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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
This is ass-backwards.
The definition your chatbot put out may serve your position, but it's clearly not standard and obviously not how ownership normally works. Which is this: Ownership is the right to not be deprived. I.e., the opposite of what you posit.
Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?
You can argue that any of those statements are true, or come up with some other semantic acrobatics, but in the end it's transparently extremely motivated reasoning.
I normally advise any would-be revolutionary to first understand why the world works the way it does before they waste everyone's time by implementing some half-cocked utopia that's made of fairy dust and ignorance. But posts like this are the opposite of understanding. It's wilful nonsense.
There can be arguments for alternate economic systems, but positing a useless definition of ownership isn't making any of them.
I like people who try flipping tables. Sometimes it has remarkable results. However, your chronology is backwards. At the point where ownership is established, there is no opportunity for anyone to deprive the owner -- at least for the short time during which no one is yet aware they own the article. Ownership establishes the right of global deprivation of every other human being on the planet of the owned article. That's its genesis. That must be in place before deprivation of the article from the owner even becomes a rational question.
Here's a point on which you're confused. Ownership is not the act of depriving. It's the legal right to deprive at will anyone, at any time or place. Again, the right precedes and justifies whatever action the owner wants to take. So, in answer to all those questions, for every single one, you have the right to deprive anyone you choose from access, use, "enjoyment of", benefit from the article, even if it would be judged immoral and causes great harm. No, having the right is not the same as exercising it, nor is there any requirement on an owner to exercise their right of deprivation. The owner can give the article away, share it, rent it, loan it, etc. So, those questions are actually irrelevant to question of whether the right of principled deprivation constitutes ownership.
LMAO! Don't confuse your lack of clear thinking as lack of real experience in the real world on my part, especially since you don't know diddly about me.
You can only deprive someone of something if it was in some sense theirs to use in the first place. You're operating under this unstated assumption--that everyone naturally has rights to everything, and ownership actively deprives others of those rights.
The exact opposite is more accurate. Only the owner has the right to their stuff in the first place.
Let's take another example. I own my body. I have the right to do lots of things with it. Barring exceptional circumstances, nobody has the right to do anything to my body. Does this ownership mean I'm actively depriving others of their rights to do what they will with my body? No, that's absurd. They simply didn't have those rights to begin with.
Yes, I have the right to engage in self-defense when someone threatens my rights, but that doesn't mean I'm depriving them of their rights to my body--because those rights don't exist. The right to bodily autonomy, and the right to defend the right to bodily autonomy, are two separate things, and you're getting them mixed up. Just because ownership entails the right to defend your property doesn't mean that that is all that ownership is. In fact I'd argue that that "right to defense" is fundamental to all legal rights. If you can't enforce a legal right, it's not a legal right in the first place.
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Ownership is the right to deprive another of his own property. For example your mother in law has the right to beat you with her cane for pilfering from her garden. She probably won't, but it wouldn't be unjust. A primitive in New Guinea has the right to shoot you with a bow and arrow for trying to eat his pig- again, he probably won't(mostly because you are unlikely to try to eat his pig) but it would be just if he did.
What a backwards definition.
Given a garden, the right to pilfer isn't automatically granted to everyone. When I buy a garden, you're trying to apply extremely circuitous logic to say that I'm "buying the right to deprive others the right to pilfer this garden." No, I'm just buying the right to pilfer it myself. Nobody else had that right in the first place.
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Sure, but that doesn't a priori mean it's a bad idea. A lot of the most useful things in rationalism involve taking a normal word, and making a better, non-standard definition that fits better to a coherent concept (e.g. "belief" is just a predictive model of the world)
Yes, to all of the above. Not just if we assume OP's worldview, but just in the normal sense of the word - all of these are examples of OP (and me) being deprived of something.
But, under the way the world currently works, these are all things that the respective parties are allowed to deprive OP of.
I think OP is wrong in wanting to change the system, and also in describing the right to deprive others as the "essential" part of the concept of ownership. But he is right that ownership of X is fully encapsulated by the notion of "having the right to not let others use X".
I just think this falls under the general pattern where people attempt to pathologise normal, functional things by "deconstructing" them and describing them in bizarre, but technically accurate ways ("marriage is a way for a man to control a woman's body", "capitalism is a system where billionaires spend millions on yachts whilst homeless people freeze to death on the streets", "we live in a Eurocentric, cisheteronormative society", "jail is society locking human beings up in cages")
"Being deprived of" implies that something is actively being taken away. This is not the case--you never had access or rights to those things in the first place. If I were to hand you the keys to my car tomorrow, would you say I had given you my car, or that I had "ceased depriving you" of my car?
Both of those statements are true, and are just different ways of framing the same thing. I would say you "gave me your car" because I am fine with the fact that ownership involves depriving other people of an object. If I were OP, it would make sense to frame it you "ceasing to deprive me" because I would abhor what I see as a backwards, oppressive social construct.
Normal people absolutely do use this double-negative framing for more controversial issues. For example a leftist might describe the state not giving someone asylum (Article 14), denying a transgender person gender-affirming healthcare ("trans rights are human rights") as "depriving them of their human rights". I can't give any (mainstream) right wing examples, because standard conservative/libertarian ideology believes that there is a meaningful distinction between "positive and negative rights", and that people are only entitled to negative rights (a conservative would view e.g. free speech as different to the above examples - a state does not "deprive" someone of their right to free speech, because infringing on someone's right to free speech requires them making a positive action to repress them - instead of just passively not giving them something they want)
Elsewhere the right to ownership has been defined as solely the right to enforce ownership. This is wrong, because it ignores the most fundamental right of ownership--the right to do as you please with the thing you own. The only way to square the circle is to say that in a state of nature everyone has that right until they're deprived of it.
There's no getting around this framing, and when you look at other examples, it starts to look absurd. For example, is bodily autonomy solely the right to deprive others of access to your body? Is free speech solely the right to deprive others of the right to limit your free speech?
Not only are these double-negative framings weird and counterintuitive, they're also inherently circular. When the right to bodily autonomy is defined simply as "the right to deprive others of the right to one's own bodily autonomy" you still haven't explained what bodily autonomy is. Once you do start to go into detail it becomes much clearer that these double-negative framings are actually inaccurate.
In reality one cannot generally do whatever they want with their own body. Suicide is generally illegal, and people will stop it by force if they see it happening. There are limits to all rights. Suicide being illegal is not a limitation on [the right to deprive others of their rights to your bodily autonomy] because not only are you not allowed to stop them from stopling you, you're actually also not allowed to kill yourself in the first place. You never had that right to begin with. It's not [everyone else has the right to stop you], because you'll still get a slap on the wrist even if nobody stops you.
As another example, mutually consensual cannibalism. It's illegal! It's not just Adam choosing not to exercise his right to deprive Bob of his right to eat Adam. Bob didn't have that right in the first place, regardless of what Adam says.
Finally, going back to the original example, trespassing is a thing even if the owner is dead or totally uninvolved. It's not a case of 1 single person having the right to deprive others. It's simply more accurate to say the other people don't have rights in the first place. You could say "ok, both the state and the owner own the property" but this also isn't true! Bystanders are also legally allowed to do things like prevent theft. Do they own the property too?
They're not just two separate framings. The negative framing--that ownership is the right to deprive others--is just wrong, and falls apart when you look closely.
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