Property [addendum]

About 5 pages (1,350 words)

Property Summary

Property [addendum]

What is property? It is some valued item that belongs to someone. Its existence in society may be collective or individual, although even if collective, it usually emerges from instances of (pooled or expropriated) individual ownership. And that presupposes the right to private property.

Property Is Private

The institution of the right to private property is the single most important condition for a society in which freedom in the classical liberal tradition—which means negative liberty, including free trade, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion—is to flourish. Under communism, in contrast, no such right is recognized. Privacy has a negligible role in a system which holds, as Karl Marx (1818–1883) proclaimed, that "the human essence is the true collectivity of man" (1970, p. 126). Even within noncommunist, nonsocialist systems the exact status of property is in dispute—some hold it is a convention established by implicit consensus and maintained by government or law. Some hold it is a natural normative relationship that comes about by means of the creative and productive initiative of persons and the law of property exists to recognize and not to create it.

What Is the Right to Private Property?

Karl Marx understood the right to private property, although it was John Locke (1632–1704) who tried to justify this right. Marx wrote, in "On the Jewish Question," that "the right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily without regard for other men, independently, from society, the right of selfishness" (1970, p. 53). This, though correct, is not the full story. The right to private property, be it applied to obtaining and holding a toothbrush or, as was Marx's concern (and what Marx found objectionable), an entire factory, does spell out a person's authority to use what he or she owns without regard for other persons. This use may be reckless, prudent, or generous. Its exercise may not, however, violate others' rights. Defenders do not assume that it would be insidious.

The natural right to private property was only discussed in direct terms starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. William of Ockham (1285–1347) proposed that "Natural right is nothing other than a power to conform to right reason, without an agreement or pact" (2001, p. 48) or, as Heinrich A. Rommen paraphrased him, "the right to private property is a dictate of right reason" (1954, p. 419), the power to make one's moral choices on one's own, free of others' intrusion. Because such choices are made by persons in the natural world, one of our natural rights is the right to private property.

One Role of Private Property in Society

Property rights weren't explicitly identified in ancient times but the Old Testament ban on stealing implies what was spelled out by Locke and other classical liberals. Moreover, there have been strong philosophical intimations of it in, for example, Aristotle's Politics (384–322 BCE). Whereas Plato, his teacher, held that, at least within the ruling class of a political community, there may not be any private property and indeed privacy, at all, Aristotle objected as follows:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few. (Politics, 1261b34)

Earlier Thucydides (c. 471–c. 400 BCE) said,

They devote a small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays. (The History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. 1, sec. 141)

So, communal ownership leads to reduction of responsibility and a corresponding lack of attentive involvement with whatever is owned. This does not mean that people are evil. At their homes, this is likely to be different—if one is late and rushes off, the trash will be disposed of upon one's return. At a public place the attitude seems to be, "It will get cleaned up somehow, by someone, at some time." So, it is a systemic problem: people are unable to incorporate the significance of managing the public property within the scale of their values. Each of us knows, directly, how important or not it is for oneself to keep one's backyard clean. So one will take care of it commensurate with that knowledge. It is not possible, however, for an individual to know how important it is for the community, society, or humanity at large that one keep the air or river or lake clean, and to what degree.

A more recent defense of the right to private property is closer to that which we get from John Locke; namely, that we require this right so as to have a sphere of moral authority—as Robert Nozick (1938–2002) called it, "moral space," or as Ayn Rand (1905–1982) noted,

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to an action, like all others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or causing that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values. (1967, p. 322)

Basically, then, the main normative reason given for why one has a right to private property is that it is the means by which one's liberty to act free of others' imposition is secured within a social context. It is also a precondition for individuals to act prudently and productively in human communities without the legal permission for others to take from them what they have earned. Economists tend, in contrast, to defend it as a feature of the infrastructure by which productivity and prosperity is best encouraged in a society. Another support given to the idea is that it makes it possible for individuals to remain sovereign and to distribute resources as they see fit rather than others would demand.

There are innumerable objections to the right to private property, most recently the idea that property is held by the public at large and government merely permits individuals to make use of it to the extent government deems this in the public interest. For why this is a troublesome view the general theory of natural rights would need to be explored and scrutinized.