Ownership - What makes something yours?
Most of us believe that we own things, but what does it mean to acquire ownership? Perhaps first we need to understand what ownership is.
Primitive ideas of ownership may involve the self, where ownership is literally the parts of yourself. A turtle lowers its head inside its shell in the face of danger, taking responsibility of its own body parts. Some animals can think more abstractly and see property outside of themselves. A tiger is territorial, and it will try to defend its territory against other animals. Then humans come along, who take ownership of nearly anything.
While many of us understand that our body parts are ours, it may not be that simple as to why we can claim ownership of things that are not part of yourself. How did we get all the way from, "these are my hands", to "this is my house."? What is the connections between the two?
Something tells me that we really don't fully understand what ownership is because it isn't always clear as to who owns what. Did slave-holders really own the slaves? is even possible to own a human being? How about animals? Some animal rights groups believe animals cannot be property.
Primitive ideas of ownership may involve the self, where ownership is literally the parts of yourself. A turtle lowers its head inside its shell in the face of danger, taking responsibility of its own body parts. Some animals can think more abstractly and see property outside of themselves. A tiger is territorial, and it will try to defend its territory against other animals. Then humans come along, who take ownership of nearly anything.
While many of us understand that our body parts are ours, it may not be that simple as to why we can claim ownership of things that are not part of yourself. How did we get all the way from, "these are my hands", to "this is my house."? What is the connections between the two?
Something tells me that we really don't fully understand what ownership is because it isn't always clear as to who owns what. Did slave-holders really own the slaves? is even possible to own a human being? How about animals? Some animal rights groups believe animals cannot be property.
Comments (88)
Many animals have developed a capacity to be aware of, connect and collaborate with other four-dimensional ‘beings’ or events in the environment, and become as familiar with them as with their own bodies. They learn to reflexively associate certain change patterns in these others with a necessary threat-related response in themselves. Those familiar events include their home, their territory, food/water sources or members of their social group.
Some animals extend the association still further by marking their territory, chemically signifying this subjective familiarity in a more ‘objective’ way. Like humans offering sacrifices to the gods, they only know how they’d respond to the warning, and actually have no information about the threat they’re trying to deter.
Humans have developed a variety of ways to signify and objectify this same familiarity (and associated fear of loss) as a deterrent to others - from a line drawn in the sand to branding, symbols, colour codes, jewellery, walls, name plates, etc.
As humans, we have convinced ourselves that we can hypothetically avoid all experiences of loss in this way, and therefore reduce suffering. We own a dog to protect our property to protect our home to protect our family to protect our genes...
What we fail to recognise, however, is that loss and lack are necessary experiences of life: even if I own everything, I will still experience lack because I am not what I own, and I will not avoid loss because everything is a finite event, including me. I am a dissipative structure in a state of inequilibrium, continually absorbing and discarding parts of myself - it is the only way I am still alive. I am necessarily less than the universe.
1. Owners have boners
2. The owned are things that can be boned
I think the whole concept of ownership can be reduced to these two basic laws.
"Ownership" (i.e. title, deed, contract) is just a contrivance of legal convention enforced by the threat of State sanction or violence purportedly in order to minimize the usual murdering & dying otherwise needed to establish claims. That's the Hobbesian meta "hom? homin? lupus", ain't it? From piracy to property simply by fiat of a (bribed) Caesar's Legions ... Pax legem talionis. (calling @Ciceronianus the White :fire: )
I think I might've mistaken one meaning of "possess" for another here. Does the following not make sense:
Quoting TheMadFool
I'd like your comment. Thanks
What qualifies you for rights to something is your undisputed habitual use and possession of it.
Agreed.
Property rights only exist when the powers-that-be recognize them. If they refuse to enforce such property rights, then you do not have them.
There is currently only one exception: you own cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin because you know their secret, regardless of what the powers-that-be believe or enforce.
Since it is not possible to prove that someone knows a secret -- he can trivially deny that -- cryptocurrencies fall outside the range of political enforcement.
Power to defend what you've acquired. A limited government is necessary to ensure that you acquired it legally - meaning: without infringing on the rights of others.
Did you read the rest of my post? They defend their property by being part of a society with a limited govt that defends those rights.
If you’re saying instead that whatever the state will defend for you is what is yours, that’s very different from the original criterion. It’s still might makes right, sure, but it acknowledges that where a state exists it has all the might, and so all the rights (on such an account), and whoever it decides owns something thus becomes the fact of ownership, a far cry from the “defend it yourself” criterion implied originally.
Noah Harrari (book: "Sapiens") would probably say that ownership is a concept developed by animals (as opposed to plants) that helped early animals try to more likely get the chance to mate. Noah Harrari believes that humans thrive over other animals because we develop fictions that enable millions of us to work together to overcome our environment.
Considering my philosophy is combined with religion, i believe his view points are very interesting but based on calculated risk, i reject many of his beliefs because i don't think they are expedient in helping me avoid the worse case scenario.
I personally believe it's all together, if you're only willing to fight for something verbally and not physically, then you're not worthy of your opinion nor possession.
Yes, but only up to a point. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.
If I am eating a banana in the jungle and a wild elephant intimates that he wants the banana, I might yell at him to back off but if he persists I would let him have the banana, it would not be worth getting physical with an elephant over a banana.
My thoughts and actions are the primary source of my sense of ‘complete ownership’ - these are of course embodied so my body is entwined with the limits of my actions, and as a consequence also my thoughts.
Others senses of ‘ownership’ are based on social interactions and what is and isn’t mutually beneficial. I’m not sure what the two first replies of ‘power’ mean exactly but I guess to me ‘power’ in this framework means ‘efficiency of control’. I say this because someone with more limited control is not necessarily less ‘powerful’. In the sense of it’s not about what you’ve got it’s about what you do with it.
I’m just hoping their view of ‘power’ has more depth then a reduction to merely meaning ‘oppressive force’ - if ‘power’ meant that then we’d just call it ‘oppression’ not ‘power’. I hope their thoughts were more in line with mine?
Outside of the state ownership only signifies a varying degree of association with a person, and the possessive pronoun is used to indicate such associations. My hand, my clothes, my car, my child, my wife, my country. If we disregard state laws and any preconceived ethics, there is no reason to assign ownership only to some of those items and not to all or none.
Your body parts are closer to you and therefore more yours than anything else. The clothes you are wearing are more yours than the ones in your closet. The house you are living in more than the one you are renting out.
Your wife may be closer to you than your car and therefore more yours. Does that mean that you own your wife? You may answer that you don’t have the right to control your wife, but aside from law and ethics there are no rights, so ownership can’t be evaluated in those terms.
It could perhaps be assessed according to degree of attachment you feel to an object. What would hurt you more, the loss of your car or your wife? The answer would be what is more yours.
In any case, “ownership” is a very elusive term, and outside of the state it’s not possible to define it. That means it doesn’t really exist, right?
There are many words that defy a clear definition, eg species, yet this does not mean that they are not useful terms.
An obvious yet an important point. The emotional weight attached to items (due to love, hate and/or habituation) plays strongly into our sense of ‘ownership’. This would still tie into my broad view as being ‘thought’, which then shows us the use of clarity of thought when understanding how far our reach extends in terms of ‘control’.
I think it is fair to say the more negative perception of ‘power’ extends from a need to feel like we have control. Attaching a sense of greater control to situations where we have little to no control will inevitably create distress - possibly culminating in delusion, aggression and hatred.
Interesting that you mention freedom. I have this theory that the more freedom you give away to others the more you get to keep for yourself.
An object once possessed gets locked to the possessor and loses its freedom. After all if it were public property it would have greater freedom by which I mean more possibilities.
An object's best economic state would be one with maximum freedom or possibilites. Thus we have thieves who take what is NOT theirs.
This forces the state to intervene and create an artificial structure of rules and regulations that prevents thieves and protects ownership.
Why is ownership more important than maximizing utility of objects?
It seems that we've made a choice between the options of maximum utility of an object where it is not owned by anyone and protection of ownership. There must be a good reason for this. I think it was Banno who started a thread on the tragedy of the commons. The group works best when they compete with each other and ownership is a part of the competitive landscape. I think it's the most important element of competition and thus of the health of an economy.
Only an agreement between me and another person with which I am trading things I own for things that they own. No one else gets to have a say in what we own. They can try to take it, but then that doesn't mean that I never owned it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's really easy to grasp. You just have to take in everything that I have said, which really isn't all that much. The state would only decide to not defend my ownership of something if I acquired it by infringing on the rights of others.
The ruling elite cannot be trusted.
In theory, the ruling elite protects your property rights. In practice, they are also the worst threat to them. The more you trust them, the more likely you will sooner or later lose what you have.
The ruling elite must never be trusted, and everything they say, must be treated with utmost suspicion. They are liars and manipulators. They will try to make you believe that they act in your interest, but in reality, they are only looking for an opportunity to strip your clean.
But the question was "what makes something yours" not "how is your claim currently protected". We're looking for a property attached to the object you claim is yours which makes it yours. If you say that property is {having acquired it without infringing the legal rights of others} then it would be impossible to ever aquire the first possession - legal rights came after property ownership. Also, your criteria doesn't account for ownership between countries - whose law would the 'rights' be considered from?
Most importantly though, the argument is circular. If you are going to claim that the right to property is derived from a lack of infringement of rights in acquisition, then one of those rights must surely be the right to property. A right can't be established on the basis of its own existence.
Arguing over what some given law dictates doesn’t seem to do a great deal if we’re to get to the heart of what ‘ownership’ means. The issue of ‘rights’ is another part of this problem alongside the ‘social contract’.
If I say "I own that", I'm most of the time talking about legal ownership. There's no 'heart' of what ownership means. It means whatever it is used for in an expression, and most of the time it is used to assert a legal right.
With regards to the other questions, I admit they're interesting to a point, but rare. I rarely have to claim I own my body, or my actions, these seem very unusual language uses to me. Even with something like organ donation after death, the claim of ownership would still be a legal one.
I'm honestly struggling to think of examples where the word might be used in a non-legal sense, perhaps you have some?
Now it sounds like you think there are some other reasons why the state should or should not defend someone’s preexisting rights to things. Which is a fine position, but it’s counter to the “ability to defend it makes it yours” principle you started with.
In this, as in so much else, the Law rules. What is the difference between "I have" and "I own"? Merely the difference between having something and having the legal right to something. Note that I say "legal right." That is to say an enforceable claim to it, not some feeble claim of entitlement which is hopelessly mewed by those who dream of having a legal right but instead have a vague, fuzzy belief in a "right" somehow existent outside the law, like God is said to exist outside the universe.
Yes, I know the old saying "Possession is nine-tenths of the law." And in fact possession over a period of years, open and obvious and unchallenged, may result in ownership, by operation of law, i.e. because that's what the law says. Otherwise, the saying at most is an acknowledgement of the fact that it can be difficult, and expensive, to establish legal ownership, and that often discourages someone from claiming it.
Laws were developed so those who want property and can get it can keep it.
This is the Word of the Law!
Ownership is inextricably linked to property, which is an extension of our faculties. Property does exist whether it is abolished or not, because property is primary to laws and governments.
Do you have any examples of 'ownership' being used prior to written law? My etymological dictionary has it as being from ""one who owns, one who has legal or rightful title," first used in the mid 14th century.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Exactly.
That is why I referred to a sense of ownership being about our personal reach of control, perceived or actual, as the possible heart of the issue as put forward by the OP regarding ‘owning’ your body. If you want me to make this more concrete then think of levels of labour where I may own you, partially as decreed by a labour contract, or fully as a slave - I only ‘own’ you in such a sense as you’re willing/able to play along dependent upon your own sense of ‘control’ under the influence of some law.
I can make a law that says it is illegal for you to die whilst you’re working fir me ... meaningless law. The ‘laws’/‘rules’ merely fit around our sense of limited control, which are effectively where a sense of ownership lays in part. I’m not suggesting this is all there is to it, but it seems hard to deny it is a significant point right?
That seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Hadn't we better establish if there was such a concept prior to all written law? I can see how, logically, there must have been immediately prior to written law (in order for said law to write about it) but that's still influenced by the intent to make a law.
Quoting I like sushi
I never say such a thing in day-to-day speech, nor have I ever heard anyone do so, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about that.
Quoting I like sushi
Probably, but I don't think that's the same as 'owning'. I might 'have' a library book. I don't 'own' it.
Quoting I like sushi
Well, that's one way of looking at it, but we could equally say (if slavery were legal) that you continue to 'own' me even if I don't play along. You just now 'own' a very recalcitrant slave.
Quoting I like sushi
So you're saying that the limits of our powers must constrain what we can make law and so examining those limits tells us something about those laws? OK, I can see that being a useful exercise.
I agree, in that respect, the extent to which we can 'control' something is the maximum extent to which we can make a law conferring ownership. Is there any more fine-grained constraint than that? The extent to which others in our community are prepared to allow the exercise of such control perhaps? Maybe that's why we no longer have slavery.
It occurs to me that this is perfectly analogous to the Euthyphro Dilemma:
"God commands it" : "It is good"
::
"The State defends your possession of it" : "It is your property"
And then we ask "so if God commanded [thing we normally think of as bad] then it would be good?" and the Divine Command Theorist replies "God wouldn't command things that are bad", which then suggests that what is good or bad is independent of God's commandments; at best, if God is perfectly good, he would just never command things that are (independently) bad.
Meanwhile we ask "so if the State defended or allowed [thing we'd normally think of as theft] then it would be a legitimate exchange of property?" and if the might-makes-right proponent then replies "the State shouldn't defend or allow theft", that suggests that what is or isn't someone's property (and so what is or isn't theft) is independent of the State's defense of it; at best, if the State were perfectly just, it would never defend or allow any change of possession that was (independently) theft.
In other words, "Should the state defend your possession of it because it's yours, or is it yours because the state defends your possession of it?"
1) I never said ‘power’ as far as I recall? I said something along the lines of being limited, having limited control in all aspects of life, yet our primary sense of control being felt strongest in our own thoughts and actions - both of which can fool us into believing our ‘control’ is greater or lesser than what it appears to be.
2) Yes, and individuals in a community act upon the their perceptions of their own reach of control and the limited effects of their thought/action. A slave owner can take your life but they cannot prevent your death - the limit of control plays into the use and effect of ownership. Ownership requires upkeep, just as we’re to blame, to some degree (depending on control), if we put on weight, drink too much or smoke.
Other items to think about is whether something can be owned yet never given away or loaned out? I cannot cut my arm off and lend it to you for a week then get it back again whilst I can lend you a hammer and have it returned without serious change - in fact it would be better for me to be your slave for a week than cut away part of my body. This ties into ownership in regards to items that a ‘whole’ rather than ‘parts’ - in terms of time and/or space.
These may seem like quite silly examples on the surface but if you consider ‘ownership’ only as a legal tern and you own a loaded gun it doesn’t matter if the law says it’s your gun when I pick it up and shoot your with it. Legal ownership is relative to where you live, or even nonexistent, but human behavior is pretty ubiquitous regardless of its various manifestations of dealing with the appropriation of material resources.
If no one was around to take your stuff it wouldn't mean that you own everything and you can only defend what you own, not what you don't, so being able to defend what you own doesn't exhaust what it means to own something.
You can own something and it be taken away, but that doesn't mean that you never owned it. How can someone take something from you if you didn't own it in the first place? What would they be doing, if not taking what you own? If you never owned it, then how does it even make sense to say that someone is taking it by force?
There is some house that Alice is living in. Bob walks into it and starts living there too. Alice says "no, get out, this is my house". Bob doesn't obey her commands -- he doesn't use any violence against her, he just continues hanging out living in the house that Alice says is hers. Alice wants to force Bob out of that house -- or preferably, have the state come and force Bob out of the house for her, using violence if necessary. Bob is getting tired of this disturbance in the place he lives and would like the state to remove Alice instead, or maybe he'd like to remove her himself if they won't, though he hasn't tried that yet, nor has she tried to remove him by force yet. They're both just asking the state to make the other leave, so as to defend their exclusive right (they each claim) to this piece of property.
Under what circumstances should the state decide in Alice's favor or Bob's favor? What makes the house really Alice's or really Bob's? Is it just whoever the state happens to decide to favor? Or are there independent reasons that the state should consider in deciding whose rights are legitimate and deserve defending? If the latter, are those reasons simply "whoever succeeds at forcing the other out themselves gets to stay"? If not that (or the "whoever the state decides for whatever reason to force out" answer), then the "whoever can defend it owns it" principle is not being adhered to, but instead something else determines ownership, and the state just enforces (or ought to enforce) those independent rights.
Should the state defend your possession of something because it's yours, or is it yours because the state defends your possession of it?
(Consider all the possible circumstances that could lie behind Alice and Bob's conundrum. Did Bob used to live there before Alice? How long ago? Is this Bob's vacation home and Alice is squatting in it when Bob arrives for his vacation? Or is this Alice's family home since childhood and Bob is some vagrant who wandered in off the street? Does Bob usually live there, and just went to work this morning, and came home to find Alice had moved in while he was away? Did Alice just buy this place from someone who claimed to be the owner, and now Bob shows up acting like it's actually his? Do any of these things matter or not, and if so why?)
An impossible scenario. How does someone walk into a house and start living there? Who owns the keys to the house? Alice's dog doesn't like Bob and bites him everyday he tries to come into the house. Is it the dog's house?
There's lot of ways you could flesh out this scenario (read the entire post please, I listed a bunch in the last paragraph). The important question for you is, what if any difference do those different circumstances make?
So owning something entails having something and defending your having it. If your defense makes it not worth trying to take what you have from you, then you own it by default.
Bob is tired of Alice's constant nagging in taking out the garbage. Its not worth the effort to live there. A defense doesnt necessarily entail violence. Ownership is often equated to who wants it more and is willing to put more work into posessing it than others.
So if I can convince the state to help me keep you out of the house you live in, and keep anyone else besides me from living there, then it's my house, totally legit? (Or, if the state doing it is somehow wrong: if they just don't stop me from driving you out of the house myself?)
I'm pretty sure you'll say no, of course not, because it's your house and that would be stealing. But why is it your house if you can't defend your possession of it from the state (or from me)? Why is it wrong for the state (or me) to dispossess you of it, if your ability to maintain possession of it were all that made it yours, so your failure to do so would make it not yours anymore?
Should the state defend your possession of it because it's yours, or is it yours because the state defends your possession of it?
The state is going to want something in return, and the state isnt going to do something that would cause its members to lose faith in the fairness of the system. How are you going to convince others that what I worked hard for is yours and how will that be consistent with how the state makes others decisions in regards to ownership? I think you're just making up unrealistic scenarios with taking into consideration the implications of your thought experiments.
Obviously, cooperation is a strategy that works or else human beings wouldnt be as successful as they are. Most of us are intelligent enough to understand that there might be an easier way to gain access to the things others own that don't involve violence where the thief risks their life for something that he doesnt need to in order to use the resource they want.
The point of thought experiments it to tease out what you're really saying or thinking. Regardless of whether or not something would happen, I want to know what you think in the hypothetical circumstance where it does.
I'm trying specifically to avoid concrete real-world issues, but if you really want something like that, here's an easy scenario: the public, losing faith in the way the system works now, decides that it's not fair that there are more unoccupied homes than there are homeless people, and so ownership of those homes should be assigned to the homeless people. So the state, directed by the majority, who elect people to represent that view for them, stops keeping homeless people out of unoccupied homes, and instead keeps those homes previously-assigned "owners" from kicking the homeless people out. The state just starts acting like the homes rightly belong to the newly-assigned owners.
In your view of might makes right, does that then make those homes legitimately the property of the newly-assigned owners, and no theft have happened?
Or on a larger picture: if a state-socialist regime comes into power in a state and does start taking things from people and giving them to other people, on what grounds would you say (or wouldn't you say?) that that was wrong? So far, all you've said to similar questions is "that wouldn't happen". But this has happened, and I gather that you think that it was bad. Why is it bad, if might makes right, i.e. power is ownership?
The house is “really Alice’s” because the house is her property, meaning it was justly acquired by her own faculties and production, whether she built it or purchased it. Bob would be engaging in some form or other of stealing from Alice.
The state ought to defend Alice’s property because it is hers.
I’m channeling Bastiat’s formulation here:
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Not only are there many words that defy a clear definition, most words do. (Even very simple words. What’s the exact difference between a shoe and a boot, for example)
The special problem with “ownership” is that it has a very clear legal definition. It is artificially clear, in fact, since legal language has to make up clear definitions that don’t necessarily exist in natural languages. The legal definition of ownership has then been transferred back to the natural language and we now tend to believe that that is its real meaning.
The definition would be something like: “Ownership is the legal right to control an object.” That is also probably what we mean in daily language when we say we own something. “I own my car” means I (and no one else) has the legal right to control this car. I can’t say “I own my wife” since I have no legal right to control her.
But if there were no state and government this definition would be meaningless, and the question was what ownership really means. Would there be no ownership if there were no state? Well, there is no definition of ownership at all outside of the state, so that means that ownership doesn’t really exist as a natural quality.
(Also, note the last paragraph of the post you responded to, it might not be Alice's legitimately acquired property after all).
To me it all starts with the libertarian presumption that you have the right to own your own body and nobody else's. But the flip side on libertarianism is that you don't have the natural right to own anything beyond your body. Everything else can be derived from that. For instance Henry George believed natural resources should be publicly owned and Silvio Gesell thought the same for fiat money.
see the natural rights of ownership
Thanks
Most words and terms in legal documents have specific meanings, in fact many words in specialised disciplines, such as physics, have a specific meaning. However this does not mean that those words have no meaning outside of those disciplines.
Ownership can certainly have meaning outside of the legal domain.
If a pride of lions kills a wildebeest they will have ownership of that carcass until they are done with it and will defend it against jackals, hyenas and vultures.
Might does not make right in my estimation. I thought your thought experiment was important.
As for your last paragraph, yes the questions you posed matter because the answers should determine whose property it is.
Does it? If I own a car and just let it crumble into a pile of dust, do I not still own it? I suppose once it's completely disintegrated, it's no longer a car so I've lost ownership of it, but that;'s not unique to ownership.
Quoting I like sushi
I think you could. No matter what state it's in on it's return, people would still say "here's your arm", not "here's an arm".
Quoting I like sushi
Ii think that's the matter that should be addressed first, if you want to look at the origins of ownership. On what grounds do you say "human behaviour is pretty ubiquitous regardless of its various manifestations of dealing with the appropriation of material resources"? Is it the result of some study you've done into human behaviour in this regard?
You answered yourself. You’ll have to tell me why it matters about this or that being unique. Either way you don’t seem to have gotten the point that ‘ownership’ - close relation to - objects and/or people means you generally tend to them as they’re of use/value.
A farmer may claim ownership over a pile of manure and you’d be happy they did too if you had it piled up next to your bed. Think of refuse in general. Do you ‘own’ it? Is it your responsibility or do you ‘disown’ it? How would this go down in a community with no laws or government? Would you be ‘disowned’/‘exiled’?
Quoting Isaac
So what? That has nothing to do with the thrust of my point. Which was that different items of ownership are different in many regards. Even so, if I grew attached to your arm and moved to a country where ‘ownership of arms’ wasn’t an illegal item then would the arm be mine or yours if it’s legal where I live to own an arm. I imagine you’d prefer I used you rather than just your arm so you wouldn’t have to literally part with it for any period of time.
Figuratively and literally speaking their are items in our lives (physical or otherwise) that we’re more or less attached to. Point being the sense of ‘ownership’ is wrapped up in this not merely the dictates of governments and their ability to enforce a set of rules you never signed up for and to some degree will disagree with.
I think it makes more sense to address the OP:
Quoting Wheatley
In anthropology there has been a long interest in how ‘ownership’ arose. This is often referred to as the rise/origin of inequality where groups of humans accumulate goods of symbolic value above practical use. Jade blades or other such ritual items that possess no physical utility - status symbols maybe? In hunter gatherer societies clashes certainly happened, but so did mutually beneficial exchanges (women, partaking in social events/rituals and/or mutual protection from nature/hostile tribes). In this sense the idea of ‘ownership’ was present most strongly through tribal/family ties where material goods were certainly of import not by no means necessarily of more import than the producer (skilled hunter, gatherer, storyteller or tool-maker).
The domestication of humans following Sedentary Living meant human control became more specifically orientated to ‘pieces of land’ rather than in a hunter gather society where ‘the land’ was a whole made of parts rather than of parts made of a whole - a perspective shift brought about by creation of a static space. Where previously humans scope of control lay within themselves and between each other as the most prominent component of their existence ‘in the world’ - rather than an extraneous to it - now there was a field of play in which the environment could be brought under direct human control. In this sense humans began to play at ‘god’ within the limited bounds of what we now call ‘houses’. Here they had a cosmos with which they held almost complete sway over. The ‘house’ became ‘owned’ because it was an item crafted with the purpose of setting boundaries and creating and dictating rules of play.
For a bibliography try Eliade, Levi-Strauss, Renfrew, Rousseau and/or Geertz for a more anthropological look at this kind of thing.
If you wish to go deeper there are multiple avenues to take in this respect that include language, religious practice, shamanism and knowledge exchanges through mnemonic means. Further still there is the neurological data to consider in how we sense our surroundings, how we learn, and the less substantial area of psychology that highlight our social proclivity. Politically there is also how the division of labour from a mobile life altered with sedentary living and how specialisation likely intensified with this alongside necessity and needs for basic survival. There is also family units, communities and items like sanitation that arise along with brining more than just dogs into our circle of living - horses and cattle.
As for the general question of how ‘ubiquitous’ humans are, didn’t mean much more than something like every language possesses the same concepts, and by ‘material resources, cultures that have a similar environment generally share a common set of problems - flora and fauna as well as general climate.
I most certainly don’t think ‘Ownership? Ah, it’s just a legal term. Where’s my dictionary ... yep, or as good as. Next question?’ ;D
That is how it works for physical property. For crypto-assets, it has nothing to do with any legal rights.
I own all unspent output in address:
1GomQsbposWNZDqEXn1jNMjQcKFGdfjDbm
because I know its secret:
KyQhFdcvAEw6mQ9xTP4oWjcmRrpx1A3qyHXcPpMfxEhgV55YuqJY
If I do not know the secret, then I also do not own the assets.
It is property-by-pure-knowledge as opposed to property-by-law-enforcement. It is pure knowledge alone that gives me property rights. Property-by-law-enforcement looks very primitive in comparison, and it also lacks purity.
Furthermore I do not trust property-by-law-enforcement, because I totally distrust the ruling elite. I prefer pure knowledge instead.
I own because I know. That is how I like it.
Then ask me questions about what I think. I have no comment on impossible scenarios because it is a waste of time and would be a red herring.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I have never said that "might makes right". Might does not make one right. Might makes one mighty. Facts and logic make one right.
It seems to me that is what you are proposing - that might (the State) makes one right. I think history has shown that the State isn't as mighty as it thinks sometimes and overreaches and that is when its members revolt.
The public is losing faith in the system in the U.S. Look at the presidents we're voting for (Obama and then Trump) - supposed "outsiders" of the system. The average American citizen is looking for alternatives because we are losing faith in our representatives who are life-long politicians - speaking of which - how about we show those representatives who really "owns" those seats they are sitting in. How about some term limits on federal congressmen? How about freezing pay raises for them? Who owns the money they are using to give themselves raises, and their rich corporate pals loop holes in tax laws?
Giving unoccupied homes to the homeless is another scenario that you haven't thought about the implications. It's the typical "thinking with your heart and not your brain" scenario.
Just because the homes are unoccupied doesn't mean that they aren't owned. They are owned by the developers who invested in the resources it took to build the home. If the State started giving away these homes to the homeless, why would any developer invest in any more home-building projects? Home construction would come to a screeching halt. This is what I meant when I said that the system isn't going to do something that would make its members lose faith in the fairness of the system.
Quoting NOS4A2
This, coupled with the idea that "laws are for the lawless", one sees that most people understand what "ownership" means and laws are for those that don't.
Okay, then I think this whole conversation has been mislead somehow, because everything I've been asking is trying to reconcile something you said earlier that suggested that you think might makes right, which you then immediately contradicted in the same post. I've been trying to suss out how you reconcile that contradiction. It was this post:
Quoting Harry Hindu
That sounds like you're agreeing with Maw that ownership consists in having power to defend what you've acquired: that might (power to defend) makes right (legitimate ownership). But then you immediately say that a government is necessary to make sure you don't acquire things that aren't yours. But if having power to defend is all that makes it yours, then your act of acquiring it from someone else would mean they failed to defend it and so it wasn't theirs anymore. And if the state is the one doing all the defending, and defending it makes it yours, then either everything belongs to the state, or at best anything belongs to whoever the state acts like it belongs to. Which seems like a conclusion you would disagree with, but that's the consequence of what you seemed to be saying, so you seemed to be contradicting yourself.
If you're not saying that power to defend what you've acquired is all that makes something yours, then that resolves the contradiction. I've just been trying to get you to either say that, or say that you accept the consequences of that, to tell which side of this apparent contradiction you really fall on.
In your estimation, would the product of one’s work be publicly owned? Or do these become public property after a certain time?
It appears that saying something is “publicly owned” is to bestow the same “natural right”, but to the “public”, which is without body.
In a left-libertarian type scheme once you have paid society for extraction or use of a natural resource then the added value of mixing in your labor to create a greater value is forever yours. The Georgist idea is for society to charge a rent on the value of raw land (a land value tax) , but the improvements made to the land (a house,etc) are not taxed since the land was not your creation but the improvements were.
By that measure it sounds like "public ownership" is in fact state ownership, because some state or other would be required to determine and enforce what one could or couldn't do with this property. Unless every member of the public agreed with these conditions, it would naturally exclude some members of the public. I suppose this is why most "public" spaces are in fact owned by state.
Private property generally requires government enforcement as well (governments are not necessarily states, NB), unless you want to go back to what Maw was saying that your own power to defend something is all that makes it yours.
I've never read George but I'll surely look into him. I read your essay as well.
That sounds sort of what China now does.
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php
I wouldn't say that, but I would say defending one's property is a natural right, whether there is a government or not. I don't think we defend things to make them our property, but because they are our property.
Like I said, a "public property" necessarily requires a state (or some group of left-libertarians) to enforce the property conditions imposed on it. So it isn't public, and certainly not libertarian, if a state is at liberty to do what they want with the property but members of that public are not.
There's a public park, an open field where anyone can play. Someone goes out there and starts putting up a fence around it. I don't like that, it's my park too and he has no right to exclude me from it, so I take down his fence. No state involved, just a member of the public defending their own rights.
True, he might then try to fight me over that, but if someone tries to trespass on your private property and you try to exclude them, they might try to fight you over that too. In either case, either the stronger party wins that fight, or some social institution intervenes to settle it.
One way or the other there's a chance that the winning power in that conflict might be wrong about who has what rights and who violated them. There's no difference between the private property and public property in that respect.
(And it's possible the two scenarios described above might in fact be the same scenario: I think that land is public property and he's wrongly excluding people from it, he thinks it's his own private property and people are trespassing on it. Who is right? Dunno, haven't fleshed out this scenario enough. Who gets to decide who is right? Either "nobody" or "whoever has the most power", depending on whether "gets to" is prescriptive or descriptive).
One cannot just assert "it's my park too" unless the space has been designated as such by some state or authority. In order to do that the state or authority must dictate what can or cannot be done with said property. The state can only dictate what can or cannot be done with said property if it is their property. At no point in this exchange does the rights to that property extend to the public, only that the true owner, the state, has allowed them such access.
One could say the same thing about asserting "this is my private land". Unless you think the guy putting up fences around a public park just suddenly owns that park now because he said so? Either claim is contestable, neither is true by default, and one way or another there will have to be social agreement about who owns what or else people are going to be fighting over the consequent disagreements. And one possible thing people could agree on is "this belongs to everyone". That's no different than agreeing that "this belongs to him".
I think he could say that if, by his own faculties and labor, he created the property. This would necessarily lead to property disputes given the boundaries of said property, but with cooperation between other property owners compromises would be made.
I think you’re right that a collective of some sort could declare a space to be usable by everyone. But think about the wealthy New York elite’s desire for Central Park and the evictions of the freed men and immigrants who lived there in that space. Who’s to say it is a public space if people are being evicted from it?
We're talking about land in this case. Nobody creates land.
Quoting NOS4A2
I don't know enough about the specifics in the case in question, but it can still be just to "evict" someone from a public space if they are unjustly monopolizing it. If someone sets up camp in a public park and thereby excludes anyone else from ever using that space, that's little different from someone putting a fence around a part of the park. In either case it would be just to "evict" them from monopolizing that public space, so long as they're still just as free to use it as everybody else is and the action is necessary to allow everybody else their equal use of it.
In reality, "ownership" is just one more concept that we humans created that give reason for our deeds, and our existence.
Can we really "own" something that is not intrinsically imprisioned with us, as ourselves? No, i think not.
But in the case of human society, what gives me "property" over something, someone, etc, its my power to get it, hold it and defend it of others. Until someone can proclaim "ownership" over my property, it's still "my property".
Sure. It has become quite muddled. I will attempt to clarify.
I don't believe that power is what entails ownership. They are two separate things. One might even ask if one owns/possesses power, and what that means.
I define ownership as things that you worked for, and "worked" excludes any action that infringes on the rights of others. So if you take something that isn't yours, you didn't work for it, which is to say that you don't own it. You may possess it, but you don't own it. The two are mutually exclusive as you can be in possession of my lawn-mower because you are borrowing it, or you stole it. When you steal something, the person you stole it from still lays claim to what you stole.
If "ownership" is meaningless, then by default, so is "stealing". Taking and defending things from being taken is the act of the ownerless trying to become owners of what others have. You can't take something that you own and you can't defend something that you don't own, so it seems to me that taking and defending are implications of an explicit "ownership".
What 'rights of others' does this work need to avoid the infringement of?
I ask because if one of those rights is the right to property, then your argument is circular, if not, then where do these 'rights' come from such that they exclude the right to property (which seems to be listed in quite a number of 'bills of rights')?
Its not circular. If I have the right to own property that I worked for, and you do to, then it doesnt necessarily mean we're working to own the same property. Theres also the option to trade what you own for what I own and there is no infringement on rights.
Think "rights" as the goals which we have as individuals and assume others have the same goals so we dont inhibit those goals and expect others to do the same. This is why infringing on others rights takes away your rights to the same thing. Infringe on others rights and others no longer respect yours.