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What gives you the right to treat other people's hard work as some kind of treasure chest you can loot? How about I come to your house and start drinking your b

What gives you the right to treat other people's hard work as some kind of treasure chest you can loot? How about I come to your house and start drinking your beer? There's not a lot of benefit to society for you to have beer in your fridge, after all. You could be feeding some orphans or helping some refugees instead of lazing around drinking beer. If you want something, work for it. Don't steal it from others.

Eridrus 10y ago
A rights-based framework is not the only way of making decisions in this world. It's one a lot of people who are fortunate enough to have attained success in life, or expect to in the future, subscribe to, but it's not the only way to see the world. If you were to follow your reasoning through to it's extreme the same way your beer example does, you would probably need to give all of society's land back to the native populations, but I doubt you're rushing to do that, I'm sure you have some moral gymnastics that makes that fine, but anyone trying to make a claim to anything you see as yours is immoral. While you certainly may have worked hard, and I have no desire to disincentivize hard work, our position in society at birth and even our genetics are probabilistic, so I find it hard to justify the idea that the fruits of your labour should be yours alone. Private property is a useful concept, but it is also not a universal requirement for a society, nor is is a binary feature.
theonemind 10y ago
The native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership. What gives anyone the right to own land? The land existed before us, and stays here after we die. That you can own it seems kind of strange, when you think about it. We make up the rules. We want to benefit society, and usually, to some degree, protect individual rights. If we change the rules so that we take your property when you die, then people thereafter get born into a world where they know that they can't work to have some amassed property passed on when they die. If I responded with the same kind of hyperbole you used, I'd just say you can't steal from dead people, and what gives a dead person a right to dictate what happens in the world of the living?

Eridrus 10y ago

A rights-based framework is not the only way of making decisions in this world. It's one a lot of people who are fortunate enough to have attained success in life, or expect to in the future, subscribe to, but it's not the only way to see the world. If you were to follow your reasoning through to it's extreme the same way your beer example does, you would probably need to give all of society's land back to the native populations, but I doubt you're rushing to do that, I'm sure you have some moral gymnastics that makes that fine, but anyone trying to make a claim to anything you see as yours is immoral. While you certainly may have worked hard, and I have no desire to disincentivize hard work, our position in society at birth and even our genetics are probabilistic, so I find it hard to justify the idea that the fruits of your labour should be yours alone. Private property is a useful concept, but it is also not a universal requirement for a society, nor is is a binary feature.

theonemind 10y ago

The native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership. What gives anyone the right to own land? The land existed before us, and stays here after we die. That you can own it seems kind of strange, when you think about it. We make up the rules. We want to benefit society, and usually, to some degree, protect individual rights. If we change the rules so that we take your property when you die, then people thereafter get born into a world where they know that they can't work to have some amassed property passed on when they die. If I responded with the same kind of hyperbole you used, I'd just say you can't steal from dead people, and what gives a dead person a right to dictate what happens in the world of the living?