Private Property and Ethics

It's funny (to me) to recall a time, not long ago, when the very idea of discussing property rights would have put me in a coma. At the time, I held that notions of property rights existed essentially to legitimize keeping wealth in the hands of the wealthy. I have since come to see the value of examining different ideas about property rights. I've come to realize that these ideas exist, not only to keep wealth in the hands of the wealthy, but also to redirect wealth to the well armed and politically connected.

Of course there is, at least, one exception to this rule. It is the idea that sparked my interest in property rights a few years ago. That is the radical notion that the products (or property) generated by an individual's labor should belong to the individual. I classify the notion as radical because all existing (i.e. enforced) systems of property rights in the world today, deny, implicitly or explicitly, the rights of the fruits of work to the worker.

Around the world, access to resources is controlled by monarchs, congresses, generals, people's assemblies, and parliaments rather than by the individuals who live on or develop the resources. Large portions of the products that the worker produces are forcibly expropriated to serve the "public good" by, for example, building prisons and waging wars.

This is not to say that the Lockean idea of property belonging to the creator of property doesn't encounter complications in the details. These complications can typically be worked out without the need to mobilize national armies--the method preferred by alternate theories of property rights.

Property rights eventually (or maybe from it inception) is connected with ethics.

In a conversation I'm having with Danny Shahar, a philosopher who is very generously helping me think through various aspects of ethics, I overgeneralized the term "theft" as always being "wrong" or unethical in contrast to "taking" which doesn't indicate an ethical judgment. Danny rightly pointed out that one must first accept "the moral legitimacy of property rights of some form." In addition, Danny outlines a situation in which theft may be morally ambiguous:

let's say you felt chest pains while walking down the street, and knew (somehow) that you were starting to have a heart attack. You happened to be passing by the open window of a house where some aspirin was sitting on the table, but no one was home. Now, let's say (probably falsely--I don't know) that if you took the aspirin, it would increase your chances of surviving the heart attack significantly. Would it be wrong to steal it? I don't think that the answer is clearly yes, or that by saying no we would be denying any form of property rights. We would just need to say that property rights aren't absolute like that; they don't tell us what we always must do or must refrain from doing.

Here I may require some further instruction from formal philosophy. I believe that almost anyone would choose to take the aspirin. To extend the situation: you've now survived the heart attack and the homeowner (or aspirin owner) approaches you. He says that you "owe" him ten cents for the aspirin. Is his claim justified?

What this teases out, perhaps, is the difference between ethics as a pre/proscriptive tool and ethics as a tool for the determination of just outcomes. It makes little sense to imagine that someone should ignore the biological imperitive to live because of ethical considerations. I'm sure there are some weightier scenarios that we could invent that would increase the ethical dilemma somewhat in favor of repressing the biological imperitive in favor of ethical considerations.

Nevertheless the action can still be considered as a breach of ethics in the sense that we justly owe the aspirin owner compensation for that which was taken from him. Again, we can fog the just nature of the outcome by having the asprin owner demand a million dollars or by having him kill us as we reach in the window for the aspirin.

I would repeat my point, though, that these seem to be issues around the fringe of what we as humans need from an ethical system and issues that can probably be addressed without recourse to extreme measures--making all aspirin state owned, for example.

My (now oft) repeated claim is that academic philosophy tends to justify, or at least let pass, the violence of religions and states. I do not wish to demean attempts to iron out the details of the ethical content of scenarios such as the one above. However, seeking to resolve questions of heart-attack induced aspirin theft seems secondary to questioning the ethical frameworks that justify, for example, incarcerating 2 million people--largely for victimless crimes against the state. Under "normal" circumstances, I would think that the efforts of those most highly educated in the science of ethics would be applied to less ambiguous scenarios.