Nature?
God?
Government?
The threat and fear of violence?
Wishful thinking?
Some combination of the above?
. . . i think regardless of what you pick, you’re standing on shakey ground.
I hope you have insurance for that shakey ground.
Why don’t you go into more detail, ugly? I fully agree that the concept of ‘property rights’ is, in many cases if not most, a massive confusion that gets by by simply being overlooked. I’d like to read your thoughts on it. Why do you think it’s on shaky ground? What do you think is the root of the confusion? How can your ideas clear up the confusion?
i think like most or all notions of “rights”, the notion of property rights is at most a useful construct without much natural reality outside of whatever laws are being enforced in a given place at a given time. Though, i don’t think that viewpoint is going to help clear up much of the confusion, because i think most of the confusion stems from disagreement about who is entitled to own what. i wonder if maybe the notion of property rights is kind of inherently confused and shakey, because everybody wants them in place, but at most we have our intuition to ground them in, or else an appeal to the authority of the law.
This subject has been on my mind lately, because of two newspaper articles I read. This one, about 5Pointz, and this one, about making it illegal to feed the homeless in L.A.
I guess I’m a bit out of sync with my fellow New Yorkers, because as opposed to most of the comments after the article about 5pointz, I think the idea that the developer did something evil or something, or that the graffiti artists had a right to not have their graffiti obliterated, is completely ridiculous. Like it or not, we have a system in this country, and things work based on the reality that this system can be expected to work. It’s about trust. If the system is that money, earned in legal and ethical ways, can be used to buy property, and that property can be used in legal and ethical ways, then that’s what a good citizen should expect. I think the graffiti artists and their fans (not all of them, just the ones with a misplaced sense of entitlement) are like children.
The article about the homeless is much more problematic, though. Something like “property rights” is all well and good if everyone has their bit of property - something enough to thrive on. Without that kind of basic equality, property is just something that not everyone can have. And for the have-nots, what is left if everything is private? Can we really claim to live in a healthy society when we think about making it illegal to feed the homeless? If I lived in the neighborhood where hundreds of schizophrenics, drug addicts, etc. were lining up for free dinner at a food truck, I would have a serious problem with it. Again, there are expectations, and a kind of trust has been broken. I’m sure some kind of band-aid can be worked out, but as always it will involve keeping ugly things out of sight and out of mind, all in the name of some kind of liberal good will (“the homeless don’t want to eat outside, they prefer to eat inside”).
Regarding justification for property rights in the first place, I guess I think it’s natural to protect your investments. If I spend a summer growing a garden, and you come along in the autumn to harvest it…
Yeah, i don’t think the artists really ever should have expected anything more. i think the developer probably could have profited from the property somehow without having the artwork destroyed, so what happened is kind of a shame, but the nature of graffiti is that it’s transitory, so it’s also fitting. And what he did was totally within his rights as owner of the place.
Yeah, there’s not much liberal goodwill in banning the feeding of poor people, no matter how much one tries to spin it. Homelessness is not something people with homes like to think about, so having a homeless person living in your yard can be a little disconcerting, but surely it’s misguided to make it illegal to feed them. They aren’t parasites, even if it feels bad to have them around.
Yup, it’s natural to want to say this is MINE, but it isn’t always so simple, even WITH property rights. What if the garden you grew was on a vacant site owned by some real estate company? Simply putting work and effort into making something doesn’t mean you own it, as the 5pointz thing reminds us. Those artists created something and put a lot of effort into it, but in the end, they had no right to it.
i think they come from effort invested and regular comforts. if i make something, be it a home or object… i spent time on it… why shouldn’t that be mine? i’ll get angry if someone takes it from me
what did i make it from? well surely i can gather some objects for basic living without having to gain approval or rights… i gave them to myself, and so did everyone else
i think property that is not solely derived from individual effort is the most shakey ground
They are not saying don’t feed the homeless, they are saying dont do it on the streets.
Property rights keeps fighting down to a minimum.
utility.
Agreements with any or all of the above.
It’s a fact of life that people consider things to belong to them exclusively in the right circumstances, and as far as I can tell this has happened in every culture through recorded history where it wasn’t aggressively prohibited…and it still happened then.
So property happens. Whether you call it a right or an instinct or a necessary evil or whatever is where things get complicated. With that in mind, of course one could also ask what gives the State the right to take people’s property. Force? Greater Wisdom? Divine Mandate? All the same reasons why people are entitled to their property have been put forward, slightly modified, as reasons why the State ought to be able to take it.
Property rights come in bundles. There are a lot of different rights that relate to property. Sometimes you have different combinations of them in the bundles. Some people say it comes from mixing your labor with something and adding value to it so that it then becomes yours because it holds value that you generated. Some people think it has to do with the chain of possession and how you came to possess the property and whether the object was rightfully obtained, (rightfully, here, just means in accordance with law). It’s a big deal in philosophy…the whole property thing. But it’s a sensitive one because everyone wants more stuff than there actually is, and in the end, like everything else, the good shit is going to the craftiest and the most cunning. That’s just how it is man.
My body feels like my property. Which is why I call it “mine”. There isn’t any unarguable justification for that, but it’s pretty close to us, that notion.
Exactly. at a certain point, if I try and take your body, you’ll probably have something like a war with me. And no amount of writing books, or fact checking, or logical analysis will change that. But like I said about bundles or rights and property…you know…you might give up the rights to your penis to say…your wife, or some hooker. Then it’d still be your penis in the sense that you’d have the right to retain possession of the physical object that is your penis, but you’d give up the right to insert it into just any hole. We can see, through this example how entering into a marital contract can effect your rights to your penis, but not all of them, only some of them. The bundle starts to break away until eventually, if you make enough bad decisions, the only right you might have left, regarding your penis, would be the right to retain possession of it. I mean, even then…in some cases you can lose it anyway. Look at that Lorena Bobbit chick.
Haha, well said Smears.
I always feel like I’m trying to use up all the commas in my keyboard, but I think that it really helps me in the sense that when someone reads me, they get it the way it would sound if I said it. I do a lot of pauses when I talk. What am I on about right now? Penis rights? Jesus.
Rights come from claims.
I think that every right might be in some sense related to a claim, but “come from” them???
Not so sure about that one.
Property definitely happens, i agree that it’s a basic fact of human life. i don’t however understand the difference between a person claiming something as their own for this or that reason and the State doing the same. Whether they are taking my property or they are taking what already belongs to them is just a question of how you frame it. For better or for worse.
Unless you believe that they pre existed before someone claimed them, they come from claims. I dont believe in pre existing metaphysical type entities that grant a person access or possession. Its just the pressure the person applies, which is his claim. If granted, this sets a precedent, a legalish ‘right’. They derive from people who think they should have/need them. I see no other root in practice.