I’ve compiled and edited several of my blog posts into a “Mini-Manifesto of Liberty”. In it, I write the following:
I feel assault, plunder, and enslavement are wrong. Implicit in this feeling is a belief in property rights. I don’t derive this feeling from some philosophical doctrine. It’s just part of me. It arises from my heart, not my reason. I believe most of humanity feels the way I do. I believe most of humanity, in spite of widespread evidence to the contrary in today’s society (which I will deal with below), deep down has an intrinsic respect for property rights. Academics often talk about the importance of the tradition of property as a factor in “how the West got rich”. But I believe property is more than just a tradition; it’s an instinct.
There is a burgeoning school of thought in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences (led by Marc Hauser and Steven Pinker) which contends that morality is not just cultural artifice, but that it is an intrinsic feature of the human mind which evolved over the countless millennia of humans living together. There are some needs which are common to all man. There is an overwhelming general need in the human species for self-restraint and fellow-feeling if it is to flourish. It only makes sense that this overwhelming general need would mean that familial groups who tend to have certain highly-functional moral feelings would end up prospering and propagating their genes, while familial groups made up of individuals who were constantly killing and plundering each other would have died out.
Economic science teaches us that the most highly-functional moral feelings are those concerning ownership (both of one’s bodily self and of external objects). I believe it is no coincidence that we find in experience and in history that these same moral feelings concerning property are, of all moral feelings, the most timeless and universal.
I believe that this is why when we take up some unused thing and begin to use it, we automatically think of it as our “ours”. We take reflexive affront when our person or our property is aggressed against by others. We feel involuntary outrage when we see the person or property of others aggressed against. And we spontaneously feel guilt when, or at least after, we aggress against the person or property of others. Of course there are exceptions (as with those suffering from neurological disorders), but these facts are true for the overwhelming preponderance of humanity.
We don’t need to be taught to feel revulsion toward murder, plunder, and enslavement; it has been stamped on our hearts by nature. And implicit in our natural revulsion toward murder, plunder, and enslavement are property rights: imperatives from one’s own conscience that says, “this is mine, that is thine”. I would go so far as to say that anyone who says they don’t feel such proddings of the conscience are either impaired or lying. And the fact that a great many people every day override that revulsion and go ahead and murder, plunder, and enslave anyway is owing to two causes. First of all, frailty is just as much a part of human nature as morality is. Moral urges are one kind of urge among many, and sometimes they lose the tug of war over human action. The second cause is that institution that fosters and feeds upon human frailty: the state.