Uncertainty and Risk:From Entitlement Theory of Justice to Inalienable Rights

The following paper presents a set of philosophical arguments that extend the standard set of property rights under the classical libertarian perspective to include the individual rights to ownership, management and transfer of risk and uncertainty. The paper shows that an extension of property rights, proposed below, strengthens the libertarian arguments concerning the sufficiency of the minimal state for achievement of liberty and justice. However, as argued in the paper, property rights extension alone does not support the argument in favour of the minimal state as a necessary condition for justice. To achieve such argument, we extend the argument concerning the inalienable rights to include the rights to risk and uncertainty. We show that in presence of such rights, the infamous Nozickian assertion concerning the potential implications of continuity of the space of rationality with regards to its role in separation of the human domain from that of the other biological species, no longer holds. In addition we establish that incorporation of individual rights over risk and uncertainty into the set inalienable rights allows for resolution of the Hansson’s causal dilution problem.