esk@wucs.UUCP (Walter Wego) (04/11/85)
[Despite appearances, this is an essay in logic, not ethics] I promised a while back to write another piece on property rights from a libertarian perspective. This is it. I aim to prove my statements in the earlier piece about how property rights can arise. I start from a controversial premise, which I make no attempt to justify, but which, I contend, anyone who calls himself a libertarian must accept. Nobody may aggress another person, unless that person is a threat to someone. Moreover, nobody may use threat or fraud in order to induce one to perform a certain action (again, retaliation is an exception). First use of aggression, threat, and fraud are out. This is my premise; anyone who disagrees can quit reading at this point (unless he is interested in seeing what follows from this premise). Now, for those remaining, a few facts. FACT: there was a time when there were no persons. (Corrollary: there was nobody around to own anything. Corrollary: Nothing was owned. Corrollary: anything which is now owned, had a first owner (or owning group).) FACT: many, if not most, resources are scarce; i.e. not everybody can have as much as he might like. E.g., there is only so much oil on the earth (or for that matter, in the universe). Now a definition of property rights. Person A has a property right against person(s) B to the use of object X iff B has an obligation to avoid interference with A's use of X. The person might have property rights only to some of the ordinary uses of an object; A might have obtained the object with a contract that allows only certain uses by A. The person might have a property right only against some small set of persons, or against everyone. I will use the term "full-blooded property right" to refer to a right that holds against everyone, and entitles the holder to use the object in any way (short of initiating force). Now my conclusions. These are the only ways in which an object can first come to be owned. First, a person could get others to agree to let him use the object (perhaps in exchange for letting them use other objects). Such a property right holds only against those who are party to the agreement. Second, a person could compensate others for depriving them of the use of the object. Such compensation must be adequate in the compensee's eyes; he must feel that he is better off for it. If so, he should refrain from interfering with the compensator's use, since interfer- ence would harm the compensator, whereas the compensee loses nothing (given the compensation) by being excluded from the object. Such a property right holds only against each person compensated. Third, one acquires a property right in an object if one performs useful labor on an object which was derived from a non-scarce raw material. This non-scarcity must be as viewed by other potential users of the raw material: if any of them find that there is not enough, or not the right type, left over, they are at liberty to use the object themselves (though they may have to pay some compensation). Some examples to illustrate. The first case is obvious enough. The people of an island get together and agree on a mutually acceptable division of the land for farming. The resultant property rights do not necessarily hold against a Robinson Crusoe washed up on the island the next day. The second case may seem redundant; if others are made better off by the compensation, why wouldn't they just agree to let one use it in exchange for the same sum? Because they might be trying to capture some of the "consumer surplus" that one gets from the object; or they just might not have time to talk contracts. Suppose I want to farm region X and a small region Y, which borders region Z farmed by Brown. Unfortunately Brown also seems to want to farm region Y; I see he's planted something there. I tell Brown that I'm paying him what he could have grown there; I give him an appropriate amount of food (or whatever), and proceed to farm region Y knowing I can grow more than Brown could have. The third case is a special case of the second; since the raw material is non-scarce there is nobody to compensate, as there is nobody who would lose anything by my exclusive use of the part I take. If the particular bit of the raw material I take is important to somebody, the story changes. If I decide to farm on somebody's father's burial ground, and he feels that a particular type of vegetation is appropriate, he may have cause to interfere with my use even though there is plenty of other land for him to farm. He has no obligation not to burn my crops and re-plant the vegetation he wants, provided he does not burn me in the process. I could then (if I felt that the land was more valuable than other lands I might use) burn his stuff, and so on. Although such a scenario would show us to be stupid, there is no *moral* reason we should not do this. Now, the (remaining) argument. Each object (or the stuff of which it is made) must have a first owner (or owning group) if it is to have any. Therefore, it cannot be objected to the above discussion that either the farmer or the dead man's son or *someone* *must* own the land in question. The farmer and the son each regard the land as special; thus it is a scarce resource. Neither one has compensated or contracted with others for the land. And nobody else has either. There are now two things I need to prove: that cases 1,2,&3 confer original ownership, and that nothing else does. First the hard part: that nothing else does. Each object that one wants to acquire a property right in, is either valuable to some other person(s) or not. If not, it falls under case 3; if so, one will make others worse off by exclusive use of it unless one does something for them in return (cases 1 and 2). One might try to avoid this by non-exclusive use: one allows the others to use it at the same time. If this can be done, it shows that the object was not scarce (there is enough for everyone to use) and falls under case 3. So, any use that does not fall under cases 1,2,3 makes some others worse off than they would be if one were to forgo it. Does this mean that one may not use the object? No, because the situation is symmetrical: if the others used the object, they would be making one worse off than if they refrained. One has no obligation to refrain from using the object, since doing so does not violate the rights of others (they can't have a property right to the object, since by symmetry oneself would have such a right, which is a contradiction). Everyone who is interested in using the object is thus at liberty to compete for control over the object: he can take it and run, or disguise it, or build a fence around it... but he cannot punch the others in the face and take it; that would be aggression. Of course, it might be foolhardy to engage in this competition; it might be in everyone's interest to negotiate. But again, there is no *moral obligation* to be so cooperative. Now the easy part: showing that cases 1,2,3 confer property rights. My argument for case 2 was mostly given above; I said that the giver of compensation would be harmed if the receiver interfered, whereas the receiver is no worse off for not interfering. To see why this means that the compensated person should not interfere, consider that one should not harm others if one can avoid it without being harmed by them. Case 3 is a special case of 2. Finally, case 1 is simple: if parties to the agreement go back on their word, they commit fraud. This ends the main argument. Contrary to (e.g.) Torek, libertarian principles give determinate answers to these questions; the law of excluded middle does apply. Contrary to many libertarians, the principles don't give many full-blooded property rights. Contracts (case 1) are not likely to be agreed to by the whole world, or even a large segment of it; and outsiders are not bound to respect the rights defined therein. Compensation (case 2) might not be worth it, since one has to compensate *each and every* other person for the loss of the object's use, and the total of the values to them could easily exceed the value to oneself. Fortunately, those others might realize that they probably couldn't win a competition over the object, and demand only a fraction of its value to them. Unfortunately, they could easily lie about its value to them. Finally, abundance (case 3) applies (arguably) only to a few resource materials. But contrary to many anti-libertarians, property rights can be legitimate -- at least, if the premise I started with is correct. Before I sign off, I want to admit that this treatment is brutally brief. There are a lot of side issues I've skipped. They will have to wait. These central points needed addressing first. --apparently a dying breed, the TRUE libertarian, Walter Wego c/o esk@wucs
laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (04/11/85)
Ah, Walter, you have presented the Nozick stand. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is *THE* libertarian stand. Most libertarian philosophers I know do not like Nozick's principle of recompensation at all. They like absolute property rights betteer. The most practical reason to distrust compensation schemes is that people do not universally agree what things are worth. If I take your wallet so I don't have to work for a living and can devote myself to praying to the volcano God to spare your life when Mt. St. Helens next blows, then I may think that you have a wonderful deal. You might disagree. Impasse. What is worse is your notion of what happens when Robinson Crusoe sets ashore on Toronto Island. Toronto Island is already divided up. Should the inhabitants of Toronto Island have to give 1/population+1 th of their property to Crusoe? If this is the case then it seems that the stored goods I have earned in order to make my life better are all at the mercy of my neighbours who might decide to move to my island. I suspect that we are about to rediscover ``war'' on the grounds that simply moving to the island is an act of agression -- after all if enough people move the existing inhabitants will all starve... Libertarian ethicists will also not agree that your principle of non-coersion is an absolute. Eric Mack, for instance, argues that it is a detonic corallary of ethical egoism, which he calls ``eudamonic egoism''. And then there are libertarians who argue that property is a nuisance and that property rights are only very megre additions to more fundamental human rights. A fair bit of libertarian thought is directed at convincing these well meaning souls that without property rights there can be no human rights. For this reason, some libertarians take property rights as given. There is much to argue about. Laura Creighton utzoo!laura
josh@topaz.ARPA (J Storrs Hall) (04/16/85)
A very interesting discussion of property rights by Mr. Wego. However, the concept of "property" elucidated within differs from that which is commonly associated with the term, in at least one important respect. Wego defines a property right in terms of the obligations of other persons not to interfere with the owner's use thereof, and shows that such property rights can arise out of basic libertarian non-agression principles. However, as Mr. Wego notes, such property rights suffer from dilution from the claims of "new" persons not party to the original compacts or compensations. Suppose someone appropriated your body while you were sleeping (and thus not making use of it). He attaches it to some machine which makes profitable use of the autonomic reflexes or body chemistry. If you attempt to regain use of "your" body (in such a way as to leave the machine) you are interfering with his use of it and thus "agressing" him. I disagree with the derivation of property rights from non-agression principles (even though it is quite logically consistent); the example above may help to show why. I assume a (more thoroughgoing) definition of property as an axiom--the non-agression principle can be derived from it in its turn. (See early writings of Rothbard.) This is the point over which I've occasionally labelled myself "propertarian" rather than "libertarian". --JoSH
js2j@mhuxt.UUCP (sonntag) (04/17/85)
> Suppose someone appropriated your body while you were sleeping > (and thus not making use of it). I don't know about *you*, but even when I'm sleeping, I use my body to breath, etc. In fact, since the word 'body' includes my brain, my body *is* me. I wish I had a copy of the origional article here, but I think the theory being discussed allowed the 'appropriation' only of unused *and* unowned property. If I own a piece of property by virtue of using it, my claim lapses when I cease using it. If on the other hand, I own it because I paid everyone else in society not to use that property, my claim to that property continues whether I use it or not. I can also own something because I manufactured it out of abundant materials; in this case too, my ownership does not cease when I cease to use it. In the case of my body, it was origionally manufactured out of things my parents purchased; it was given to me by my parents, and I have used only things which I have purchased (food) and abundant things (air, water) to improve it since then. It is *not* unowned property, and my ownership of it is unaffected by whether I use it or not. > > I disagree with the derivation of property rights from non-agression > principles (even though it is quite logically consistent); the > example above may help to show why. It doesn't. In fact, the example above is completely at odds with the theory of property rights which has been presented. > > --JoSH -- Jeff Sonntag ihnp4!mhuxt!js2j "I never met a man I didn't like."- M. Trudeau