An attempt at a complete formulation of the ethics of ownership

last edited 2024-11-05

Preqrequisites:

Is libertarianism luck worship? And why you should believe in peace

The principle of peace, that people must not force effects on each other, is where all concepts of property and ownership come from. The rule is very simple, but the applications are nuanced and non-obvious enough that I'm going to go through them in as much detail as I can. Even I'm not certain that I have all the details right.

Bodily autonomy

Since people are forced to feel what happens to their body, it's wrong to affect another person's body against their will. This is the most obvious instance of ownership, such that even communists accept it. It isn't limited to sensory pain or injury either. It's violence to force any type of perception onto someone, including tickling, restraining, or continuing to speak to someone who requests to be left alone.

Possession = property

Possessing something allows you to use it in ways that affect your experience, so taking it away would count as forcing an effect on someone. In light of metaphysics, this is just an extension of bodily autonomy because there's no difference of kind between your limbs and your possessions, only a difference of degree.

Given the above, a realization can be had: *appopriation of natural resources forces an effect on those who could've had it otherwise*. You can see this less deniably with this example: your house is next to a river. Assume you didn't know about the river when you bought the house, but now value it highly. A company from another area sends in trucks that harvest all the water. Even many libertarians would agree this is theft, but what's the difference of kind between that and this:

Your hometown is destroyed by a natural disaster, and you move to the nearest other area that has a water source. The river there is monopolized by a company that uses machines to harvest all its water. They've taken resources that, otherwise, you would now have access to. Time can't be the difference because even the water taken from the river next to your house you weren't *already* using; they let you keep the water you had already extracted. Both cases only involved *potential* access to the natural resource, and it counted as you "possessing" it for the purposes of property.

Thus natural resources can generally not be claimed as property in the same way as artificial things. To appropriate a natural resource is to deprive others of something they could've had otherwise, so you have to compensate anyone made worse off by your appropriation.

Unnegotiated transactions

If you give a gift without communicating a condition of repayment, then it's given and they're not obligated to give anything back. But what if you communicate a condition of repayment, but nothing is mutually negotiated?

Consider this: A wants to trade belongings with B, but synchronous communication is impossible and it's time sensitive. So they send a package and a note saying "I want to trade this for <thing you have>, if you don't agree to this trade, send this package back". Assume sending packages costs nothing. If B doesn't agree to the trade, they're obligated to send it back, right? That seems obvious to me.

But what if the package can't be sent back? What if it's a favor and A wants repayment in a different form? In this case, I think B must repay the minimum of the value A lost and half the value B gained. Obviously, they can't be obligated to give back anything worth more to them than they got since they didn't agree to anything. But why do I say half the value? Because A wouldn't get any of their requested currency at all without B to trade with; 2 people are necessary to create a mutually beneficial exchange, so they can only be entitled to half the value.

Non-scarce goods (freeloading)

The situation that a software vendor makes their software available for download with pay and (against their intention) you have a way of downloading it for free can be exactly rewritten as follows:

A makes a substantial personal sacrifice to provide some benefit to B, telling them they're doing it under the assumption that B will do something else in return, although B doesn't get any input in the matter. This is exactly the favor scenario above and the answer is the same: B must repay the minimum of the value of A's sacrifice, half B's benefit, and A's requested price (since they consented to that).

Of course, the specific nature of the software version of this scenario creates different abilities for the consumer. In particular there's nothing wrong with the consumer pirating it and paying after using it - they can't be obliged to pay more than the software is worth to them and paying before using it means paying before finding out how much it's worth to them.

The obvious difficulty might be: but surely it's always moral to not use the work and pay nothing, and if the only difference between a moral course of action and the one in question is that someone benefits, how can that be considered theft? But here's the insight: if the work isn't worth anything to you, then you wouldn't have been asking this question anyway since the value you're obliged to pay is zero. If the work *is* worth something to you, then by definition the alternative to freeloading would have been paying that amount to use it, not not using it.

Any other form of non-scarce good would be the same way: using someone's artwork, for example. It's worth noting that using someone's artistic or intellectual property without paying them but with credit and in a way that doesn't devalue the product they're selling (such as posting music from a movie on Youtube) is generally of substantial *benefit* to the artist, since it gives them publicity at no cost to them. A lot of people who are stingy about copyright of their works overlook that and think they're being stolen from when they're actually being helped.

Restitution after death

A steals from B, then A and/or B dies. There are a few possible cases here, and they're somewhat murky:

*The criminal dies and the victim wants restitution from the criminal's descendant.* My verdict is yes: the criminal's descendant owes restitution to the victim (but not more than they, the descendant, gained). If you reject my verdict here then you end up with the consequence that a criminal can legitimately steal your property by stealing it then giving it to someone else and then dying.

**Both the original victim and criminal are dead, and the victim's descendant wants restitution from the criminal's descendant.** I don't think restitution is owed. I don't think you can pass on something you don't possess, at least not to people who weren't alive at the time of wrongdoing.

**The victim dies and their descendant wants restitution from the criminal.** This one seems like another yes to me, since the criminal does not have legitimate possession and should do what the original owner would likely have done.

Of course, all that is under the assumption that the criminal and victim will never meet again and so properly resolving the situation is impossible. If we're not to assume that people stop existing when they die, if the criminal and victim were to meet after death in some other world, the debt and/or crime would still be there. If only one of those is the case, you'd have to balance for example a victim owed restitution from a criminal who does not owe restitution.

Misunderstandings

If you labor on an object not knowing it's owned, you still own your investment, but the object also still needs to be the original owner's property. Time / order of events doesn't actually make a difference if you didn't know about it. Since both people have valid ownership claims, assuming it isn't possible to separate the improvements made from the original object, ownership is split.

Obviously, if you labor on someone else's property knowing it's someone else's property then you can't claim any ownership of the resulting object that conflicts with theirs. If there was a probability of it being owned, multiply the ownership ratio by that.

Lying as a non-peaceful act

Lying is another act that's commonly defended from the same realm of moral judgement as obvious crimes like theft and assault. But giving someone false information generally affects them and insofar as it does, you're responsible for forcing that effect on them, since you prevented them from making an informed choice. Therefore, lying is a crime with the magnitude of the harm it causes. (This doesn't mean it's morally fine to tell a harmless lie; just that it's not un-peaceful.)