Robinson Crusoe had property T/F (Property is a social institution? No)

Economics Political Theory
21

As stated before the point is to distinguish the behavioral difference between the objects Crusoe interacts with. I’ll have to continue to agree to disagree with you. I do not think it’s safe or fair to use this as a pleonasm. It will cause confusion in discussion.

As for the rest of your post. I feel that you are making a pedantic attempt at building a counter argument. I don’t understand what advantage you gain by conflating the two terms as one. We loose understanding on Crusoe’s situation, and other situations in doing so.

NOTE: It may be that my own argument is pedantic. I’ve thought of that as well.

But we make several key Austrian principles vague when conflating rights with property. For example, when discussing the benefits of Capital goods it sometimes becomes necessary to exclude rights from the discussion. In doing so making several assumptions, but in order to further the understanding of an economic consequence. Capital is property, you are correct that rights are implied, but the Capital and rights are not the same thing.

Rights has a uni-directional relationship to property, in that rights always involve a specific object of property. It is not always bi-directional though.

22

lol, we’re arguing about labels, of course its pedantic!

OK, so you’re labelling the tools that Crusoe uses property. Would you describe him as the “owner” of the tools? But an owner without ownership rights, because rights makes no sense here. Is that how you see it?

Outside of a Crusoe world, does property always imply rights?

23

where Crusoe lives - on a desert island, where he is the only human individual present, no concept of property rights emerges. in order for such to emerge there needs to be rivalry for scarce goods. it is true that goods on the island are scarce - his body and the standing place that it occupies, he also can not have a net and two pairs of shoes at the same time beacause the material for their production is the same and is not enough for both of the goods to be existant simultaneously and etc. but since there is no one else on the island - there can not originate a conflict for a scarce resource. BUT even though a CONCEPT for property rights might not exist, what is important is what the author of the theme have suggested :

A) as we know property rights are deducted from the human nature (onself is the dominion of his body - i.e. he is in direct control of it, he has individual subjective value scale and is the only one that can directly act in a manner according his values) - self-ownership is evident

B) I am quoting filc “property is just an object, an economic object of interest to man” - that is property is just a title that man has come up to distinguish a scarce resource from non-scarce. that is why filc is somehow confusing because air is of interest to me, but it is not my or anyone’s property.

C) of course Crusoe never refered to his shoes as his property, he just called them shoes.

D) I am writing this so that we can trace how come that when Crusoe is not alone he should be the one who is the ultimate desicion maker of the way a scarce resource(other than his body) is disposed of. we know about self-ownership, and we know about the homesteading principle and that is your answer. since Crusoe owns himself SO he can also own what he has “mixed his labour with”, that is why when Friday appears Crusoe can not legitimately go to him and tell him “you can not be on this island, only I can be on it(unless he has homesteaded the whole of it)”. this is very important because that tells us how exactly property rights over things outside the physical surface of oneself’s body emerge and mean (because of self-ownership and homesteading and mean exclusive control). it also implies that property and rights over property do not come into existance with the emergence of society - property exists as long as scarce resource exists (and this predates any society - it is valid in the case of lone Crusoe), and rights over property are derived through individual action (praxeology - i.e. Crusoe “mixes his labour with scarce goods”), so when an individual is alone he does not call his control over a scarce good a right, this is used only when there is more than one person, BUT the very legitimate claim of control over a scarce good is acquired long before the moment of appearance of second individual.

I think that what is imperative is exactly this - the chronological aspect - i.e. who did what with a certain thing in the past or did not do. What forcefull “conventions” society can establish as legitimate in order to steal someone’s stuff on the premise that what he did when he was alone does not count is non-sense, because it is like society is saying “private property does not exist at all”. that means that if society discards what someone has previously acquired through labour (voluntarily exchange) it actually tries to discard the very notion of self-ownership which as we know can not be logically discarded.

If society says that no private property at all exists, and does not want to use reason, but rather violance, this does not mean that property rights actually don’t exist, this just means that society is stupid and aggressive, disregards human nature and causes conflict instead of keeping the peace.

24

i hope that two consequent posts are not counted as spam

i think that what I suggest in my first post is what Rothard have written here : http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/six.asp

25

Hmm I’m not sure how to further clarify my position.

There are times when we are analyzing property, when details of it’s owner is irrelevant. It’snot objectively obvious that the property is owned by a specific person, or that it is even owned at all(Could be up for grabs). Not all tools have their owners label on them, and some are discarded making them available to others. There is no magical phenomena which distinguish’s the ownership of one object of property from another. That is the task of rights, and the social framework that man builds to support it.

Let me put it this way.

When discussing a specific right, the property associated with it is typically obvious. Freedom of Speech for example is a right where the associated property is obviously implied. When discussing a specific property however, the associated right is not always obvious, those rights may change depending on what is demanded by individuals in society.

This statement simply points at a whole in my analogy, but does not refute my point. Air, at least to me, is not an object of Human Action. Only objects which stem from a praxeological root can be considered as property. Obviously that changes based on conditions and scenario, if I lived in space oxygen may very well be something of great importance to me.

I am merely making a point that Crusoe had property, not necessarily property rights.

26

that is why I suppose you should not use the word “interest” because both scarce and non-scarce goods can be of interest to me. and if you nevertheless use it , depending on the circumstances, for examples air, can be scarce or non-scarce and in both scenarios of interest to me. if I am underwater it is scarce and I am very much interested in every breath I could get, and when I am on ground air is non-scarce, but I am still interested in it, since I need it to continue my living. that is why when you distinguish between goods as scarce and non-scarce there is no need for such a follow-up explanation.

regarding “I am merely making a point that Crusoe had property”

that is what I also meant in my previous post. he had property, since property simply means an economic good in the Mengeiran sense.

regarding property rights - such a concept did not exist, BUT this does not mean that he does not have a legitimate claim of control over this property, the concept itself does not exist yet while he is alone but he homesteading the scarce resourse is the act that grants ONLY him the ONLY rightfull argument for the defense of him continuing to be in control over it after another human individual is introduced. SO the important thing is that this LEGITIMATE CLAIM is acquired according to the natural rights and praxeology. exactly the fact that he existed first, i.e. predated everyone else, so he had time before the newcomers to appear to homestead what previously was just a “thing”, this is not a privilege or bad luck for the new ones that has got to be corrected through theft.

27

yes I see your point about interest. I’d have to revise my statement. The clearest way I can say this is that property only deals with praxeologicaly relevant objects.

Good point.

28

Very well put.

Here you have injected your libertarian ethical values into your very definition of property rights. You are saying object X (a body) ought to belong to A (on the basis that A is in direct control of body X) rather than B (who does not have direct control of body X). This is a libertarian idea.

I think it is important to have a definition of property rights that is “value-free”, because the concept of “people owning stuff” is the point of all political philosophy. Different political philosophies say different people ought to own stuff. Libertarians are defined by their principles for deciding who should own what: namely, homesteading and voluntary exchanges. Non-libertarians have different principles for deciding who should own what.

We must not have our libertarian values/principles imbued in our definitions, because that leads to equivocation errors and does not facilitate clear discussion amongst ourselves or with non-libertarians.

Here again it is clear when you say property rights, you mean the libertarian conception of property rights.

What does the word private mean here? Is there a difference between private property rights, and property rights?

29

Trilub, thank you for the reply.

First of all I need to make a very important note, and that is the following: what people are doing when discussing whether there do exist or don’t property rights, or more generally when they discuss who should do what or not do it, they are making fundamental propositions about the way two or more people interact without causing conflict. That is people engaging in such a discussion suggest universally preferable behavior which goal is the avoidance of conflicts and - if howsoever they occur - a way for their arbitrage(this is very important because if Christians really do adopt God’s moral and they try to trial a woman for cheating her husband, the woman - if not Christian- would never agree with their willingness to put her in jail because she is not Christian(i.e. does not believe) and there is no way that the Christians can articulate to her why what she did is wrong, they can just say “God says so”).

Such a debate exists for the following reasons:

A) human individuals can not not act

B) there is more than one human individual

C) resources are scarce

Exactly because of these three reasons humans even bother to engage in talks about what they should do, i.e. how should they behave. These three reasons are known as the fundamental problems that constitute the so called “human condition”. This condition exists as long as individuals act(I don’t think that every individual will begin not to act simultaneously with every other individual) , as resources are scarce (I don’t think that any time soon someone will invent a machine that will start popping out things on our desire), as there are at least two individuals(I don’t think that someone will manage to kill all others and leave him the only human on Earth). So the main task with which humans are confronted (we accept that there are humans that actually do want to minimize conflicts) is to come up with some kind of a system that helps them avoid conflicts. There exist many different propositions for what the proper human behavior should be. These conflicting values all suggest a preferable human behavior, that is they suggest rules. The thing is that in order for a rule to be just it must be universal. The only universal system is the Libertarian ethics, since it is not relativistic, since it is logically coherent, since it does not deny human nature.

Do you mean with this that libertarian ethics are subjective? If you imply this it is like saying that logic is subjective (which would mean that it does not exist).

Political philosophy does not tell us who should own what. It tells us what should be the violence in society.

No proposition for what ought to be is value-free. Libertarian ethics is not value-free, no ethics is value-free.

No, there is not difference. I use them interchangeably.

30

If an animal (let’s say a wolf) kills another animal, I would say that that the kill is its property. As wolves are pack animals they share their kill with the pack, but I assume they would not share their kill with unfamiliar wolves.

Does this mean that the familiar wolves have property rights, and the unfamilar ones do not?

Or are rights just nonsense in the context of property outside the arena of human society?..

31

I do not see how this fits the theme. But, don’t you think that first of all if animals could have any conception of property or rights they would need a common way of communication. I don’t believe that a squirrel and a lion can discuss whether it is legitimate for the lion to eat the squirrel or not. And the more grave problem is that animals can not think. So how are they supposed to even imagine that what they are doing is wrong or not?

32

Animals cannot think? That’s news to me. I was under the impression that we both simply act on intuition but the difference is that we humans attempt to justify our decisions after the fact using reason, whereas they don’t bother with that pointless exercise.

Anyway, that’s besides the point. The point is that ‘property rights’ are an idea, a ‘fixed idea’, or a ‘spook’ as Stirner would call it. Property is a ‘willed relation’, and animals are just as capable of creating willed relations to objects as humans are. Language is not necessary for property to exist.

33

I know that language is not necessary for property to exist. that is because property does not exists at all. as you have pointed out both property and property rights are only concepts, they do not have a physical manifestation in the real world. it is just what individuals (rather some of them) have decided to call certain things that do exist (property is everything that fits what Menger calls an economic good with the correction of Mises to the second prerequisite) and some abstractions, because it would be a time consuming for every individual every time when his property is conflicted or about to be to start explaining the whole natural rights doctrine. it would also be time consuming for those of us who write about it.

I do not know what a “willed relation” means. But it is irrelevant. Animals having some kind of a sentiment with a certain thing neither makes that thing property in the very definition of property, neither implies that there actually exist or could exists property rights in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, if we assume that there could exist property rights this means that there must be a common understanding of what property rights is and why should animals live their live according to this doctrine or not. Otherwise if the lions knew about it, but they could not articulate it to the elephants this concept will eventually be lived by only by the lions. Which of course, we have assumed that can reason what is preferable behavior, i.e. what they should do and from what they should abstain.

34

This is how I see it.

Property does exist, it came into existence at the first moment an intelligent being had the concept “mine” as opposed to “yours”. It does not require a human level of intelligence to come to this concept, as is more than evident in the animal world.

Property is a liberty not a right, in the same way that breathing is a liberty. It exists until someone infringes on your liberty. For property on a desert island to be a right someone would have to have an obligation to provide you with property, which is plainly nonsense. If you are going to say there are property rights you might as well say that you have a ‘right to breathe’.

By the way I would distinguish that from the correct use of property rights which is the purely legal sense of mortgage or rent agreements, in which the holder of the right to the property is given that right by the obligor.

35

Property is deeply embedded in our language. Which is a social institution.

36

I agree that language is a social institution, I’m not going to argue with Wittgenstein on that point. But in what sense is property deeply embedded in our language? I’m not sure that sentence actually says anything of any significance.

I have two cats. They have separate bowls to eat from. They have an awareness of which bowl in theirs, this is shown by the fact that they wait by it. Occasionally when one of the two is particularly hungry they go to the others bowl and try to eat from it. If the cat who has been infringed upon notices this they defend their food. In this instance it is very clear that they are aware of what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘yours’, and they are aggrieved by having their property agressed upon.

The fact that Rothbard asserts that humans have property rights and that animals do not (of course he also says animals have no rights of any kind) is purely arbritary and comes about as a result of the fact that he erroneously believes that language is necessary for property to exist.

37

I would suggest you to read Rothbard and Hoppe. And also what I have written previously in this thread.

liberty means free from coercion. coercion is absent when property rights are not violated. the only rights that exist are property rights. there is no such thing as a right to breathe. you breathe because you have right to your body, it is your property(i.e. self-ownership). property symbolises real things in the real world. these things are scarce goods. they don’t magically disappear from the reality if someone steals them from me. they just change hands.

the lion eating the gazette as opposed to the gazette not being eaten and the gazette eaten by another animal does not give the lion who actually ate it property rights. as I told you no concepts exist in the animal kingdom. he defending his prey from other predators is I believe what you call “concept of mine”, the problem is that the mere act of killing another animal and defending its dead body from other animals to eat it does not mean that the lion has come up with a concept, that he has thoroughly thought that he is the proper owner of the gazette’s body and this is the proper thing to do, otherwise he would haven’t done it. the lion killing the gazette is merely an act. it neither affirms, neither violates property rights, simply because such does not exist, and this act is not a proof for their existence.

38

“If the cat who has been infringed upon notices this they defend their food.”

well you have said it by yourself. that is the fundamental role of ethics. to suggest a preferable behavior that if adopted avoids all conflicts. which would mean that there would not be such situations between your two cats fighting the moment when one of them is running out of food (i mean when this example is applied to humans). your cats fight exactly because

a) they can not reason what should they do and what they should not

b) if nevertheless they could do that, they can not communicate to each other to explain what they have come up with in their heads

that is why when there is some kind of uneasiness in their state they immediately fight, rather to collectively decide what to do, which implies a discussion, or rather to the cat without food to abstain from attacking, because she thinks that it is morally wrong to attack her cat-fellow(even though for example it can beat the other cat without a problem).

39

I’ve read everything Rothbard has ever written apart from his historical books, similar with Hoppe. The difference is that I now realise that the Rothbardian definitions of liberty and rights are specifically tailored to suit his ‘natural rights’ ethic. Or in other words, instead of thinking honestly how these words should be defined from first principles. he worked backwards and establish his ethic, THEN defined his terms to suit his ethic.

As we seem to have quite different definitions of the words we are talking about we are only going to be talking at cross-purposes, and I suppose I am unlikely to persuade you to rethink your definitions. If you read this essay I think you might come out the other end with a slightly changed world-view:

http://www.dejasay.org/bib_journals_detail.asp?id=55

40

Cats have ethics too, and are able to communicate both with other cats and with humans, it’s just that they are so radically different from us that we have trouble comprehending it. Or rather the poverty of our human language results in the our word ‘ethics’ being’ incapable of adequately describing a cat’s ‘ethics’.

Most animals have customs, social structures, learned behaviours, adaptations to change, communication, and many other dyanmics that can quite easily be said to be features of ethics, as far as ethics is about determining courses of action.

An ethic of cooperation may be desirable in humans but it would be supremely arrogant of us to imagine that it would be ‘better’ for cats if they would just stop fighting and cooperate like us ‘superior humans’.