Skip to main content

Who Is Entitled to What From Others?


Recently I've posted concerning the fact that who does what where when matters. It is my understanding thus far that if Person-A performs Act-A at Location-A at Time-A then Persons-Not-A did not, excludability working as it does. Now let's talk about what this means for ethics and jurisprudence! I need a theory of entitlements justified using this 'who what where when' stuff.

Why talk up any theory of entitlements at all? It's an attempt to describe as accurately as possible the conditions under which humans plural will best flourish. So this is purely descriptive ethics, purely an outgrowth of the practical significance of individual actions and the location of those actions in space and time.

It must always be the case that who does what where when matters because for it to be otherwise then there would be no need to find out who committed a murder, or other heinous act. Let's carry this a little further. If they wanted a community, one of whose members had been found brutally murdered, could respond by voting to decide who gets punished for the act, since who does what where when doesn't matter according to the people of this community.

The same epistemological truth that underlies criminality also underlies property rights, since all rights, including the right to life, are entitlements afforded you by others. Therefore the person who acts to claim a previously unclaimed (in reality) resource gains the sole decision-making entitlement over the use of that plot of land.

The only way this can be otherwise is if society as a whole or the collective already enjoys some kind of claim to the land that the first person is claiming, but the collective does not exist absent the agency if its members - only an act of consent can associate a person with a collective - so this is a case of reification. Therefore there is no logically sound justification for subsequent arrivals to claim land that has already been claimed unless the previous claimant chooses to surrender it.

There is also the possession form of property, which is like the private form except that one's claim goes away when one stops occupying or using land. This is not an absurdity because if the owner of the plot of land is absent they are not physically there to protest encroachment by others. See a problem yet? How long is long enough for others to assume you've abandoned your property? Clearly only an action in space and time whereby you say you are abandoning your property, or your death without will can leave it truly unclaimed and open to being claimed anew by others.

The title of this post must be addressed, and the answer is that everyone is entitled to the consequences for their own and for others' autonomous moral agency that arise from their own actions. Taken consistently this entitles people to control what they acquire without force, and to defend that control against incursions. It also entitles 3rd parties to assist in stopping aggressors. It entitles everybody to act non-violently and act violently in defence of their person and stuff.

So private property is fine since it reflects who did what where when better than the public, common or possession kinds. What about political authority? Well, I guess that's for another time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000...

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla...