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I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argumen
by Jabanga 9y ago
I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to.
What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.