimes difficult to distinguish neatly between option and brute luck, and because most cases will involve a mixture of both. We can look past this complication for current purposes. ⮭
  67. See also Cohen’s discussion of “bad price luck,” “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” in G. A. Cohen, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Michael Otsuka (Princeton University Press, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400838660-003. ⮭
  68. See Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, Chapter 2; Andrew Williams, “Equality for the Ambitious,” The Philosophical Quarterly 52, no. 208 (2003): 377–389, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00276; Andrew Williams, “Equality, Ambition, and Insurance,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78, no. 1 (2004): 131–150, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-7013.2004.00119.x; Tom Parr and Andrew Williams, “Fair Insurance: Defended, Amended, and Extended,” in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 8, ed. David Sobel and Steven Wall (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192856906.003.0003. ⮭
  69. Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice, 93; Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, 162–63. ⮭
  70. It’s important to note that there is significant variation in the beliefs and opinions of indigenous people. Not all indigenous people have a spiritual relationship to their land, and many indigenous people support resource extraction. A majority of indigenous (Inuit, First Nations, and Métis) people support resource extraction in Canada, for example. Heather Exner-Pirot and John Desjarlais, Majority of Indigenous People Support Resource Development (Macdonald-Laurier Institute, 2022), https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SEPT2022_Majority_of_Indigenous_peoples_support_resource_development_Exner-Pirot_Desjarais_COMMENTARY_FWeb.pdf. ⮭
  71. William Larson, “New Estimates of Value of Land of the United States,” Bureau of Economic Analysis (2015): 3–4, https://www.bea.gov/research/papers/2015/new-estimates-value-land-united-states. ⮭
  72. See Jason Barr, Fred H. Smith, and Sayali J. Kulkarni, “What’s Manhattan Worth? A Land Values Index from 1950 to 2014,” Regional Science and Urban Economics 70 (2018):1–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2018.02.003. ⮭
  73. “Navajo Nation Abandoned Mines Cleanup,” EPA, updated June 16, 2026, https://www.epa.gov/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup/aum-cleanup. ⮭
  74. Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, Tara L. Maudrie, and Susanna V. Lopez, “Stagnating Life Expectancy Among American Indians and Alaska Natives: Understanding the Drivers and Recommendations for Research, Policy, and Practice,” Annual Review of Public Health 46 (2025): 193–211, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071723-110657. ⮭
  75. Erik Stegman and Amber Ebarb, “Sequestering Opportunity for American Indians and Alaska Natives,” Center for American Progress, November 26, 2013, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/sequestering-opportunity-for-american-indians-and-alaska-natives/. ⮭
  76. Nicole Stern and Lisa I. Iezzoni, “Poor Housing Harms Health in American Indian and Alaska Native Communities,” April 6, 2022, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/poor-housing-harms-health-in-american-indian-and-alaska-native-communities-202204062721. ⮭
  77. Similar considerations are furnished in Lea Ypi, “Structural Injustice and the Place of Attachment,” Journal of Practical Ethics 5, no. 1 (2017): 1–21, https://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/structural-injustice-and-the-place-of-attachment/. ⮭

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from very helpful comments by Simon Caney, Tom Parr, David Axelsen, Martin Jacobsen, Paul Forrester, Alejandra Mancilla, Darrel Moellendorf, Andrew Williams, two anonymous editors for this journal and its editor-in-chief, as well as audiences at the Political Philosophy and Public Policy Workshop at Newcastle University and the Dynamic Territory Seminar at the University of Oslo.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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