A private property right is a collection of particular rights that relate to the control of an object. The ground for such moral rights rests on the value of project pursuit. It does so because the individual ownership of particular objects is intimately related to the formation and application of a coherent set of projects that are the major parts of a self-shaped life. Problems arise in explaining how unowned property is appropriated. Unilateral acts with (...) regard to an object, e.g., mixing in one’s labor into it, probably don’t ground particular rights to private property. Nor do bilateral contracts since a stable pre-institutional contract with regard to appropriation is not likely to form. However, a conventional method of appropriation can allow for such appropriation while at the same time preserving the pre-institutional nature of such rights. This theory can also account for a person’s property rights in her own body. However, the value of project formation requires that persons have at least some private property that is to serve as the object of their projects. These positive rights to property undermine the libertarian claim that all non-commitment-based rights are negative. However, a further empirical argument is needed in order to justify protecting these positive moral rights to private property by positive legal rights. (shrink)

The impending missions to exploit natural resources of celestial bodies may at some point start interfering with the scientific interests, including those of astrobiology, in these bodies. While the legal status of celestial bodies at the highest level is clear, uncertainty has arisen as to the extent private property rights over such objects or over their resources are legally acceptable, legally impossible, or potentially legal. This also provides for a considerable amount of uncertainty regarding how the legal (...) framework could or may need to be changed to accommodate private interests. The article analyzes the two main international treaties relevant from this perspective, as well as their backgrounds, in order to outline the current legal status of celestial bodies and the resulting legal rights and obligations pertinent to both private exploitation and exploration. Based on such an analysis, it concludes by highlighting an approach that could actually incentivize the private sector and the science community to work together in a manner conducive to their interests in exploitation and exploration respectively. (shrink)

The impending missions to exploit natural resources of celestial bodies may at some point start interfering with the scientific interests, including those of astrobiology, in these bodies. While the legal status of celestial bodies at the highest level is clear, uncertainty has arisen as to the extent private property rights over such objects or over their resources are legally acceptable, legally impossible, or potentially legal. This also provides for a considerable amount of uncertainty regarding how the legal (...) framework could or may need to be changed to accommodate private interests. The article analyzes the two main international treaties relevant from this perspective, as well as their backgrounds, in order to outline the current legal status of celestial bodies and the resulting legal rights and obligations pertinent to both private exploitation and exploration. Based on such an analysis, it concludes by highlighting an approach that could actually incentivize the private sector and the science community to work together in a manner conducive to their interests in exploitation and exploration respectively. (shrink)

Efforts to protect endangered species by regulating the use of privately owned lands are routinely resisted by appeal to the private property rights of landowners. Recently, the 'wise-use' movement has emerged as a primary representative of these landowners' claims. In addressing the issues raised by the wise-use movement and others like them, legal scholars and philosophers have typically examined the scope of private property rights and the extent to which these rights should influence (...) public policy decisions when weighed against other moral considerations. Whether from an anthropocentric standpoint or from a perspective of moral extensionism, the key question seems to be the extent to which prima facie property rights are overridden by other moral interests, not whether such rights claims can reasonably be appealed to at all in public discussions of environmental justice. I argue, however, that a morally extensionist perspective not only introduces more potential defeaters of prima facie property rights, but actually strips appeals to private property rights of their moral significance. Hence, I argue on Rawlsian grounds that appealing to private property rights in the way that the wise-use movement does is unreasonable in a pluralistic society. In so doing, I show that a Rawlsian perspective may be more congenial to the interests of moral extensionists than is typically thought. (shrink)

The “private” dimension of social life is problematic, posing conceptual, political, and ecological challenges. Some of these problems arise from the very nature of private property as it is enshrined in social life, which demands special privileges be granted to “private” matters on the grounds that these are private, because the predominant representation of the involved rights is that they reflect claims of the holders, rather than legitimate claims of society as a whole in (...) allocating responsibilities, benefits, and duties. The claim to the rationality of allocations of property rights, this article argues, must be questioned in light of the kind of commonality that is revealed in a striking manner by environmental issues (although it is not restricted to environmental matters). This questioning makes sense in relation to an analysis of social interactions, beyond the problematic opposition between the private sphere and public life. (shrink)

Can the right to private property be claimed as one of the `rights of mankind'? This is the central question of this comprehensive and critical examination of the subject of private property. Jeremy Waldron contrasts two types of arguments about rights: those based on historical entitlement, and those based on the importance of property to freedom. He provides a detailed discussion of the theories of property found in Locke's Second Treatise and Hegel's (...) Philosophy of Right to illustrate this contrast. The book contains original analyses of the concept of ownership, the ideas of rights, and the relation between property and equality. The author's overriding determination throughout is to follow through the arguments and values used to justify private ownership. He finds that the traditional arguments about property yield some surprisingly radical conclusions. (shrink)

Can the right to private property be claimed as one of the ‘rights of mankind’? This is the central question of this examination of the subject of private property. This book contrasts two types of arguments about rights: those based on historical entitlement, and those based on the importance of property to freedom. It provides a detailed discussion of the theories of property found in Locke's Second Treatise and Hegel's Philosophy of Right (...) to illustrate this contrast. The book contains original analyses of the concept of ownership, the ideas of rights, and the relation between property and equality. The book's overriding determination throughout is to follow through the arguments and values used to justify private ownership. It finds that the traditional arguments about property yield some surprisingly radical conclusions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A key factor in the decision to convert a publicly owned company to private status is the expectation that value will be created, providing the firm with rent. These rents have implications regarding the property rights of the firm’s capital-contributing constituencies. We identify and analyze the types of rent associated with the newly private firm. Compared to public firms, going private allows owners the potential to partition part of the residual risk to bond holders and (...) employees, rendering them to be co-residual risk bearers with owners. We propose that new promotion-based contracts with bond holders and employees, reflecting their particular investments, be negotiated as the firm migrates from public to private status. These contracts should acknowledge the firm’s intent to maximize shareholder value and its need to take the risks necessary to do so, but support that the firm’s survival not be undermined due to its possibly opportunistic owners. (shrink)

Science is critical and thrives on discourse. However, new challenges for science and academic freedom have arisen from an often-discussed cancel culture and an increasing demand for safe spaces, which are justified by their assumed protection against microaggressions. These phenomena can impede scientific progress and innovation by prohibiting certain thought processes and heterodox ideas that eventually result in new ideas, publications, statements, etc. In this paper, we use the approach of property rights ethics to shed light on these (...) phenomena, especially in academia. First, we argue that microaggressions must be generally tolerated according to property rights ethics as the starting point for discussion. Then, we analyze cancel culture and safe spaces in academia. To this end, we distinguish between two basic cases in the educational system. We show that cancel culture and safe spaces seem justifiable in a private education system but have no place in public, tax-funded universities from the perspective of property ethics. Our essay contributes, on the one hand, to the economic analysis of science and, on the other hand, to the ethical study of new phenomena in modern societies. (shrink)

In this timely book, Walter E. Block uses classical liberal theory to defend private property rights. Looking at how free enterprise, capitalism and libertarianism are cornerstones of economically prosperous civilizations, Block highlights why private property rights are crucial. Discussing philosophy, libertarian property rights theory, reparations and other property rights issues, this volume is of interest to academics, students, journalists and all those interested in this integral aspect of political economic philosophy.

Certain scarce resources seem indivisible, unlike, e.g., land and cattle. But some such resources can be, and have been, turned into private property. In offshore fishing grounds, individual tranferable quotas have been issued to fishing firms that have, as a result, become custodians of fish stocks in those grounds. In the eel fishery on the Danish coast owners of farms by the coast had traditional rights to lay eeltraps leasing those rights out to professional fishermen. In (...) the 1920’s in the U.S., individual firms were gradually being granted, by court decision, exclusive broadcasting rights in a certain area and on a certain frequency. Grazing rights in Iceland were, from the beginning, allocated by quotas belonging to individual farmers. Fishing rights in Icelandic salmon rivers were also alocated by tradition to individual farmers.Certaines ressources rares semblent être indivisibles, contrairement à la terre et aux bovins par exemple. Mais de telles ressources peuvent devenir, et sont devenues, des biens privés. Dans le domaine des zones de pêche offshore, des quotas individuels transférables ont étés accordés aux entreprises de pêche qui sont devenues les gardiennes des stocks de poissons dans ces zones. Dans les pêcheries d’anguilles sur les côtes danoises, les propriétaires des fermes côtières avaient traditionnellement des droits pour poser des pièges et pouvaient louer ces droits à des pêcheurs professionnels. Dans les années 20 aux Etats Unis, des décisions de justice ont graduellement accordé à des entreprises individuelles des droits exclusifs de radiodiffusion sur certaines zones et sur certaines fréquences. Les droits de pâturage en Islande furent originellement alloués par quotas à des fermiers individuels. Les droits de pêche dans les rivières peuplées de saumons en Islande furent aussi alloués de manière traditionnelle à des fermiers individuels. (shrink)

For private property to be legitimately recognized as a universal human right, its meaning should pass the test of self-imposability by an end. In this Essay, we argue, negatively, that the prevailing understanding of private property cannot plausibly meet this demanding standard; and develop, affirmatively, a liberal conception which has a much better prospect of meeting property’s justificatory challenge. Private property, on our account, is an empowering device, which is crucial both to people’s (...) personal autonomy and to their relational equality. The liberal conception of the human right to property has both vertical and horizontal significance — it implies respect from both the public authority and other individuals — which means that it is thoroughly political but not necessarily statist. Our account generates important implications, both domestic and transnational. Domestically, it implies that whereas some property rights should be subject to strong constitutional protection, state law should facilitate other types of private and non-private property institutions, and these property institutions may well be subject to non-owners’ claims to access and, more broadly, to being treated respectfully. Furthermore, our conception of the human right to property requires that everyone have the unusual authority typical of full-blown private ownership. Transnationally, our analysis highlights a freestanding dimension of relational justice, which is relevant across borders even given that our distributive obligations are statist. This injunction of relational justice in transnational interactions brings into question the adequacy of the current state of the law, according to which these interactions are mainly governed by choice-of-law rules that conceptualize them as wholly subsumed under the capacities of the parties as citizens of their respective polities. (shrink)

Is the institution of private property part of the natural law? Leo XIII seems to say simply that it is, and many modern Catholic thinkers have followed suit. Aquinas presents a more nuanced view. On the one hand, he denies that the institution of private property is “natural” in the strict sense—unlike the ordering of physical goods to general human use. On the other hand, he maintains that private property does belong to the ius (...) gentium, which is founded directly upon natural law in the strict sense. I argue that this relegation of private property to the ius gentium is necessary in order for Aquinas to coherently maintain that it is licit to “steal” when in dire need, but that this relegation nonetheless does not deprive private property of the kind of “natural” character which Leo XIII ascribes to it. (shrink)

In this short essay I argue that the main insight of Murphy and Nagel’s book, The Myth of Ownership, that people have no right to their pre-tax income, is not supported by their claim that the right to private property is not a natural right. The non-naturalness of the right to private property, I argue, is irrelevant to their moral argument. The plausibility of their moral conclusion derives from the thesis that people have a right to (...) the fruits of their labor, maintaining, however, that there is no possible conception, morally speaking, of what the fruits of one’s labor are, independent of a system of legal and social norms that constitute the terms of fair bargaining, pricing, etc. People can only have a right to a fair assessment of the added value of their labor, and the latter cannot make any sense independent of the entire system of norms prevailing in the relevant society. I argue that this last conclusion is not affected by the nature of the right to private property. (shrink)

The ethics of restitution vs. privatization examined against the transition from Communism and classical theories of property rights.

The proposed justification avoids problems that invalidate the familiar entitlement, utility, and interest-based justifications; interprets private property as necessary for controlling resources we need for our well-being; recognizes that the possession, uses, and limits of private property must be justified differently; and combines the defensible portions of the familiar but unsuccessful attempts at justification with a more complex account that combines the defensible portions of previous justificatory attempts with a new pluralistic approach that treats the right (...) to private property as a conventional, defeasible, but indispensable right. (shrink)

I develop an account of private property that preserves public participation and access. A focus on the initial state of common ownership, labour, and the proviso reveals that standard Lockean defences of property ignore important common interests. In consequence, property rights over environmentally significant goods must be less strong than full liberal rights, and I show how these will be designed.

The goal has been to devise a strategy that protects as much as possible the rights and liberties of all agents, both users of fossil fuels and people whose livelihoods and territories are at risk if the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is true. To achieve this goal the standard climate policy instruments, taxes and emissions trading, should be discontinued. There are weaknesses in the theoretical perspectives used to justify these policy instruments and climate science cannot provide the knowledge that (...) would be needed to justify their implementation. In their place I propose a privatised policy, based on Austrian and libertarian frameworks of thought, which share an interpretation of climate change as a putative interpersonal conflict rather than market failure. The use of fossil fuels, like any other economic activity, should be subject to side-constraints designed to avoid the infringement of other people’s property rights. Tort litigation on the basis of strict liability would protect these rights, insofar as they need protecting. By providing a public arena for the competitive testing of scientific hypotheses concerning climate change, such litigation would also promote the public understanding and even the advancement of climate science. (shrink)

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are (...) entitled to form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

_Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue and inequality, and the belief (...) that justice in distribution must take precedence over private ownership. Lawrence Becker goes on to contend that there are four sound lines of argument for private property that, together with what is sound in the anti-property arguments, must be co-ordinated to form the foundations of a new theory. He therefore expounds a concise but sophisticated theory of property that is relevant to the modern world, and concludes by indicating some of the implications of his theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Contractualist Justification and Private Property Three Models of Welfare Rights The Proposals as Reasonable Alternatives Objections Conclusion References.

William Perm summarized theMagna Cartathus: “First, It assertsEnglishmento be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified (...) because it is necessary to maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”. (shrink)

S’il n’existe qu’un seul problème intellectuel et culturel vraiment sérieux concernant le capitalisme, c’est celui du manque d’une défense morale soutenue et largement connue, pour ne pas dire acceptée, de l’institution des droits de propriété privée.Il n’y a pas de doute, dans le monde actuel, qu’une société dotée d’une infrastructure légale où cette institution fait défaut connaisse un grave désordre économique. Le fait de ne pas respecter et protéger légalement l’institution de la propriété privée — et ses corollaires, comme la (...) liberté de contracter et de poser les termes par les parties en affaire — a provoqué les faiblesses économiques à travers le monde.Sans une défense morale, l’institution de la propriété privée, qui est la source de beaucoup d’ avantages pour nous tous, restera pour toujours vulnérable aux critiques, du style de celle de Karl Marx qui disait que “le droit de l’homme à la propriété est le droit de jouir de ses possessions et d’en disposer arbitrairement, sans souci des autres hommes, indépendamment de la société, le droit de l’égoïsme”.Cet essai proclame que contrairement aux sentiments et impressions répandus, l’institution des droits de propriété privée est en accord avec la conception pratique de la moralité humaine.If there is one really serious intellectual and cultural problem with capitalism it stems from the lack of a sustained and widely known, let alone accepted, moral defense of the institution of private property rights.Few doubt, in today’s world, that a society with a legal infrastructure that lacks this institution is in serious economic trouble. The failure to respect and legally protect the institution of private property — and its corollaries, such as freedom of contract and of setting the terms by the parties to trade — has produced economic weakness across the globe.Without a moral defense, however, the institution of private property, which is the source of a great many benefits to us all, will forever remain vulnerable to the critics, such as Karl Marx who said 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.”This essay argues that contrary to such widespread sentiments and impressions, the institution of private property rights fully accords with a sensible conception of human morality. (shrink)

The preservationist duties that conservationists would lay upon landowners to protect the natural environment obviously interfere with what those people do with their land. That is often taken to be an equally obvious ? albeit possibly justifiable ? violation of their rights in that property. But to say that, as landowners often do, would be to imply that property rights somehow embrace a ?right to destroy?. Closer inspection suggests that they do not. That would be a (...) further right, additional to and independent of all the component rights standardly associated with the right to private property. A right to destroy is implicit neither in the concept nor in the justifications of property rights, as they are standardly conceived. Conservationist policies cannot, therefore, properly be opposed on the grounds that they would necessarily violate people's property rights. (shrink)

Hegel is often read as defending private property and property rights on the basis of the so-called “developmental thesis,” which holds that the institution of private property is a necessary condition for individuals to develop the basic capabilities required for free choice. In this paper, I challenge the developmental thesis, and present my own interpretation of Hegel's justification of private property and theory of property rights. Reconstructing Hegel's theory requires that (...) we read the Philosophy of Right as a whole and consider the role of property within the context of the political system that Hegel sketches there, rather than merely looking at the Property subsection of the work in isolation, as works that argue for the developmental thesis tend to do. (shrink)

Suppose libertarians could prove that durable, unqualified private property rights could be created through 'original acquisition' of unowned resources in a state of nature. Such a proof would cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the modern state. It could also render the approach to property rights that I favour irrelevant. I argue here that none of the familiar Lockean-libertarian arguments for a strong natural right to acquisition succeed, and that any successful argument for grounding (...) a right to acquire would have to use my favoured approach to property rights - the 'vector-sum' approach. I conclude with some doubts about original acquisition theory and natural property rights. (shrink)

Neo-classical liberals aim to offer a more consistent, coherent, and morally ambitious form of liberalism than the traditional classical and social liberal alternatives by providing grounds for a strong commitment to both individual economic liberty and social justice. The key neo-classical liberal claim is that the stringent protection of negative economic liberty does not conflict with, but is rather an essential component of, a commitment to political and social justice. My focus in this article is not on this key neo-classical (...) claim itself, but rather on the conceptually prior question of the meaning and institutional implications of the negative conception of individual economic liberty. In addressing this question I trace some lines of argument which derive from the classical political economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing in particular on ideas and arguments developed by the American economist and social critic Henry George, I argue that a fully coherent and defensible conception of negative economic liberty is compatible with a commitment to a strongly conditional form of private landownership, but is incompatible with a commitment to absolute private property in land. (shrink)