The Origins of Property

An Informal Workshop on Lockean Theories of the Origins of Property Rights in terms of Homesteading, Mixing One's Labor, and Original Appropriation


Tuesday October 21

280 Park Hall

University at Buffalo, Amherst Campus, Buffalo, NY.


1:00pm Barry Smith and Leo Zaibert (University at Buffalo): Property and Sovereignty

2:00pm Lansing Pollock (Buffalo State College): Do We Need a Theory of Original Appropriation?

2:45pm Cigar Break

3:15pm Jack Sanders (Rochester Institute of Technology):  General versus Special Rights to Property

4:00pm James Grunebaum (Buffalo State College): Vicious Circularity and Original Appropriation

4:45pm Cigar Break

5:15pm Jan Narveson (Waterloo): Original Appropriation Vindicated

6:30pm Dinner

Further information can be obtained from Eva Koepsell (716) 645-2444 Ext. 781, evamk@acsu.buffalo.edu.


All speakers have been asked to respond to the following list of

Sixteen Arguments Against the Lockean Theory
 

  1. The theory has never been empirically instantiated. Thus homesteading in North America gave rise to property rights because homesteading licenses had been granted to farmers or prospectors by the king, who had sent his surveyors in advance.

    2.  
  2. The theory is sometimes defended as a theory of how property rights ought to have originated. But ought implies can, and it is questionable whether property rights could originate in the way the theory describes.

    3.  
  3. The theory is utopian: it ignores hard facts concerning the wars, might, differential power, and other well-documented phenomena which in fact gave rise to property rights (and to sovereign rights) in the course of history.

    4.  
  4. The theory is cut loose from evolutionary biological accounts of how the institutions of property originated.

    5.  
  5. Many millions of people throughout history have been mixing their labor with unowned land and have not thereby become property owners. (Vide the decisions of successive courts regarding aboriginal land.)

    6.  
  6. The theory cannot distinguish between possession and ownership. More generally: the idea of mixing labor can not by itself answer the question which set of ownership rights vest in the owner, e.g., private usufruct, private ownership, communal, and so on.

    7.  
  7. It is hard to define labor (and even more so the act of 'mixing' your labor).

    8.  
  8. The doctrine is subject to many of the problems raised already against Marxian 'labor' theories of value. Thus for example it assumes that there is some unitary thing/stuff called 'labor'. As the Marxian theory neglects the fact that labor itself is of value only because of a surrounding context of other things which have value, so the homesteading theory neglects the fact that the very same action, for example digging a hole, may be 'labor' in one context but not in another.

    9.  
  9. The theory gives no account of the precise extent or precise shape or location of the land in which property rights would be acquired through the mixing of labor.

    10.  
  10. The theory gives no account of the temporal extent of property rights (for example, as was initially almost always the case, where those who are mixing their labor with land were nomadic).

    11.  
  11. The theory neglects the degree to which the institutions of property are a human achievement of high order, a new sort of legal-economic-geometric technology, that was added to the mere mixing of labor, for example when Europeans began to colonize the lands of North and South America.

    12.  
  12. The theory neglects the degree to which the same institutions of property can exist in different cultures to different degrees (for example in proportion to the degree to which there exist efficient and honest systems of cadastral registration).

    13.  
  13. The theory neglects important analogies between property, on the one hand, and sovereignty, on the other.

    14.  
  14. If taken seriously as giving license to property rights in things previously unowned, the theory would appear to have ludicrous consequences. In particular, it licenses and encourages willy-nilly destruction of resources as a means of propertizing them (as in: if you want to own that thing over there, just labor on it a bit and it's yours).

    15.  
  15. The theory appears to deny license to those whose use of resources is not easily construable as labor-mixing (as in hunter-gatherers, perhaps). While this may be acceptable to some, it contradicts at least some of the motivation for the labor-mixing principle itself (whether theologically or naturalistically interpreted).

  16. The theory is not at all easy to apply in various interesting cases, for example involving intellectual property. With what does one mix one's labor when one comes up with a novel idea? Perhaps there should be no intellectual property rights, but the reason should not be simply that our choice of theory can not accommodate such things.