Phred wrote:The concept of self-ownership pre-dates the development of capitalist philosophy and is not dependent on it.
This assertion would be more persuasive with some factual support. Reliable sources, please.
Since these rights existed before the idea that we own our bodies, it would be logically impossible for these earlier rights to be based on the idea that we own our bodies.
Assumes facts not in evidence - that the concept of self-ownership is a recent philosophical development.
Assumes facts not in evidence: that the concept of self-ownership is not a recent philosophical development. In fact, there's no clear statement of the idea before Locke's Second Treatise on Government, and it waited another century, until the American anarcho-capitalist Josiah Warren, to be stated definitively.
Just because a stone axe can be seen as a durable capital good does not mean that prehistoric people had complicated philosophical notions that somehow exactly match capitalism.
I never said they did. I merely point out that durable capital goods existed long before the invention of agriculture. Or of writing. Or perhaps even of speech. Humanoids were fashioning tools almost from the beginning.
And their ancestors were living on land and using it without owning it or anything else for millions of years before that.
What is the basis of "culturally derived ideas of private property"?
All valid property rights are based on the producer's right to the fruits of his labor, which is based on the non-deprivation principle: each individual has a right to that which he would have if others did not take it from him. As the product of labor would not exist but for the producer, no one else has a right to it. As the producer would have it if no one else took it from him (it naturally comes into existence in his possession), he does have a right to it.
What would lead a culture to come up with the concept?
The concept of rights, including property rights in the fruits of one's labor, is deeper than culture. It is probably genetic. All normal humans have a capacity for moral reasoning which other animals lack. Even infants too young to talk show aversion to injustice and abrogations of rights.
What observations and rational thought processes did they follow to determine that I cannot legitimately walk into your bedroom?
The most scientifically credible explanations of human behavior come from evolutionary psychology – i.e., analysis based on differential reproductive success. In the case of property rights, people in a given society gain a reproductive advantage when the producer has property in the fruits of his labor, because that provides each individual in that society with an accurate incentive to produce. More production makes the whole society wealthier and thus better able to compete than other societies where the producer's right is not recognized.
In particular, increased production yields a military advantage through larger population (more warriors in the field) and increased quality and quantity of arms to equip them. In the millions of years of inter-societal competition and combat that produced the human species, the military advantage conferred by producers having property in the fruits of their labor has made it virtually universal, and has probably even affected the human genome, genetically predisposing us to respect property in the fruits of labor – i.e., giving us a property right instinct.
Truth To Power wrote:Proto-humans without stone tools predate proto-humans with them.
Well, duh! What's your point?
Before the stone tools show up, there is no reason to have a concept of property, in one's own body or anything else, which is why animals lack a notion of property despite having the bodies you claim are the original locus of property rights. All they have is brute animal possession. I.e., if an animal possesses a territory, or some food it has obtained, it must defend that possession itself, by force, and if its possession thereof is overturned by force, no other animal will attempt to restore its possession, or show even the slightest regret that a fellow animal has lost what it possessed.
By contrast, in every known human society, where A has a recognized property right in X, and B overturns A's possession of X by force or fraud, abrogating the property right, C, D, etc. will
not view the change of possession with equanimity, and will often intervene (either individually or through a social authority) to restore A to “rightful” possession of X. The advent of durable capital goods in the form of stone tools therefore provides human beings with the first reason to have property rights. You will note that property in other human beings -- chattel slavery -- long antedates property in land, proving that the notion of "property in one's own body" as the basis of property rights is incorrect.
We actually have some knowledge about what early human societies were like, because some have survived to experience contact with modern civilization. When first encountered by European explorers, the natives of Flinders Island, for example, had no Neolithic technology, and had even lost the use of fire. Their notions of property were primitive, and definitely included products of labor but NOT LAND.
But they had property and recognized it as such, they just hadn't progressed to the point where they had invented agriculture.
I.e., they had property rights that weren't based on any purported "homesteading principle."
Your ramblings about prehistorical humans are beside the point.
No, they identify the relevant fact: that property right concepts cannot possibly be based on any so-called “homesteading principle,” because property in products of labor long antedates the first instances of property in land, which is itself a much later innovation than property in other people's bodies (chattel slavery).
Of course humans aren't going to regard land as property prior to the invention of agriculture.
Why not? Many animals are territorial,and so are human societies. People had private property in the products of their labor for at least many thousands of years before anyone thought of agriculture, and were well aware of the concept of communal territories, why didn't they extend the concept of private property to land?
That doesn't mean land can never properly be considered property under any circumstance.
Land can never rightly be property for a quite independent reason: property in land is not consistent with people having a right to liberty.
We have many records from pre-agricultural societies that encountered literate societies.
If true it's beside the point, but give us three examples, backed by reliable sources.
?? You want "reliable sources" for the fact that advanced, literate European civilization encountered hundreds of pre-literate, pre-agricultural societies?? What next, three reliable sources for the fact that land existed before people?
Anthropologists have found no case of property in land arising in a hunter-gatherer or nomadic herding culture.
Well, duh!
So the claim that property rights are based on "homesteading" rather than the producer's right to the fruits of his labor are false as a matter of scientific fact.
I fail to understand your continuing deliberate obtuseness on this point.
Ahem. I am the one person here who is honestly identifying the relevant facts of objective physical reality and their inescapable logical implications, and I will thank you to remember it.
Clearing, draining, fencing and tilling a piece of land is clearly labor.
But it merely
adds fixed improvements to a resource that was already there, and which they have not removed from where nature put it. They are explicitly claiming ownership of something they did NOT produce.
How can you argue the person (or group of people) performing that labor does not then have the right to that piece of land, the fruits of his labor?
Because it is indisputably NOT the fruit of their labor. The land – the location on the earth's surface, together with the soil, rock, etc. under it and the space above it – that they claim to own existed before they did, with no help from them or anyone else, and it is therefore logically impossible that it could be the fruit of their labor. They may have added
fixed improvements to it – the fence, the furrows and planted crops in the field, the drier soil, etc. -- but those improvements are merely attached to the land; they are not themselves the land the laborer is claiming as his property.
No, because that is a privately owned facility produced by labor.
Which is located on a piece of land, which you insist cannot be legitimately owned. But if you want to (contradictorily) make an exception for those spaces located on land that have permanent roofs over them, change "bedroom" to tipi or yurt or tent and answer the question.
There is of course no contradiction in what I have said, and this exchange will be a lot less humiliating for you if you can manage to remember that.
The type of structure makes no difference. The right is to property in the structure, the product of the builder's labor, not to the location where he performed that labor or to which he attached its fruit.
Anyway, this confusion of yours is easily resolved: do you agree that a boat is the property of its builder, but the sea it floats on is not? Are you aware that many people – like people in Hong Kong, where all land is publicly owned and has been for over 160 years -- build and own structures on land they do not own, and find nothing impossible in the arrangement? Did you know that even iconic buildings like the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building have been built on leased land?
Buildings are privately owned because they are products of labor.
But your building isn't floating half a mile up in the air, it is located on land you don't legitimately own. Can't legitimately own, according to your hypothesis.
It is not a hypothesis. It is fact. You know that a ship is located on sea the ship's owner can't legitimately own. So what? No one imagines that owning a ship confers a right to own the sea it floats on. The only difference between owning a ship on the sea and owning a house (or fence, or tilled fields, etc.) on land is that the house, etc. can't be moved. But the fixed improvements to the land don't make the "improved" land itself a product of labor any more than the ship makes the "navigated" sea a product of labor.
Your building prevents anyone else from using that land for purposes of their own. You are thereby violating their rights.
BINGO!!! And as that violation is necessary to the function of economically advanced societies, it must rightly be compensated, in both directions. I.e., the land user who profits by it must rightly compensate the community of those whom he deprives of the land, and those who are thus deprived must rightly be compensated for the deprivation. It is no accident that properly understood, simple justice in possession and use of land also solves the problems of poverty, unemployment, fair and efficient taxation, perverse incentives, pollution, the boom-bust cycle, etc.
- By QatzelOk