Barnes and Tim Scanlon for their generously extended and very incisive criticism of a draft of this article. And, for their many helpful comments, I also thank

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In A Theory of Justice in (1971), John Rawls laid out his objections to utilitarianism and advanced a powerful critique of the welfare metric, replacing it by attention to primary goods. Sen later advanced arguments against the welfare metric and called for attention to something like opportunity (under the title “capability”). This chapter argues that Sen moved away from Rawlsian and other views in two directions which were orthogonal to each other. If Rawls and welfarists fixed on what a person gets in welfare or goods, Sen fixed on what he gets in a space between welfare and goods (nutrition is delivered by goods supply and it generates welfare), but he also emphasized what a person can get, as opposed to (just) what he does. The chapter exposes the ambiguity in Sen's use of “capability” (and cognate terms), and proposes an answer to the question, “Equality of What?” which departs from his own in a modest way.

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In this book G. A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as as he wishes with himself. The author argues that self-ownership cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure, thereby undermining the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement of self-ownership, since, in the Marxist conception, the employer steals from the worker what should belong to her, because she produced it. Thereby a deeply inegalitarian notion has penetrated what is in aspiration an egalitarian theory. Purging that notion from socialist thought, he argues, enables construction of a more consistent egalitarianism.

The Concept of Exploitation Exchange-value is a property of things which are desired; in Marxian language, then, it is a property of use-values.' It is, however, a property, not of all use-values, but of those use-values which are bought and sold, which undergo market transactions. Such use-values Marxism calls "commodities." Exchange-value, then, is a property of commodities. What property is it? The exchange-value of a commodity is its power of exchanging against quantities of other commodities. It is measured by the number of commodities of any other kind for which it will exchange under equilibrium conditions. Thus the exchange-value of a coat might be eight shirts, and also three hats, and also ten pounds sterling. Exchange-value is a relative magnitude. Underlying the exchangevalue of a commodity is its value, an absolute magnitude. A commodity a has n units of commodity b as its exchange-value just in case the ratio between the values of a and b is n: i. The exchange-values relative to one another of two commodities will remain the same when each changes in value if the changes are identical in direction and proportion. The central claim of the labor theory of value is that magnitude of value is determined by socially necessary labor time. To be more precise: the exchange-value of a commodity varies directly and uniformly with the quantity of labor time required to produce it under standard conditions of productivity, and inversely and uniformly with the quantity of labor time standardly required to produce other commodities, and with no further circumstance. The first condition alone states the mode of determination of value tout court. The labor theory of value is not true by the very definition of value, as we defined it. In alternative presentations of the opening pages of Volume i, value is defined as socially necessary labor time. But a stipulative definition of a technical term is not a theory, and when value is defined as socially necessary labor time, it cannot also be a central theoretical claim of the labor theory that socially necessary labor time determines value. Still, those who favor the alternative definition i. Fuller definitions of the technical terms used here will be found in my Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford and Princeton, 1978), Appendix II.