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That's a little reductive is it not? I'd like to propose a thought experiment. Suppose you own a house. One day you decide to go on a vacation for a week and l

That's a little reductive is it not? I'd like to propose a thought experiment. Suppose you own a house. One day you decide to go on a vacation for a week and like most people you don't do anything with your house during that time. You just pack your stuff and leave. During that week somebody else sees that your house is empty and comes in to live in it. They go through your stuff, watches your TV, maybe even wears your clothes. They're careful to leave before you get back home, and they leave it exactly as it was. In fact you can't even notice they were there. Has that hypothetical person violated your property rights? In your model I'd argue they haven't. You haven't incurred any costs, and you didn't lose anything. Yet I'd argue that most people have some intuitive sense that your property right has indeed been violated.

dmd 4y ago
If there is literally no evidence whatsoever - none, not even microscopic evidence - then no, it hasn't, and I'd argue that this has happened to your house every time you've ever left it. In fact, right now, there are people doing wildly inappropriate things in every room of your house you're not in, who disappear if you go look. Prove me wrong.
pixl97 4y ago
"If it walks like a duck" Now, with physical items 'personal' entropy is an unavoidable outcome of the universe we live in. Even more so, if physics behaved like your example, why would we have ever evolved to give a shit if someone came into our house and used it if we couldn't tell. In this universe society would have evolved to share much more freely because it would have been a massive benefit for everyone. This is what humanity has a problem with now. We still have the ancient lines of thought that we live in a world filled with shortages and if we don't acquire as much as possible as quickly as possible we're going to die. Meanwhile technology has and is progressing to a point that everyone on the planet could have a perfectly nice life except for the fact a few of us want to own everything all for themselves.
jefftk 4y ago
All of my worries in your scenario come from cases where the premises of your hypothetical are violated: they break my stuff, they don't leave, they take things, etc. (The more a hypothetical requires you to assume things operating very differently from how they would in real life, the less useful the intuitions it generates are.)
- delusional 4y ago
  There are indeed plenty of problems with my hypothetical situation. The point wasn't to reason from the metaphor, it was rather to question the concept a little deeper. The cases you propose all seem to relate to some "fear" or "risk" that your property degrades in value. I agree that those are real attributes of property, I wasn't arguing they aren't. In reality my view of property rights is way more utilitarian and post-modern than i express in the hypothetical. I see property rights as a useful thing we made up to systematize and compartmentalize the messy universe we live in. In that system IP rights make perfect sense because it's useful to society that you can reap some benefit from dispersing good ideas.

dmd 4y ago

If there is literally no evidence whatsoever - none, not even microscopic evidence - then no, it hasn't, and I'd argue that this has happened to your house every time you've ever left it. In fact, right now, there are people doing wildly inappropriate things in every room of your house you're not in, who disappear if you go look. Prove me wrong.

pixl97 4y ago

"If it walks like a duck" Now, with physical items 'personal' entropy is an unavoidable outcome of the universe we live in. Even more so, if physics behaved like your example, why would we have ever evolved to give a shit if someone came into our house and used it if we couldn't tell. In this universe society would have evolved to share much more freely because it would have been a massive benefit for everyone. This is what humanity has a problem with now. We still have the ancient lines of thought that we live in a world filled with shortages and if we don't acquire as much as possible as quickly as possible we're going to die. Meanwhile technology has and is progressing to a point that everyone on the planet could have a perfectly nice life except for the fact a few of us want to own everything all for themselves.

jefftk 4y ago

All of my worries in your scenario come from cases where the premises of your hypothetical are violated: they break my stuff, they don't leave, they take things, etc. (The more a hypothetical requires you to assume things operating very differently from how they would in real life, the less useful the intuitions it generates are.)

delusional 4y ago
There are indeed plenty of problems with my hypothetical situation. The point wasn't to reason from the metaphor, it was rather to question the concept a little deeper. The cases you propose all seem to relate to some "fear" or "risk" that your property degrades in value. I agree that those are real attributes of property, I wasn't arguing they aren't. In reality my view of property rights is way more utilitarian and post-modern than i express in the hypothetical. I see property rights as a useful thing we made up to systematize and compartmentalize the messy universe we live in. In that system IP rights make perfect sense because it's useful to society that you can reap some benefit from dispersing good ideas.