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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.
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 Alice. Bob didn't have that right in the first place, regardless of what Alice 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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