In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Five the natural right to private property The right to property is right to an action . . . it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequence of producing or earning that object. —ayn rand, ‘‘man’s rights’’ Arguably the most controversial component in the Lockean tradition of liberalism is the natural right to private property. Our purpose here is not to start applying our theory to particular rights that have been traditionally associated with the Lockean tradition or to particular forms of property rights as they have been defined in the past. Rather, we seek to outline some implications of our theory of individual rights in this most central and controversial area of traditional liberal theorizing. In doing so we wish to express our view that property is indeed central to liberalism and how it might be understood according to the principles of our theory. In the first place, we take the statement in the epigraph to be the essence of the correct approach to thinking about property rights. This statement contrasts nicely with the usual understanding reflected in a statement like ‘‘a property right is, roughly, a right which a person has with respect to a specific thing,’’1 where there is nothing that refers to the essence of a property right as an action. This traditional way of thinking of property rights in terms of things is not completely avoided by those who define property in terms of ownership.2 ‘‘Ownership’’ is less object- or thing-oriented than The material is this chapter is adapted from our argument for the natural right to private property in Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), 115–28. This material has also appeared in slightly different form in our essay ‘‘Aristotelianism, Commerce, and the Political Order,’’ in Aristotle and Modern Politics, ed. Aristide Tessitore (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 278–304. 1. Allan Gibbard, ‘‘Natural Property Rights,’’ Noûs 10 (1976): 77. 2. Lawrence C. Becker, Property Rights: Philosophical Foundations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 18–20 and, especially, 120 n. 11. 98 liberalism and the political order many approaches, but it is still a derivative concept from what must be first said about action, as we shall see more fully in Chapter 9. The relationship people have toward things or objects, whether in terms of possession or ownership, is a function of human action. The central question about property rights, therefore, is how one’s theory fits into what one says in general about rights and human action. Our position is that human beings are material beings, not disembodied ghosts, and that being self-directed is not merely some psychic state. Self-directedness pertains to actions in the world, actions employing or involving material things at some place and at some time.3 For such actions by individuals to be selfdirected , they need to have the use and control of what they have created and produced protected from being used without their consent. Thus, it is not objects per se that individuals need to have property rights to, as if any random distribution were acceptable.4 A human being needs to have property rights to things that are the result of his or her own judgments and productive efforts. A person’s choices and judgments cannot be said to have been respected if the material expression of those judgments is divested from the individual. In our view, then, human action is not composed of a ‘‘mental’’ part accompanied by a physical correlate. Two-substance dualism is false. Rather, the choices, judgments, or intentions of human action are ultimately realized in terms of material and physical realities in space and time. Further, since these actions are undertaken by individuals, and since there are no collective minds, this is an individual affair. The realization that production is a highly individualized affair is perhaps our first indication that Locke was mistaken in his contention that God or nature has given mankind a stock of objects (in common or otherwise ) from which we must devise a set of rules for just distribution (or even, as we shall see, for original ownership). The most nature offers is the potential opportunity for the transformation of the material world. A theory of property rights will, therefore, concern itself with legitimate exploitation of opportunities, not with things...

Share