Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Gavagai]

Can you explain what you believe instead?

Sure. I believe that at the initial position all objects in the world are completely unowned in a sense that no one has any rights over anything whatsoever - here we agree. When humans come to the world, they start claiming these objects. Each individual human does it separately, by performing concrete physical acts over concrete, individual objects. By this process, natural objects are gradually removed from the unowned pool and placed under individual ownership titles.
Now, you point out that by doing it individuals remove the possibility for other individuals to establish ownership of the same objects. With this, I also agree. Then, you say that this fact makes the process unfair; I reject this. It can only be unfair if by removing objects from the unowned pool we violate some pre-existing right which other people have over these objects. But if such right existed, it would contradict our assumption that the world in the initial position is completely unowned. It appears that to prove your point you need to assume exactly what you are supposed to demonstrate which makes the whole argument circular.
Now, there are a few ways to solve the problem. The simplest one is a theory of common ownership which you seem to implicitly employ. It says that no multitude of individual acts of claiming objects takes place. Instead, humanity as a whole (including, in your case, all those unborn) in a one sweeping, magical act claims ownership over the whole nature - I will call it "primary ownership". After that humanity assigns individual ownership titles to separate individuals from which it consists. I will call these derivative individual titles "secondary ownership".
The distinction between "primary" and "secondary" ownership allows you to avoid circularity. You justify your belief that the unborn should have a claim upon secondary ownership titles by appealing to a) primary ownership and b) the rules which it is proper to employ in the process of distribution of the objects of primary ownership. You seem to be focused on justifying b) but I am calling a) into question.
At this point, I'll stop - I understand that there is already a lot to digest. My questions are whether you agree that there is a problem of circularity in your argument and whether you agree that to assume a primary ownership of humanity over the whole nature is your preferred way to deal with it.

I need to add that for me this is not an idle chatter: I am currently writing a paper dedicated exactly to these problems. And if anything is unclear, please, ask (refers to everyone reading, not just Seven). I understand that this reasoning is rather complicated.

[SevenSpirits]

Thanks for explaining your point of view.

I draw a distinction between physical possession and the concept of ownership. Although they are correlated I consider them quite distinct. My "possession" corresponds roughly to your description of individual ownership as something that occurs inherently when a person interacts with objects. My "ownership" on the other hand is merely a useful invention of society.

The reason you find my "ownership" to be a group act is that I see it entirely as an agreement between humans to view reality through a certain lens. There is no such thing as individually-enacted ownership in the same way that you can't be a friend by yourself. It's 100% social contract; the value is in the recognition of the ownership by others.

The explanation you give of "primary" and "secondary" ownership doesn't match my thoughts at all. I see matter as simply existing, with a single layer of ownership that consists of humans agreeing with each other to leave certain things alone for mutual benefit.

I don't believe that humans have any kind of preexisting right to anything. I believe our rights exist only insofar as we grant them to each other.

When I say that a distribution of ownership rights is unfair, I mean that it is unfair as a social contract, in the same way that 51% of the population in a democracy voting the other 49% into slavery would be unfair.

[Bacchus]

@Gavagai There is also a completely different way to look at it, without such massive generalizations as all of humanity and all of nature. You could say that ownership is justified possession, or in a weaker form, posession that does not stem from injustice. Injustice can take many forms here, it does not at all have to be injustice against all of humanity, nor does it have to consist in a breach of specifically property rights. Let's say one person has a terminal disease, and another person invents a cure, but will only sell it at the price of the sick person becoming his slave. Plenty of streams of thought would say that there is injustice here, and the inventor is not justified in retaining possession of the cure on those terms. This is not to believe that the sick have a property right in the cure as a result of being sick -- they don't -- the injustice that's being done by the inventor is not to their property.

In fact, there is no logical contradiction at all in believing concurrently that a) it's unjust for the inventor to demand a degradation of dignity as a price, and b) it's an injustice for the sick to force the inventor to sell the drug at an 'affordable' price, or to outright steal it. This clearly shows that the conflict here isn't over a thing, it's over the acts related to the possession of the thing, more importantly acts done not to the thing, but to each other, and those acts are not one-offs: you could have property over something one day, and then commit an injustice which makes your possession unjustified the next. As a result of this injustice and subsequent rectification some property rights may be transferred, but that would be a new change in property rights, not restoration to or even a restoration on the basis of some true original position.

(The example is for arguments sake, I'm not arguing that there is injustice, I'm just showing that no 'primary ownership' is necessary to give cause to modification of property allocations).

I am also very surprised that as a lawyer you would advance such a physicalist conception of property. I think Seven is completely right in pointing out that ownership is a social relationship, and it shows in the fact that property rights can defined over imaginary things -- obligations and debts, for example. These things don't exist in the world and come into posession through some physical interaction of individuals with them. To be sure, you could build some theory that at the end of the day a debt should result in a transfer of something physical, so you could say that the debt is really a property right over some physical things at a future time, but do you really want to go this way? You'd have to cut through money too, probably adopting some severe gold standard position to ground monetary claims in an unambiguous physical way. And by that point you would be proclaiming that almost the entire world we live in is a massive fraud.

[ipecac]

What do you all mean by 'rights'? Is there some sort of moral component, or is it deriving from an entirely non-binding moral 'contract'? Those are two very different ideas under the same name.

Whether your talk about 'rights' involve any sort of moral duty or demand is important, at least to me. If it does, then it's meaningful and worth discussing. Otherwise if it's part of some non-binding, non-enforced, ambiguous and ill-spelled-out 'contract' that I did not agree too, then what do I care?

[Bacchus]

I think everyone broadly agrees that rights are justified claims and liberties, but exactly how they are justified will differ greatly from person to person, but the discussion at hand is quite compatible with a broad range of justification, so there is no particular need to disambiguate it.

It also came into my mind, that there are two kinds of libertarians -- there are those for whom property is a consequence of justice, and those for whom property is the foundation of justice. I think Gavagai is trying to work out for himself a position of the latter sort, but a commitment to such a position makes any argument against a particular allocation of property on justice or fairness grounds simply impossible. In fact, that's largely the point of such a stance, I think.

[ipecac]

I think everyone broadly agrees that rights are justified claims and liberties, but exactly how they are justified will differ greatly from person to person, but the discussion at hand is quite compatible with a broad range of justification, so there is no particular need to disambiguate it.

I disagree. A fundamental aspect of rights is that morally obliges in some sort of way. But if rights just arise from a social contract, then there's no such obligation. And a difference on how this fundamental aspect is regarded will have implications on discussion about why and how property should be distributed.

A justified claim on property entails moral obligations, but you can't ground such obligation in 'agreement' to a social 'contract'. Ironically, many people who subscribe to social contract theory claim that the unborn entering the society implicitly agree to the current social contract, even though these people would describe concrete situations as unjust, doubly ironically for someone like SevenSpirits who claims that the unborn are unfairly treated.

Ownership is fundamentally a moral claim, but you can't ground that morally in a social contract. So you're left with claiming that everyone supposedly agreed non-binding, non-enforced, ambiguous and ill-spelled-out 'contract', and try to make something out of that. In theory people might actually agree to a social contract, in practice they don't, which is why it's important to ask libertarians if they're living in the real world.

Amoral social contract theory tries to create a amoral morality, let's call it 'pseudomorality' for the moment, that entails duties and obligations from the agreement/'contract'. I think it's worth questioning at a fundamental level whether this works.

[Bacchus]

It's a different discussion though, and it's worth having discussions one at a time, otherwise everything will keep on circling back to metaphysics.

[ipecac]

It's a different discussion though, and it's worth having discussions one at a time, otherwise everything will keep on circling back to metaphysics.

Yes. But we are already discussing the metaphysics of ownerships, with 'property rights' being invoked.

Saying that ownership is a matter of social contract may sound reasonable in theory, in practice there are often big disagreements e.g. with redistribution, welfare, and living wage. In the light of that it's worth asking whether social contract theory, with its pseudo-binding societal 'contract'/agreement is even applicable.

[Gavagai]

2 Seven. But I do not see how what you have said is different from my description. If humans, as a collective, may create ownership rights for each other by entering a social contract, they should receive an authority to do it from somewhere. This source of authority is what I call "primary ownership". Imagine a group of people walking through a virgin forest and finding a pile of gold. They start deliberating how to split this gold between each other and come up with some decision. That would be the simplest model of your social contract. But in doing that they already assume that they own this pile of gold as a group. Without such an assumption, no decision on the distribution of the gold they reach can have any moral power.
To put it in another way. Before sorting out relationships between humans about a thing - this is what lawyers call "property rights" - you need to establish a more fundamental relationship between the collective of humans and a thing. You need to assume that it is morally right for humanity to decide the fate of that thing - and this is the assumption which I dispute.

[Gavagai]

@Gavagai There is also a completely different way to look at it, without such massive generalizations as all of humanity and all of nature. You could say that ownership is justified possession, or in a weaker form, posession that does not stem from injustice. Injustice can take many forms here, it does not at all have to be injustice against all of humanity, nor does it have to consist in a breach of specifically property rights. Let's say one person has a terminal disease, and another person invents a cure, but will only sell it at the price of the sick person becoming his slave. Plenty of streams of thought would say that there is injustice here, and the inventor is not justified in retaining possession of the cure on those terms. This is not to believe that the sick have a property right in the cure as a result of being sick -- they don't -- the injustice that's being done by the inventor is not to their property.

In fact, there is no logical contradiction at all in believing concurrently that a) it's unjust for the inventor to demand a degradation of dignity as a price, and b) it's an injustice for the sick to force the inventor to sell the drug at an 'affordable' price, or to outright steal it. This clearly shows that the conflict here isn't over a thing, it's over the acts related to the possession of the thing, more importantly acts done not to the thing, but to each other, and those acts are not one-offs: you could have property over something one day, and then commit an injustice which makes your possession unjustified the next. As a result of this injustice and subsequent rectification some property rights may be transferred, but that would be a new change in property rights, not restoration to or even a restoration on the basis of some true original position.

(The example is for arguments sake, I'm not arguing that there is injustice, I'm just showing that no 'primary ownership' is necessary to give cause to modification of property allocations).

I am also very surprised that as a lawyer you would advance such a physicalist conception of property. I think Seven is completely right in pointing out that ownership is a social relationship, and it shows in the fact that property rights can defined over imaginary things -- obligations and debts, for example. These things don't exist in the world and come into posession through some physical interaction of individuals with them. To be sure, you could build some theory that at the end of the day a debt should result in a transfer of something physical, so you could say that the debt is really a property right over some physical things at a future time, but do you really want to go this way? You'd have to cut through money too, probably adopting some severe gold standard position to ground monetary claims in an unambiguous physical way. And by that point you would be proclaiming that almost the entire world we live in is a massive fraud.

I am not sure I understand the first part. It seems like you are saying that there are moral considerations which would trump ownership titles and which would justify rearrangement of ownership titles rightfully established earlier. Am I correct? That would be a different question from the one which we are currently discussing.
The last paragraph I do not understand at all. It seems you attribute to me some view I do not hold. I am not talking here about the way the law model property rights, this is a completely different matter.