Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

Of course I can see the logical/rational justification for the exclusive ownership of land. Obviously I don't accept the analogy with air as a valid one.

I can't see why not. All creatures' need for land is the same as their need for air. Both are essential. Our need for air is more immediate; we die more quickly from lack of air than from lack of land on which to live. But both are essential for survival.

Do you at least agree that being able to designate a place as a private space where others are not allowed to come and go as they please has some use?

As a human law, that applies only to humans, and is enforced by humans upon their fellows, I see nothing wrong with this. I am concerned about the underlying concept of exclusively owning land.

The land we 'own' was not made by us. It was not given to us by someone who did own it. It is just there. It supports - or supported - a wide variety of living creatures, living on and off the land together. What is the rationale for changing this? What is the justification that entitles us to do this? I see only 'might makes right', which I do not consider sufficient to justify anything.

[Belindi]

Indeed the land I own was made by me, as if I had not myself worked to make an environment for the creatures that live on my land, it would not be the same land at all.
Before I owned the land, it was owned by a man who grew vegetables, and before him it was owned by a farmer who grew barley on it. It is many many centuries since my land was a wilderness.

[Gertie]

Chewy

It's easy to lay down a bedrock assumption of how the world "should" be, and then stack logic upon it. It's evidently not so easy to think about whether there is any reason to accept the assumption as a foundation, whether others have accepted it or not. The golden rule, or Kant's categorical imperative, if you like, is about as close as you can get to an objective basis for morality. People will still argue about that one, though, or its implications. In reality, there is no objective basis for morality or for rights. Rather than laying down unfounded and extreme ideas as the suspect concrete foundations of rights, we need to work to compromise and do the best we can for the most people possible. Simple ideas will not lead us to better ways of dealing with such complex issues, and certainly will not help us to build a kinder world. Simple ideas with no provision for compromise are the foundation for war, not peace.

It seems to me the high-lighted part of what you say is itself actually the right foundation for morality. And I think we do need some foundation, because without one the rules become the end in themselves, and we can lose track of what the overall basis for Oughts is. A foundation isn't just a basis to create rules from, it's a touchstone to check back with that your rules are doing the job as intended.


This is the problem when you treat something like ''Natural Rights'' as if it is an ''objective'' foundation which can't be questioned in any circumstance, no matter the consequences. Firstly, it's not objective it's just something somebody made up, like any other right, and secondly if it causes unnecessary harms in some circs you have no failsafe.


Now you might take the position, as some Libertarians do, that individual freedom is the correct moral foundation which all Oughts must flow from. In which case, you're arguing for a moral foundation which takes no account of harms to others. Or if you start caveating your moral foundation of individual freedom to take account of harm to others, then its not really your foundation.


The advantage of a foundation like ''The wellbeing of conscious creatures'' is it not only gives you a basis for considering what Rights are appropriate, it allows you to check that in practice any particular Right is meeting your overall foundational moral goal. If it isn't, then you can re-think, because the Right isn't an end in itself, your foundation is.


And if your foundation is the welfare of conscious creatures, you can acknowledge that individuals can have somtimes contradictory notions of flourishing which means some rights to individual freedoms is appropriate, while also acknowledging that basic welfare needs are also necessary to flourish, and rights are appropriate there too. It's a negotiation and compromise which won't achieve perfection for each individual, because we're all different, but it gives you a rule of thumb to guide you.


So is a right to a home, a place of shelter and safety, a basic necessity for flourishing for most people? Of course it is. Is healthcare, education, property, protection from violence, equal treatment before the law - sure. Will these rights incur some burdens or obligations towards each other? Yes, that's the difference between an Objective Is, and a Moral Ought.

[GE Morton]

Joe is a person in a society of persons. In societies there is not only effort to repair damage but also planning to repair inevitable future damage. What makes it possible to do both is taxation to fill a fund for repairing or preventing damage.

That is not the case in the US, Belindi, nor, I suspect, wherever you live. Taxes support fire departments, whose main purpose is to prevent fires from spreading --- a public benefit --- and secondarily, to minimize damage from a fire. They do not pay for repairing any fire damage; that is why responsible property owners carry fire insurance.

Joe's living in a society does not entitle him to force others to repair his fire damage.

[GE Morton]

I don't think it qualifies as "charity" to offer healthcare to everyone. Call it unjust if you want. I think it is the right thing to do, and I would want it to be done whether I thought I benefitted or not. I think everyone would benefit from living in a kinder society where people were not on the brink of disaster all the time.

Ah, another attempt to re-define a common word. Yes, offering health care to persons who have not paid for it, i.e., as a gift, is charity, by definition:

"1. Provision of help or relief to the poor; almsgiving.
2. Something given to help the needy; alms."

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=charity

Also, many would not consider a society in which some people are forced to support others' favorite charities to be a "kinder" one.

[Leontiskos]

I’ve claimed that you are misunderstanding the fundamental distinction between justice and charity and conflating the two. Justice regards relations between persons. If someone harms another then justice establishes a debt. If someone receives benefits without paying taxes then an injustice is occurring. The kind of harm that justice is concerned with is interpersonal harm.

If justice is all that matters, then give everyone reparations to account for all the past injustices...

This is another tangent in a thread that is full of them.

Just fix all that and THEN you can apply your ideas of "justice" to future transactions.

So are you claiming that interpersonal justice can't exist without, say, paying reparations to blacks for slavery that happened 150 years ago? What is your argument here?

Even if you could do all that, I still think it is a crap society that does not enshrine safeguards for its citizens. In the U.S., people live in constant fear that they will get sick or lose their job and lose everything through no fault of their own. The ones who are honest with themselves realize that these things can happen to anyone.

And they buy insurance. We don't have magic wands. Money doesn't grow on trees. You can't just outsource all of the problems to "The Government." Your solutions aren't real solutions. If we lived in the Harry Potter universe then your suggestions would be great. Just have the Ministry of Magic government officials wave their wands to repair the house that burned down. Everyone has a right to a house and all repairs are free. If only reality worked that way.

Leontiskos wrote in reply to Chewy Brian:

If you think it is unfortunate that Joe’s house has burned down then by all means donate or start a GoFundMe. You will probably get a lot of help, and the majority will come from conservatives. But don’t force people to pay for the house. There’s nothing right about that.

Joe is a person in a society of persons. In societies there is not only effort to repair damage but also planning to repair inevitable future damage. What makes it possible to do both is taxation to fill a fund for repairing or preventing damage.

Once you separate public and private property this argument makes sense. Public funds (taxes) pay for public property and the repair of public property. Taxes aren't meant to pay for private property.

...Unless you guys are really talking about Communism in which case there is no private property (which is really the logical conclusion to many of these posts).

[GE Morton]

Would it clarify my position if we were discussing the air we breathe instead of the land we live on/off/from? Imagine that (exclusive) human 'ownership' of air allowed us to prevent others from using 'our' air? And not only did it allow for this, but that human owners routinely did it?

I can see no logical or rational justification for the exclusive ownership of land. Given what I just wrote, can you?

Here's that rationale, previously outlined in several threads.

The rational justification for land ownership is the same as for all other goods. The aim is to allow the producer or discoverer of a valuable good to realize the benefits it affords. There are both moral and pragmatic reasons for adopting such a policy and practice, which is accepted implicitly in virtually all human cultures and even in many animal communities. E.g., a gazelle roaming the Serengeti is "unowned" and "fair game," but once taken by a lion, it becomes her property, and she will defend it. Birds who build nests will drive away other birds who encroach, but not interfere if another bird builds a nest in a nearby tree.

For humans, the pragmatic reason for recognizing rights to property is that it encourages exploration, research, and the investment of efforts to produce valuable goods, and thus increases the supply of those goods. Contrary to the fantasies of many "progressives" (which is a howler of a misnomer), modern human societies are not tribes, brotherhoods, giant co-ops, or "big happy families;" its members are not engaged in any collective enterprise or bound by any sort of pact or "social contract." They are not cells in a "social organism," genetically programmed to contribute to the welfare of the whole. Each of them invests his/her time, efforts, and talents to improve their own lives and those of a few people close to them.

The moral reason for recognizing rights to property derives from a couple of basic moral postulates: that (1) the aim of morality, or moral theories and moral rules, is to permit all agents in a moral field to maximize their welfare, and (2) all creatures who qualify as moral agents have the same moral status; they all have the same rights and the rules generated by the theory apply in the same way to all. Hence no person is another's slave, obliged a priori to advance another's welfare at the cost of his own.

Most valuable goods would not exist, or be known to exist, and thus benefit no one, but for the efforts of some particular discoverer or producer. Those efforts efforts establish a moral claim by those discoverers or producers to the goods in question because they were acquired without inflicting loss or injury on another moral agent, in violation of the above postulates. Taking such goods from the discoverer or producer, on the other hand, violates both postulates.

Your parallel between land ownership and ownership of the air is contrived and specious. The atmosphere is indivisible and fluid, the air over Japan today may be over California 2 days later. The whole of it is a natural common, used in common by all living things since time immemorial, and individuals may not lay private claims to natural commons (since that would inflict loss or injury on the other moral agents who benefit from it). Land, on the other hand, is divisible and fixed, and while some of it may be a common, not all of it is. Since laying claim to a portion of the latter may improve the welfare of the claimant without inflicting loss or injury on anyone else, taking it is morally acceptable. It is also pragmatically wise, since it will very likely be used to produce wealth (such as food crops or minerals) from which others will benefit.

Georgist-type claims to the effect that "The Earth belongs to everybody" generally derive from religious dogma ("God created the Earth and gave it to Man") and are arbitrary and without a rational basis. The Earth, in situ, belongs to no one, it is res nullius, until someone lays a claim and begins to derive some benefit from some portion of it.

[Sy Borg]

People need to understand that almost NOBODY whom they suspect of being a communist is actually a communist - or even remotely resembles a Communist. This bogey needs to be put to bed for the sake of progressing debates.

Most western nations have welfare systems, and they even remotely like communist societies. Not even slightly close. Most of today's social democracies are far closer relatives to Hitler's Third Reich, in both spirit and operation, than to communism and the CCP. There is zero risk of western nations turning communist, barring a Chinese invasion (which they wouldn't do because the US showed that invasion is a dated way to take over other nations). However, there is significant risk that these western nations will give up their democracy to fascism - right wing extremism.

In the light of this, there are no grounds whatsoever to consider basic welfare to reduce homelessness and extreme poverty to be related to communism in any way, shape or form. Maybe in the 19th century, but not the 21st.

North Korea is not actually communist, but an authoritarian monarchy.

China has similar elements of monarchy, with the increasing deification of Li, but it operates as an authoritarian capitalist state that does precious little to help its citizens. China today has adopted the trickle-down effect as long practised in capitalist democracies and, as with those democracies, the rich are hoarding and ever less is trickling down to the masses.

Russia is not communist, but a kleptocratic plutocracy. In each case, the homeless are more likely to be ignored or killed than rescued.

Communism is completely dead, having rarely been tried, and not once has it managed to persist, instead evolving into authoritarian regimes. So let's put this red herring aside and consider real systems that real world governments are adopting, and how to deal with homelessness.

[LuckyR]

I don't think it qualifies as "charity" to offer healthcare to everyone. Call it unjust if you want. I think it is the right thing to do, and I would want it to be done whether I thought I benefitted or not. I think everyone would benefit from living in a kinder society where people were not on the brink of disaster all the time.

Ah, another attempt to re-define a common word. Yes, offering health care to persons who have not paid for it, i.e., as a gift, is charity, by definition:

"1. Provision of help or relief to the poor; almsgiving.
2. Something given to help the needy; alms."

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=charity

Also, many would not consider a society in which some people are forced to support others' favorite charities to be a "kinder" one.

It seems to me that the use of "forced" is arbitrary. All of us find some of public spending to our liking and we all disagree with other expenditures. We resent the latter and our being "forced" to pay for them while we gladly pay taxes that provide the services we agree with, regardless of what they happen to be.

Bottom line is we ae forced to pay for all of it, thus quibbling about the merits of this vs that expenditure is arbitrary. If one wants to be consistent, they need to pull a Kaczynski and go off the grid, otherwise such talk is hypocrisy.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote: ↑Yesterday, 4:00 am
Leontiskos wrote in reply to Chewy Brian:
If you think it is unfortunate that Joe’s house has burned down then by all means donate or start a GoFundMe. You will probably get a lot of help, and the majority will come from conservatives. But don’t force people to pay for the house. There’s nothing right about that.
Joe is a person in a society of persons. In societies there is not only effort to repair damage but also planning to repair inevitable future damage. What makes it possible to do both is taxation to fill a fund for repairing or preventing damage.
Once you separate public and private property this argument makes sense. Public funds (taxes) pay for public property and the repair of public property. Taxes aren't meant to pay for private property.

...Unless you guys are really talking about Communism in which case there is no private property (which is really the logical conclusion to many of these posts).
Wrestling with Philosophy since 456 BC

I agree. Why cannot everybody own their own place? Or at least rent it?

I can understand why some people become homeless----those who had accommodation tied to their jobs and who loose their jobs. And also others who lose home and belongings because of marriage break up. And those who have unusual living expense due to illness or disability.Have I covered all the reasons people become homeless?

When did the notion of dividing the poor into the deserving and the undeserving become defunct?

[chewybrian]

If justice is all that matters, then give everyone reparations to account for all the past injustices...

This is another tangent in a thread that is full of them.

Just fix all that and THEN you can apply your ideas of "justice" to future transactions.

So are you claiming that interpersonal justice can't exist without, say, paying reparations to blacks for slavery that happened 150 years ago? What is your argument here?

There cannot be interpersonal justice when you start with a de facto caste system and the deck is stacked. The Ayn Rand types want to glorify the effort that creates wealth, as if there was no advantage to the wealthy before they invested their money.

The fact that the wealthy man does not overtly take further advantage of the poor man does not mean the situation is just. He can hire him in an "arms length" transaction. The poor man 'earns' a dime while the rich man 'earns' a dollar. But was there any doubt who would end up being the employee and who would be the employer? Did they have anything close to an equal chance to earn according to their actual ability and effort? The spoils of many unjust acts were already in the pocket of the wealthy man before he decided to invest and offer the privilege of a job to the man who began with nothing.

Now, I can be more just or less just in my interactions with others one on one. I can treat people well and fairly, but I am only able to do so within an inherently unfair system. If I put on my Ayn Rand t-shirt and shut my eyes, I can declare that I never got a dollar I didn't earn. The poor people are just lazy, and anyone can become a billionaire if they are smart and work hard. If I am honest with myself, though, I can see that the system had not been fair and remains unfair. If we want to approach fairness, we need to even the playing field a bit.

I'm not sure that reparations are a practical or effective solution. But, I am sure that an actual socialist government is a good and effective way to start. Again, the people that live under this style of government: Finland, Denmark, Switzerland... are among the wealthiest in the world, so they are not suffering as a result of government spending. More importantly, they report being the happiest people on the planet. They have the ideal mix of freedom and protection from disaster. They are free but not afraid, and therefore happy and productive.

[Steve3007]

Do you at least agree that being able to designate a place as a private space where others are not allowed to come and go as they please has some use?

As a human law, that applies only to humans, and is enforced by humans upon their fellows, I see nothing wrong with this.

OK. So how would you enforce it? What laws would you enact to protect private spaces like this? Presumably they would bear no resemblance to existing laws governing the ownership and renting of property and the land on which it sits?

If I rent or own a house for me and my family to live in, the law says that other humans aren't allowed to walk in through the front door whenever they like and live there with me and my family without my permission. (It says nothing about other animals.) So it gives us a certain amount of privacy and security. When you've repealed that law, what are you going to replace it with?

I am concerned about the underlying concept of exclusively owning land.

The land we 'own' was not made by us. It was not given to us by someone who did own it. It is just there. It supports - or supported - a wide variety of living creatures, living on and off the land together. What is the rationale for changing this?

As I've said, owning a property (and the land on which it sits) doesn't do this. The fact that I own a house doesn't mean that the land on which it sits was made by me or anyone else. Why would you think it does? Where in property law does it say that the owner of the land made that land? As I've said, it doesn't mean I'm free to do exactly what I please with it. The question of whether I'm legally allowed to, for example, kill or evict the other creatures living there has nothing to do with ownership laws. If I'm free to to that on property that I am deemed by the abstract concept of law to own, then I'm equally free to do it on land that is deemed to be owned by nobody.

As I've said, if (to use your earlier example) flooding is being caused by too much house building, concreting over too much land, then abolishing private property seems like an odd solution to jump to. Enacting laws that restrict those activities (regardless of who is deemed to own the land) seems more sensible to me. As I said, this:

"It would be possible to make land ownership laws such that the owner can do whatever he/she wants with that land. Since that would be harmful let's not make land ownership laws like that."

seems to me more sensible than this:

"It would be possible to make land ownership laws such that the owner can do whatever he/she wants with that land. Since that would be harmful, there should be no such thing as land ownership."

If the law said "the owner of a house is allowed to torture cats in that house" then, since I'm opposed to torturing cats, I'd replace that law with "Nobody is allowed to torture cats, regardless of where they do it" rather than replacing it with "nobody is allowed to own a house". Wouldn't you?

[GE Morton]

It seems to me that the use of "forced" is arbitrary. All of us find some of public spending to our liking and we all disagree with other expenditures. We resent the latter and our being "forced" to pay for them while we gladly pay taxes that provide the services we agree with, regardless of what they happen to be.

It is not arbitrary. The criterion is not whether a government program is or is not "to our liking," but whether or not we benefit from it, which is (for the most part) a question with an objective answer. You can morally be forced to pay for benefits you receive, but not for government services (or any other services offered by anyone) from which you receive no benefits.

There is a tacit assumption lurking in many of the comments in this thread that governments occupy some sort of higher moral plane than mere individuals, and are exempt from moral constraints that bind individuals. That is the ghost of the "divine right of kings," debunked centuries ago by Locke.

Governments are constituted of individuals, acting at the behest and as the agent of other individuals. They possess no moral authority not possessed by the individuals who create and constitute them, and are not exempt from any moral constraints upon those individuals. If my neighbor may not force me at gunpoint to build him a house or contribute to his favorite charity, neither may any government he elects do so. Agents have no powers not possessed by their principals.

[Pattern-chaser]

Indeed the land I own was made by me, as if I had not myself worked to make an environment for the creatures that live on my land, it would not be the same land at all.
Before I owned the land, it was owned by a man who grew vegetables, and before him it was owned by a farmer who grew barley on it. It is many many centuries since my land was a wilderness.

We are taking at cross-purposes here. The making of land started with a cosmic process, followed by local planetary geology, followed again by millions (billions?) of years of colonisation by life of all shapes and sizes. We do not make land; we live on it.

[GE Morton]

There cannot be interpersonal justice when you start with a de facto caste system and the deck is stacked. The Ayn Rand types want to glorify the effort that creates wealth, as if there was no advantage to the wealthy before they invested their money.

The fact that the wealthy man does not overtly take further advantage of the poor man does not mean the situation is just. He can hire him in an "arms length" transaction. The poor man 'earns' a dime while the rich man 'earns' a dollar. But was there any doubt who would end up being the employee and who would be the employer? Did they have anything close to an equal chance to earn according to their actual ability and effort? The spoils of many unjust acts were already in the pocket of the wealthy man before he decided to invest and offer the privilege of a job to the man who began with nothing.

That hoary argument has been refuted so many times I'd think anyone would be embarrassed to advance it.

EVERY wealthy man's fortune began from nothing. Every one of those fortunes began with some individual(s) applying their efforts and talents to raw materials available for the taking by everyone in the vicinity alive at the time, or seizing opportunities available to everyone alive at the time. As one example, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and currently the richest man in the world, was the son of a 19 year-old father and 17 year-old mother still in high school, who took baby Jeff with her to her classes. His father was the grandson of immigrants and the owner of a bike shop; when Jeff was 4 years old his parents divorced and his mother married Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the US as a teen with nothing but his own talents and ambition, who worked his way through college, adopted Jeff and gave him his surname. While in high school himself Jeff worked as a cook at MacDonald's. Jeff Bezos launched Amazon with a $245,000 loan from his parents; the company is now worth $1 trillion.

Of course, not every great fortune was acquired in one generation. More typically they begin with a grandparent who starts with nothing but becomes successful enough to give his children a head start, with a good education and an example to follow. One or more of them then apply their own talents, to the family business or to some interest of their own, and create even more wealth, and in a few cases, enormous fortunes. Bill Gates' father was a successful attorney, who could afford to send his kid to Harvard. But few of the thousands of sons and daughters of successful attorneys become multi-billionaires.

No, not every kid has an equal chance at success --- because their parents did not provide them with that chance. No one else has any obligation to do so, and few will have little interest in doing so. Their interests and responsibilities lie with their own kids.

There is no "caste system" (i.e., legally or culturally defined boxes, each with its own prerogatives and privileges, into which people are assigned at birth and confined for life). There is only the bell curve, which which governs the distribution of virtually all traits in living organisms, including, for humans, talents, strengths, drives, and ambition --- traits that parents tend to pass on to their kids, along with the fruits thereof.

There is nothing morally wrong with that.