What is Property?
In the "Postmodernism" discussion, engaged with AAshinoff, CBJ offered the image of a locked door. There, I replied:
Locks just stop honest people. Definitions of "property" seem to me to be socially contextual. I grant that fences are a universal indicator. But there are societies in which the huts have no doors, and the hut is still not to be transgressed. On the other hand, our retail establishments have very stout doors that open automatically for anyone and everyone. I once read that Eskimos (Aleuts), have a sense of property concerning driftwood. Wood is valuable, there being so little of it. But, if you find a piece of it, arbitrarily "far" up the shore away from the water, it was "obviously" dragged there by someone else and is not your property. That idea -- "not mine" -- is deep within our own culture: not everything left unattended is free for the taking.
I believe that one-liners are insufficient to understand property. The quip from John Locke that property is that "with which you mix your labor" is wholly insufficient, though it does identify at least one way to look at a complex phenomenon.
One challenge to understanding property is to differentiate "first instance" examples from "civilized" cases. In other words, Robinson Crusoe owned his island because it was isolated and uninhabited when he found it. What if, however, another person had landed on the opposite side, each thinking they owned the whole thing? It is easy to imagine many people each working the "whole island" planting here, hunting there, discovering each other... Now what?
For me, the single problem with "mixing your labor" is that breaking into a bank vault takes a lot of work. You might say that the vault is someone else's property. But Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed 20 years on "his" island before the original owner returned to check on his property...
Locks just stop honest people. Definitions of "property" seem to me to be socially contextual. I grant that fences are a universal indicator. But there are societies in which the huts have no doors, and the hut is still not to be transgressed. On the other hand, our retail establishments have very stout doors that open automatically for anyone and everyone. I once read that Eskimos (Aleuts), have a sense of property concerning driftwood. Wood is valuable, there being so little of it. But, if you find a piece of it, arbitrarily "far" up the shore away from the water, it was "obviously" dragged there by someone else and is not your property. That idea -- "not mine" -- is deep within our own culture: not everything left unattended is free for the taking.
I believe that one-liners are insufficient to understand property. The quip from John Locke that property is that "with which you mix your labor" is wholly insufficient, though it does identify at least one way to look at a complex phenomenon.
One challenge to understanding property is to differentiate "first instance" examples from "civilized" cases. In other words, Robinson Crusoe owned his island because it was isolated and uninhabited when he found it. What if, however, another person had landed on the opposite side, each thinking they owned the whole thing? It is easy to imagine many people each working the "whole island" planting here, hunting there, discovering each other... Now what?
For me, the single problem with "mixing your labor" is that breaking into a bank vault takes a lot of work. You might say that the vault is someone else's property. But Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed 20 years on "his" island before the original owner returned to check on his property...
