Property - Trouble in Paradise

Political Philosophy
82

Well, God may think so, but neighborhood associations sure don’t.

Not to mention the county. If you buy 10 acres and want to divide it or build a nightclub on it, you need to study the particular county’s property rights’ opinion on such things before making decisions. Each one of them has a little God in the planning office, and if you talk back to that God, he will eventually call the guy with the gun.

And don’t get me started on subsurface minerals. There are even surface mineral rights. You might buy some land, and a year later some guy sends in a mining crew to haul away your iron ore (aka: dirt). Your title attorney forgot to mention that a hundred years ago, your seller’s granddaddy sold the surface mineral rights.

I think it’s pretty hard to argue that property rights are permanent and exclusive… is what I’m trying to say here.

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83

So far as I know, you have to find a prophet. He will tell you the universe’s opinion on the matter.

84

OK, but I find that I can only answer the rightness of Rights questions within the context of morality (as Locke himself did), so I should just answer for myself then.

Here’s how I see it. I don’t agree that property ownership or any other Right is justified by Natural Law, and therefore somehow inherently real/genuine and inalienable, or can only be contravened by invoking some other aspect of Natural Law (like equality). I reject Locke’s framing, for reasons I’ve given.

To answer the question for myself I apply my own framing, which grounds the justification for Rights within a moral framework which overall tends towards trying to promote well-being. And I see that as the appropriate role for Government in a social contract with its citizens. In that framing, laws and rights are contingent on this underlying aim.

So I view Rights as a constructed tool for ensuring citizens have the basic necessities to afford the opportunity to flourish. And a baseline protection against Might is Right, including the tyranny of the majority which might form a consensus against minorities.

In your scenario invoking the Right to Own Property, while in many circs useful, acts against the wellbeing of the newcomers in a way which deprives them of the overall goal of being able to flourish. So the Right being asserted here wouldn’t be doing the job it’s supposed to, and ought not hold.

While Locke invokes Fairness or Equality, as justifying consideration of the competing interests at stake, I’d say these are also aspects of wellbeing, which is the ultimate test for me. And the state of having interests in what happens to you (your well-being) is as close as we can get to self-justifying Oughts, and subsequent Rights. There’s no need to rely on God or Nature imbuing us with Rights, it’s simply that what happens to us matters to us, we have a genuine stake in outcomes.

TLDR -

The existing farmer family will have some fewer resources if they share, but the new family will suffer harshly if not. And that’s wrong.

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85

Well, the original settlers might be saints, while the new ones are a family of pirates who murdered the inhabitants of three prior islands.

Which is why I have trouble discussing Big Words. It always comes down to the situation on the ground.

86

I’ve read Locke. The fact Locke said something doesn’t make that hte case. “rights” are generally understood to be legal entitlements. The idea of “natural rights” is incoherent as the concept of a right does not exist in nature (this defined as simply non-human organisational situations - feel free to offer another and I could perhaps adjust a response to fit your terms).
It would be incumbent on the one claiming some underlying conceptual reality of “rights” besides what humans actually do with the concept, to provide the explanation and proof for it’s veracity.

So far, across many years and perhaps upwards of 200 conversations about rights, this has never been borne out.

So I’m left with what humans actually do with rights: Communally offer each other legally enforceable shared rewards for upholding the communally required responsibilities/obligations.

More than happy to hear your version of the answers required to support the concept that rights are somehow outside of what humans do with them.

Appreciate it.
Sometimes, this rubs people the wrong way so I’m glad this was simply read as direct.

87

I will.

Who else?

If you would choose someone else to make that decision for you, you have thereby made the decision abut who decided for yourself.

You don’t get a choice but to decide for yourself.

But thinks will work out much simpler if you decide to agree with others about most things.

88

Could be. Which is partly why I think Rights need to be grounded in some moral framework.

If the moral framework is based in trying to promote well-being, then obviously murder is going to be forbidden in nearly every case, so the situation is covered.

Having a grounding like wellbeing also allows you to look at the consequences of laws and rights in action, and to re-think them if they aren’t working how you intended (It’s a pragmatic Consequentialist position). Rather than treating Rights as ‘objective’ in some way and inalienable. They become part of a toolset which can be adapted as required, and in reality people often have competing interests and any system has to allow for that. So I see them as a baseline protection, which aim to secure the basics for flourishing. Like not being killed.

89

Would you provide a different answer if I asked you these questions elsewhere?

Even this sentence is not well written.
The topic title of this thread is Property - Trouble in Paradise.

Within this thread, you made the claim - "A single prophet can even know everything".

Why do you not just answer this question openly and honestly here? If you will not, does this mean you can just make any sort of claims in threads that have absolutely nothing at all to do with the thread title, and when asked to provide support for ‘your claim’ you can just dismiss this entirely because - “This thread is about something else”.

Now, as ‘we’ can clearly see here ‘we’ have another prime example of these people all sorts of claims, which clearly look impossible to back up and support and when challenged to, they find all sorts of different excuses for them not just doing so.

90

There NEVER has been any so-called “right to property”. Unless, of course, someone believes that when some human beings formulate some words on pieces of paper then give some people what are called “absolute rights” to what is ‘now’ called “property”, then there is “absolute right to property”.
However, if anyone else but the people who formulated “this system”, which provides them and a few associates, “these rights” believes that “this” is some sort of ‘fair and just system’, then I would be very surprised.

It could be said and argued at all times throughout human history hitherto, when this is being written, many people have thought other things that are completely False and Wrong as well.

Any so-called “property rights” are just human-made conventions and laws, usually argued for by those who made them or were given those “rights to property”.

91

In thought. If ‘it’ can be agreed with and accepted by everyone, then ‘it’ is universal. If ‘it’ cannot be, then ‘it’ is just a thought (view, value, opinion, assumption, belief, preconception, perspective, et cetera), from one’s own past experience only.

For example, a ‘right’ not to be abused is something that absolutely everyone could agree with and accept. So ‘this’ is a ‘universal right’ that is absolute. Whereas, a ‘right’ for some people to have full and absolute control over some parcels of land is not something everyone could agree with and accept at all. This ‘view’ (thought et cetera) has just come from one’s own personal past experiences only, and so is not ‘one universal right’ at all.

So, once more, if ‘a thought’ can be agreed with and accepted by everyone else, then ‘that thought’ is the ‘one universal right one’.

92

Excellent, I have read your comments

93

Yeah, the lion does not seem to respect the wildebeest’s right to life, so far as I can see.

We humans haven’t respected it much ourselves, but we’re beginning to extend some rights to them now.

It sure looks like rights are things which humans concoct.

94

Just so ‘we’ are clear here, God does NOT think that ‘property rights’ are permanent and exclusive to some individual. What God does KNOW is that ‘property rights’ are permanent and exclusive for every one as (an individual) One.

For example, at ‘the moment’, human beings live on earth. Earth is the “permanent” and exclusive ‘property right’ of every human being (as well as every other animal and species, obviously). NO one individual species NOR thing has any so-called “property right” to any particular parcel of earth.

95

Sure. I don’t see how they’d work otherwise. We extend consideration to the other beings in our sphere. That’s moral thought.

Yeah. The problem comes when a powerful person adopts the framework of “what’s good for me and mine” as the primary rule in his moral system.

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96

So, you did not want to back up and support ‘your claim’ previously, because this is not the ‘right thread’ to do it in, yet you want to keep making these same claims in this same thread.

97

Well, I guess that settles that then.

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98

The Natural Lore is everything that exists has a ‘Right’ to exist and to not be abused.

“locke’s” framing cannot be logically reasoned. Full stop.

Does ‘this framework’ lay within Natural Law or outside of It?

But governments do work within a moral framework.

This, again, is just human-made law. Which obviously do not necessarily have anything at all to do with what is universally Right.

If you see ‘Rights’, themselves, as just what is made up by human beings, then okay.

99

For a human being to even begin to imagine that a wildebeest could even begin to think in terms of ‘respect’ and ‘right to life’ just show to what lengths human beings will ‘try to’ avoid ‘looking at’ and ‘seeing’ things from a True and Right perspective.

ONLY human beings think in terms of ‘morality’ and ‘rights’. No other species does, obviously.

Look, EVERY species does what they do to exist. So, if a species has evolved in creation needing to eat meat to survive, then eating meat is NECESSARY, and IS Nature Itself staying ‘in balance’.

Attempting to use what one species NEEDS to do to keep existing as some form of ‘for’ or ‘against’ one’s own personal ‘morality view’ is beyond ridiculousness.

100

There is NO such thing as any so-called “powerful person”, just like there is NO such a thing as a “good nor bad person”.

If a person ‘appears’ to be “powerful” or ‘appears’ to have “power” over others, then this is solely because others are giving that individual human being “power”.

101

Than you. After all, it has always been an obvious Truth that no one could refute anyway.