Every person should respect every person as one who should actively seek happiness. This entails that one should respect oneself as one who should actively seek happiness, according to the principle of individuation; and that one should respect every other as one who should actively seek happiness, according to the principle of liberalization. One should actively seek happiness only because every person should be respected as one who should seek happiness, therefore one should neither define nor bring about one's happiness in a way that does not respect other people as ones who should also actively seek happiness. Stated positively, one should bring about and define one's happiness in a manner that respects other people as ones who should also actively seek happiness, according to the principle of collective individuation: every person should respect every person as one who should actively seek happiness.
As a preliminary clarification, we can understand happiness as the ongoing attainment of one's needs and desires. Needs can be food, clothing, shelter, and companionship; while desires can be anything from travel to trying out a new food. For a preliminary clarification of respect, we can understand another person in terms of her body, property, and authority. Her body is quite simply that, her corporeality; her property is matter or energy that she has applied toward the ongoing attainment of happiness; her authority is her ability to create original literary or artistic works, to enter and exit relationships, and to give or refrain from consent. We respect another person by acknowledging that her body, property, and authority are meaningfully situated with respect to her ongoing attainment of happiness; that is, they are involved in her ongoing projects. Insofar as we legitimately interact with another person, we maintain her consent with regard to actions involving her body, property, and authority, just as we maintain mutual understanding of them. Rape is an example of the failure to respect another person's body. Theft is an example of the failure to respect another person's property. Forgery—such as "identity theft"—is an example of the failure to respect another person's authority. In all three cases, an illegitimate disturbance of the person's ongoing attainment of happiness takes place; and such a disturbance entails a failure to respect another as one who should actively seek happiness.
Illegitimate Disturbance
"If man's goodness is to be possible, even as a past or future utopia, this goodness would require the innocence of a certain having." --Paul Ricoeur
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggests that our day-to-day activities do not normally involve explicit decisions. We go about our business, as it were, undisturbed. It is only when things break down that we reflect upon our projects and involvements. While there is little reason to deny the vividness of Heidegger’s existential analytic, it is perhaps a tragedy that within this work he did not adequately treat solicitude—the social aspect of human action. Heidegger provides the profound insight that "those entities towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein" (Heidegger [1926] 1962, 157). Stated simply, we do not encounter people as merely instruments. However, Heidegger does not adequately address that some people do approach others—or, at least, their body, property, or authority—as merely instruments or equipment ready-to-hand, as in the instance of rape, theft, or forgery. (His sense of "leaping in" does not adequately reflect this.) At the same time, Being and Time does not elaborate a deep sense of respect for the meaningful involvements of the other. Heidegger does not address the sense in which the other's body, property, and authority are not necessarily available or ready-to-hand. (His sense of "leaping ahead" does not adequately reflect this.) The term illegitimate disturbance, which does not appear in Heidegger’s work, refers to something inherently social. Nevertheless, it is perhaps best understood in terms of Heidegger’s existential analytic, as it derives from his treatment of disturbance. It is almost synonymous with violence.
In order to understand illegitimate disturbance, we engage in a simple thought experiment. We are in effect moving from the Moll Flanders model of the world to a variation on the more traditional Robinson Crusoe model of the world. Imagine the person Friday on a tropical island. Friday's tribe was on a neighboring island, where they were wiped out by a tsunami, leaving him as the sole survivor. We assume that no other persons are on this island, no other persons have an interest in the island, and that he therefore does not encounter the ongoing activity of another person. Hence, he freely applies various means toward his chosen ends. For example, he builds a shrine to honor his ancestors. He builds a shelter presumably for himself. The sticks he uses for this shelter are meaningfully situated with respect to his ongoing project of having-shelter. He cooks a fish over a fire. For Friday, these means are available or ready-to-hand. Though there is little need for the notion of property within the context of a solitary individual, it nevertheless remains clear that various means are meaningfully situated toward Friday’s ends.
When we introduce Crusoe onto the island, he has various possibilities for interacting with these meaningfully situated items. Naturally, when Crusoe discovers human products on the island, and they appear recently used or well-maintained, he has reason to suspect that they may be meaningfully situated with respect to someone else’s ends—that they are available for another or ready-to-another’s hand. Insofar as Crusoe respects this situatedness, we have the rudiments of the notion of property. If Crusoe fails to respect this situatedness, then we have the rudiments of the notion of illegitimate disturbance. If Crusoe encounters, for example, the fish being cooked over a fire, we would consider it rude if he throws the fish onto the ground. If he comes upon the shelter, we would consider it violent if he demolished it. If he finds the shrine, we would consider it disrespectful if he destroyed it. This is because Crusoe has failed to respect that these items—indeed, the very area he has entered—are already meaningfully situated with respect to another person’s ends—in this case, Friday's ends. Crusoe's disregard has caused a breakdown within the meaning-context of Friday's life. This, in turn, entails a failure to respect another person as one who should actively seek happiness.
Within the above example, we have emphasized illegitimate disturbance with respect to property, but it can also take place with respect to body and authority. For example, Crusoe could out-and-out rape Friday. This entails a failure to respect that Friday's body is meaningfully involved in Friday's ongoing pursuit of happiness. Likewise, we can imagine a situation where a third person arrives on the island. This third person first encounters Crusoe outside Friday's encampment, and Crusoe proceeds to tell him that he can eat Friday's food and sleep in Friday's shelter, that Friday says, “It’s okay.” Nevertheless, Crusoe has lied. Friday did not give his consent. In this instance, Crusoe has failed to respect Friday's authority; and he has failed to respect Friday as one who should actively seek happiness. When the third person proceeds to eat Friday's food and sleep in Friday's shelter, this again leads to a type of illegitimate disturbance.
Do you mean property rights?
Also, what is "illegitimate"? Who determines that?
Illegitimate disturbance is relevant to property rights, but I'm getting at something more primordial. I'm advocating an existential sense of property and the violation of property. I briefly stated an ethical perspective and applied the term illegitimate with reference to that ethical perspective.
So, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia ?
Why would you tack Heidegger onto a rehashing of the non-aggression principle? Its comes off as really awkward intellectual posturing.
they said we would have an unfair fun advantage
Thanks for your comment. I've always had mixed feelings about Heidegger, but then I agree with Hubert Dreyfus that Heidegger is perhaps the most important philosopher of the 20th Century.
liberty student: So, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia ?
Yes, my sense of happiness comes from eudaimonia and Aristotle, while my sense of respect comes from Kant.
The difference between Friday alone on the island and Friday + Crusoe is explained by Mises here (with a lot less verbiage). I disagree that "situatedness" is a criterion for property - what if the disaster that befell Friday's tribe had also killed Friday? On finding the deserted island, would it be rude for Crusoe to throw a fish onto the ground that had been cooking before the disaster wiped everyone out? Would it be violent for Crusoe to demolish a one-time shelter of a now extinct tribe-member?
Clayton -
I'm generally in agreement with the following:
http://blog.mises.org/7344/contra-the-labor-theory-of-property/
Regarding Clayton's post, it seems obvious that something is no longer meaningfully situated with regard to a person when that person is dead, so I think that it's a much more interesting question to ask why we honor the will of deceased persons.
the will, is a last will and testiment, it declares a transfer of particular property held by the 'dying' to those mentioned in his will. The document is evidence of the transfer of property rights (and act of charity towards the recipients). as such if some 3rd party interferes with the uniting of inheritors with their property, they are theives, their crime is not of interfering with the property of the deceased, but the property of the living inheritors who had the rights transferred to them at the instant of death.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
nirgrahamUK,
Thanks for your comments. I was thinking more generally about the ways in which we relate to and honor the will of the deceased, for example the ways in which Friday might relate to his ancestors, but the last will and testament is certainly related.
edavismail: I'm generally in agreement with the following: http://blog.mises.org/7344/contra-the-labor-theory-of-property/ Regarding Clayton's post, it seems obvious that something is no longer meaningfully situated with regard to a person when that person is dead, so I think that it's a much more interesting question to ask why we honor the will of deceased persons. Nice link. I agree with the author's reservations about the "labor theory of property" but I also think the author has not sufficiently considered the problems with his criterion for ownership. Consider the colonial European powers, when they landed on "undiscovered" islands and continents, they really did claim the whole damn thing. That was the whole point of planting the king's flag. The king, in essence, was saying "all lands connected to the dirt in which this flag is planted are hereby annexed to my kingdom to be put to use in the interests of the king and his subjects." This certainly meets the praxeological criterion for ownership - the king really plans to mine the gold and extract the other valuable natural resources in the new colonial territory. Extending this line of thought even further, every ancient king claimed ownership of "the whole world" by divine right and intended to put it to use for their own purposes. Hence all the ancient Mesopotamian, North African and Mediterranean wars and empire-building. But these kings had the imagination to make plans to utilize the whole earth and this certainly constitutes a valid claim to ownership under the praxeological criterion. Their descendants - if they could identify themselves - would, then, have legitimate claim to own literally everything. But this is clearly absurd. My view is that we cannot know a priori what constitutes a valid claim of ownership. We cannot sit down in Thinking Man pose and dream up what is the One, True Criterion of valid ownership. The reality is that ownership is an unboundedly complex problem and the only way to solve it is through a free market in arbitration over property disputes. Over time, precedents will emerge that describe the criteria for ownership. We can make educated guesses based on existing law, history and praxeology about what these precedents would look like in an unhampered market in law. You'd probably need objectively identifiable boundaries. You'd probably need to publicly announce your claim in a manner that is commonly understood to be a property claim. You'd probably have to evidence a will to maintain control over your claimed property in the face of contesting claims (these are Butler Shafer's three criteria for property). While I agree that "laboring" on something may not be necessary to have a valid claim to having appropriated it from nature, simply having a "plan in mind" for something is certainly not sufficient to delimit property claims, see my argument above. The essential point is that given two people both making a claim to the same object which each is claiming to have appropriated from nature, one party must be able to give a reason that his claim is better than the other party's claim. If neither person can give a reason why their claim is better than the other person's, then the only fair allocation I can see would be to flip a coin. Clayton - http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.com | Post Points: 35
While I agree that "laboring" on something may not be necessary to have a valid claim to having appropriated it from nature, simply having a "plan in mind" for something is certainly not sufficient to delimit property claims, see my argument above. The essential point is that given two people both making a claim to the same object which each is claiming to have appropriated from nature, one party must be able to give a reason that his claim is better than the other party's claim. If neither person can give a reason why their claim is better than the other person's, then the only fair allocation I can see would be to flip a coin.
I think that one reason why someone's claim of ownership would be better than another's is she can show that she used the property first--that it is meaningfully situated with respect to her ongoing plans. I don't expect such a brief explanation of the existential or praxeological notion of property to explain everything right off the bat, but it's certainly an improvement on our basic understanding of property.
OK but you're essentially back to the labor-theory of property... Rothbard doesn't specify how much labor must be put into it (perhaps just building a fence around it is sufficient) but the point is that the property must be put to some use. Personally, I'm leaning toward saying that speculative uses should not count toward original appropriation since anyone can say "I'm planning to use this someday." The purpose of speculation is to reduce uncertainty by allocating scarce resources to the production of goods that entrepreneurs believe are being under-produced. Goods which are not yet appropriated from the public domain are, by definition, not scarce (else, they would already have been appropriate). Consider air, for example. Or oceans 200 years ago. So, if you're going to appropriate something from nature, you have to be actually using it, not just speculatively using it. After something has been originally appropriated, it can be traded away into speculative or other uses.
Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, p. 34
Let us now return to our analysis of Crusoe's purposeful transformation of nature-given data though the understanding of natural laws. Crusoe finds virgin, unused land on the island; land, in short, unused and uncontrolled by anyone, and hence unowned. By finding land resources, by learning how to use them, and, in particular, by actually transforming them into a more useful shape, Crusoe has, in the memorable phrase of John Locke, "mixed his labor with the soil." In doing so, in stamping the imprint of his personality and his energy on the land, he has naturally converted the land and its fruits into his property. Hence, the isolated man owns what he uses and transforms; therefore, in his case there is no problem of what should be A's property as against B's. Any man's property is ipso facto what he produces, i-e., what he transforms into use by his own effort.
Let us now return to our analysis of Crusoe's purposeful transformation
of nature-given data though the understanding of natural laws.
Crusoe finds virgin, unused land on the island; land, in short, unused
and uncontrolled by anyone, and hence unowned. By finding land resources,
by learning how to use them, and, in particular, by actually transforming
them into a more useful shape, Crusoe has, in the memorable phrase of John
Locke, "mixed his labor with the soil." In doing so, in stamping the imprint
of his personality and his energy on the land, he has naturally converted
the land and its fruits into his property. Hence, the isolated man owns what
he uses and transforms; therefore, in his case there is no problem of what
should be A's property as against B's. Any man's property is ipso facto what
he produces, i-e., what he transforms into use by his own effort.
Rothbard, following a labor theory of property, is preoccupied with defining use in terms of physical "transformation" of the object, while "use" in the sense I applied, following an existential theory of property, focuses on the object being meaninfully situated with respect the goals of an acting person. For example, you may use a rock to pound in a nail, then place the rock exactly where you found it, so that there is no evident physical "transformation" of the rock. In any case, you may well have used the rock in anticipation of using the rock again--as standing reserve--even though you placed it in the same spot you found it. A stronger example might be that Friday finds a cave on his deserted island, and he uses the cave as a shelter without really "transforming" it in any substantial way, and without exerting any effort on his part, but it is clear that the cave is meaningfully situated toward his end of having shelter. There remains a substantial difference between the existential theory of property and the labor theory of property, despite my use of the term 'use'.
Clayton:My view is that we cannot know a priori what constitutes a valid claim of ownership. We cannot sit down in Thinking Man pose and dream up what is the One, True Criterion of valid ownership. The reality is that ownership is an unboundedly complex problem and the only way to solve it is through a free market in arbitration over property disputes. Over time, precedents will emerge that describe the criteria for ownership. We can make educated guesses based on existing law, history and praxeology about what these precedents would look like in an unhampered market in law.
Well put.
Central planning of any stripe is always doomed to failure in a natural order. Since we currently live under central planning and have some miniscule chance of being able to change state policy, there is a residual tendency to think in terms of what would be a better way to centrally plan things assuming we cannot change the fact that it is centrally planned. These are certainly interesting questions for minarchists, or those who want to work within the state system, like that county commissioner guy that was posting in here recently.
Why anarchy fails
Along these lines, see Hoppe's critique of Rothbard regarding liability.
http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae7_4_6.pdf
Hoppe: Rothbard’s proposal must be criticized as overly “objectivistic,” for it ignores important “subjective” conditions which must be combined with objective indicators to determine liability.
Rothbard’s proposal must be criticized as overly “objectivistic,”
for it ignores important “subjective” conditions which must be combined
with objective indicators to determine liability.
I agree with the above, and I'm certainly not trying to offer a first philosophy or some kind of deductive system. It is clear that any substantive claim to ownership is typically made within an elaborate nexus of meaning and actual historical conditions. A friend of mine discribed that as the Moll Flanders model or understanding of the world as opposed to the Robinson Crusoe model. Because defining ownership is largely a matter of consensus formation, it has a tremendous variability. Friday may well state to Crusoe that the whole island is his, or vice versa, and if they both accept this it has a prima facie plausibility. It's, ironically, when we add more people to the scenario, approaching the Moll Flanders model of the world, that we are ever more in need of a general sense of property rights--that we need a philosophy of property, as it were. It may not be an pristine a-priori understanding of property that we obtain, but at least a general one that can accommodate those who question property rights. That's what I'm after. In specific situations property rights will be worked out in concrete ways.
edavismail:It may not be an pristine a-priori understanding of property that we obtain, but at least a general one that can accommodate those who question property rights.
I think this limit on the applicability of such arguments is key. If the whole point of coming up with a general framework for property rights is to answer those who are skeptical of property rights, then the way these types of arguments are handled should be very different from how these arguments would be handled if they were proposals for central planning or theories of "how things will be" or "how things should be."
The problem I have is when arguments that were apparently originally intended to serve as examples for "how such a society could function" (as an answer to skeptics) end up being treated more and more as predictions and/or prescriptions. It seems like no matter how careful an author is to designate such a theory as merely a possibility and not a prediction/prescription, the idea will always show up somewhere else (and sometimes, unfortunately, by the same author, or even in the same book, essay, or post) as a prediction or prescription. It is a subtle and gradual shift, but people frequently end up arguing about how things will or should be, as witnessed in threads here on the forums every day.
The labor theory of property is based on the physical transformation of objects through labor, and gives birth to erroneous notions of property as tied to effort and mere physicality. The existential theory of property is based on meaning and the relationship between ends and means, and it provides a more solid basis for understanding property relations and property rights.
"The existential theory of property is based on meaning and the relationship between ends and means, and it provides a more solid basis for understanding property relations and property rights."
Semantics. Can you clarify what you think the difference is? Is it really substantial at all or is it mere quibbling?