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PROPERTY IN THE MORAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Christopher Bertram
Christopher Bertram*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Bristol
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Abstract

Liberal egalitarian political philosophers have often argued that private property is a legal convention dependent on the state and that complaints about taxation from entitlement theorists are therefore based on a conceptual mistake. But our capacity to grasp and use property concepts seems too embedded in human nature for this to be correct. This essay argues that many standard arguments that property is constitutively a legal convention fail, but that the opposition between conventionalists and natural rights theorists is outmoded. In doing this, the essay draws on recent literature in evolutionary biology and psychology. Even though modern property in a complex society involves legal conventions, those conventions should be sensitive to our natural dispositions concerning ownership.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2 , January 2013 , pp. 404 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2013 

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References

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2 Such as, most famously, Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar.

3 A view most strongly expressed recently in Murphy, Liam and Nagel, Thomas, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Here, I take Snare, “The Concept of Property,” as a guide.

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15 Remarkably, Murphy and Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, 74–75 rely on the conventional nature of language as a parallel with property to bolster their case for the dependence of property on positive law, seemingly not noticing that language has its natural side too.

16 This latter view derives from Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication. Tomasello is skeptical about Chomskyan universal grammar.

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41 It might be thought (for example) that this is exactly what documents such as the Berne Convention do, when they recognize the moral rights of authors.