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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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My own view is that of the much more cynical Rand and early Marx: property is what you can defend by force.

That is certainly a pragmatic definition. (I would amend it that getting others -- e.g. a state -- to defend your property on your behalf should also qualify.)

See, for example, Wikipedia on territorial waters:

From the eighteenth century until the mid twentieth century, the territorial waters of the British Empire, the United States, France and many other nations were three nautical miles (5.6 km) wide. Originally, this was the distance of a cannon shot, hence the portion of an ocean that a sovereign state could defend from shore.

The island of the Whisky War would not be considered property because none of the belligerents was willing to station a defensive force on it. And you can put all the flags you want on the Moon, or sell its surface by the square meter, but unless someone breaks the Outer Space Treaty by placing a gun there to defend their claimed property, none of that will matter.

The problem with that definition (which I will call ownership-A) is that it clashes with how the term "ownership" is used in societies where laws regulate such thinks, and where that term generally carries prescriptivist connotations (think "the rightful owner", I will call that ownership-B). The ownership-B relationship is of course contingent on a particular society and even individual.

Examples:

  • A person who is keeping a sex slave owns-A their body, but of course nobody can own-B the body of another person in any non-terrible polity.
  • Russia owns-A Crimea, but it will be a long time (at best) before most Ukrainians agree that it owns-B it.
  • If someone steals a car and gets away with the theft, at the moment of the theft that car was un-owned-A, but certainly owned-B.

it clashes with how the term "ownership" is used in societies where laws regulate such thinks, and where that term generally carries prescriptivist connotations

This is true, but it's also just saying that moralism exists.

I don't think Hume's view on the matter is sound because I care about the territory, not the map.

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