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Do you believe in property rights? As a useful legal fiction subject to the same limitations as others of its genus, sure. As a natural moral right? Not in th

Do you believe in property rights? As a useful legal fiction subject to the same limitations as others of its genus, sure. As a natural moral right? Not in the slightest, because there ain't no such thing. The history of "ownership" of any given thing today is basically a history of force, fraud and the occasional lucky break. Who should own a piece of land? What moral claim do they have to it? The very best that can be said today is that they can trace a chain of transfers back to the person who most recently was able to stay on that land without being forcibly put underneath it by someone else. What kind of grounding for a supposed moral good is that? So I believe in Thomas Hobbes' conception of the state of nature -- namely, that there are no rights, no virtues, no morals, nothing but all-out war for resources, where what is "yours" is what you can take and keep by violence -- and in his conception of government as what we introduce when we get tired of that, and that this arrangement is better than the "war of all against all" even though it comes at the expense of sometimes having the government decide that "my" property could be put to a better use.

Turing_Machine 11y ago
Could you post your address? I'll bet you have a lot of stuff that other people could use, and since you don't believe in property, you surely won't have any objections to them taking it.
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  Wow, you sure did destroy that straw man over there. Now, do you want to try engaging with the actual argument (property is a useful legal fiction, not an inherent moral right)?
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    Hobbes's thesis is ridiculous, and has been refuted at great length by many over the centuries. I see no need to go over well-trodden ground yet again, but here are a couple of points: If you accept his arguments, you're basically advocating a dictatorship (or his era's equivalent, a king ruling by "divine right"). For another, his notion that humans are motivated purely by ego and self-aggrandizement is demonstrably wrong.
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      Let's unpack that just a little bit more. Posit a "desert island" scenario in which an adult is marooned with a small child. Assume that rescue is impossible (or at least wildly unlikely). No legal repercussions to worry about. The child has collected some fruit, clams, or whatnot. The adult is hungry. In this situation, a Hobbes person would simply take the food from the child. While there certainly are some real people who would do that, most of us would not. They would prefer to collect their own fruit and clams rather than take them from the child by force. Even if there weren't enough food to go around, many would give the food to the child and choose to go without themselves. As with many political theories, the Hobbes model says rather more about its originator than it does about people in general.
      - ubernostrum 11y ago
        Remember that Hobbes was writing at a time when philosophers liked to consider a "state of nature" -- the behavior of people before organized society, government, etc., come into being. Many of these philosophers, including John Locke (who Jefferson cribbed heavily from when writing the US Declaration of Independence), wrote as if the morals of Enlightenment-era westerners would magically naturally exist in people living in such a "state of nature", and simply took them for granted. Hobbes pointed out that this was balderdash. Our entire conception of propriety, of right and wrong, of what is or isn't acceptable, comes not from some natural moral law engraved into our hearts or deduced in an ideal pre-society state of pure reason, but rather is inculcated into us by the culture in which we live. So Hobbes dismissed the idea that people would be respectful and helpful in the "state of nature" and pointed out that, since that stuff only comes into being later with organized society, none of it would exist at that point. Hence the war of all against all. Which is where your desert-island analogy, and most other attempts to tear down Hobbes' state of nature, fall apart: your stranded people come in with experience of an organized culture which taught a particular set of morals and norms. One of those norms is that the adult should go hungry to let the child eat, but there is no guarantee that some natural moral law written in the adult's heart would have produced the same outcome absent years of indoctrination in a particular culture's moral system (and in fact, in actual nature we can find examples of animal species where adults will kill and even eat young of their own species).

Turing_Machine 11y ago

Could you post your address? I'll bet you have a lot of stuff that other people could use, and since you don't believe in property, you surely won't have any objections to them taking it.

ubernostrum 11y ago
Wow, you sure did destroy that straw man over there. Now, do you want to try engaging with the actual argument (property is a useful legal fiction, not an inherent moral right)?
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Hobbes's thesis is ridiculous, and has been refuted at great length by many over the centuries. I see no need to go over well-trodden ground yet again, but here are a couple of points: If you accept his arguments, you're basically advocating a dictatorship (or his era's equivalent, a king ruling by "divine right"). For another, his notion that humans are motivated purely by ego and self-aggrandizement is demonstrably wrong.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    Let's unpack that just a little bit more. Posit a "desert island" scenario in which an adult is marooned with a small child. Assume that rescue is impossible (or at least wildly unlikely). No legal repercussions to worry about. The child has collected some fruit, clams, or whatnot. The adult is hungry. In this situation, a Hobbes person would simply take the food from the child. While there certainly are some real people who would do that, most of us would not. They would prefer to collect their own fruit and clams rather than take them from the child by force. Even if there weren't enough food to go around, many would give the food to the child and choose to go without themselves. As with many political theories, the Hobbes model says rather more about its originator than it does about people in general.
    - ubernostrum 11y ago
      Remember that Hobbes was writing at a time when philosophers liked to consider a "state of nature" -- the behavior of people before organized society, government, etc., come into being. Many of these philosophers, including John Locke (who Jefferson cribbed heavily from when writing the US Declaration of Independence), wrote as if the morals of Enlightenment-era westerners would magically naturally exist in people living in such a "state of nature", and simply took them for granted. Hobbes pointed out that this was balderdash. Our entire conception of propriety, of right and wrong, of what is or isn't acceptable, comes not from some natural moral law engraved into our hearts or deduced in an ideal pre-society state of pure reason, but rather is inculcated into us by the culture in which we live. So Hobbes dismissed the idea that people would be respectful and helpful in the "state of nature" and pointed out that, since that stuff only comes into being later with organized society, none of it would exist at that point. Hence the war of all against all. Which is where your desert-island analogy, and most other attempts to tear down Hobbes' state of nature, fall apart: your stranded people come in with experience of an organized culture which taught a particular set of morals and norms. One of those norms is that the adult should go hungry to let the child eat, but there is no guarantee that some natural moral law written in the adult's heart would have produced the same outcome absent years of indoctrination in a particular culture's moral system (and in fact, in actual nature we can find examples of animal species where adults will kill and even eat young of their own species).