This paper argues that the practical implementation of blockchain technology can be considered an institution of property similar to legal institutions. Invoking Penner's theory of property and Hegel's system of property rights, and using the example of bitcoin, it is possible to demonstrate that blockchain effectively implements all necessary and sufficient criteria for property without reliance on legal means. Blockchains eliminate the need for a third-party authority to enforce exclusion rights, and provide a system of universal access to knowledge and (...) discoverability about the property rights of all participants and how the system functions. The implications of these findings are that traditional property relations in society could be replaced by or supplemented with blockchain models, and implemented in new domains. (shrink)

The Body Ownership Thesis states that each person owns her body. I address a prominent objection, the Generation Problem: the Body Ownership Thesis apparently implies that parents own their children: as we own the fruit of our property, if a parent owns her own body, she must own her child and her child's body. I argue that a person does not own the fruit of her property when that fruit is a person or the body of a person. Persons have (...) conclusive title to their bodies, but only defeasible title to the fruits of their bodies. (shrink)

I present and defend Reinach's theory of ownership according to which, prior to the positive law, one finds a distinction between possession, ownership and property rights. Ownership is not a bundle of positive rights, but a primitive natural relation that grounds the absolute right to behave as one wishes towards the thing one owns. In reply to some objections raised against it, I argue that Reinach's theory of property is morally and politically non-committal; and that it in fact has the (...) ressources for dealing with the vexing issue of the origin of ownership. (shrink)

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) refers to an oppositional attitude from local residents against some risk generating facility that they have been chosen to host either by government or industry. The attitude is claimed to be characteristic of someone who is positive to a facility but who wants someone else to be its host. Since siting cannot be provided if everyone has this attitude, society ends up in a worse situation. The attitude is claimed to be egoistic and irrational. Here (...) it is argued that the NIMBY critique rests on questionable assumptions about the rightness of weighing total benefit against total cost. This weighing-principle will sometimes have to yield so that the rights of individuals can be acknowledged. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to analyze the way in which Edmund Husserl deals with the problem of the constitution of image in his writings. The difference between a common thing and a work of art lies in the fact that the ‘thing’ is submitted as an object to perception, while the work of art is the product of the human capacity called imagination or fantasy (Phantasie). Therefore, the difference between perception (which is an objectifying act) and imagination (which (...) refers to a mental representation) is the fundamental difference Husserl operates with in his analysis of the phenomenological problem of the image building. I also want to show that Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of the image is fundamental in the understanding of the work of art (aesthetic phenomena including) and of its difference from a common thing. From the point of view of the History of Philosophy, the Husserlian analysis presupposes the overcoming of the classical opposition between subject and object, and the aesthetic experience is one of the (privileged) ways through which this overcoming can be achieved. (shrink)

I defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: the claim that doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. A thing does not genuinely belong to a person unless he has special authority over it. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing protects us against harmful imposition – against the actions or needs of another intruding on what is ours. This protection is necessary for something to genuinely belong to a person. The opponent of the Doctrine must claim that (...) nothing genuinely belongs to a person, even his own body. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen has produced an influential criticism of libertarian‐ism that posits joint ownership of everything in the world other than labor, with each joint owner having a veto right over any potential use of the world. According to Cohen, in that world rationality would require that wealth be divided equally, with no differential accorded to talent, ability, or effort. A closer examination shows that Cohen's argument rests on two central errors of reasoning and does not support his egalitarian conclusions, even (...) granting his assumption of joint ownership. That assumption was rejected by Locke, Pufendorf and other writers on property for reasons that Cohen does not rebut. (shrink)

This article argues that teachers of environmental ethics must more aggressively entertain questions of private property in their work and in their teaching. To make this case, it first introduces the three primary positions on property: occupation arguments, labor theory of value arguments, and efficiency arguments. It then contextualizes these arguments in light of the contemporary U.S. wise-use movement, in an attempt to make sense of the concerns that motivate wise-use activists, and also to demonstrate how intrinsic value arguments miss (...) the mark. Finally, it offers some suggestions about further directions for environmental ethics, reasoning that there is a good deal of headway to be gained for environmental ethics by accepting that nature can be owned as property, but nevertheless engaging the idea of private property critically. (shrink)

Is it possible to justify territorial rights? Provided a justification for territorial rights can be found, does it ground claims toparticularterritories? And provided a claim to particular territories can be justified, what kind of claim is it? Is it a claim to jurisdiction? A claim to control resources? A claim to control the movement of people across borders? In this paper I review some prominent accounts seeking to answer these questions. After outlining their main features, I focus on some difficulties (...) they encounter, in particular with regard to the justification of exclusion. (shrink)

According to the negative principle of appropriation a person can acquire an unowned resource if doing so respects a certain condition (the Lockean proviso). Contrary to some views, a proviso of this sort is not incompatible with libertarianism. Moreover, no unilateral powers of acquisition can fail to consider the impact on the interests of others. Hence, a doctrine of appropriation must incorporate such a proviso. However, the several interpretations such a proviso can take on various dimensions will be either implausible (...) as a way of taking into consideration the interests of others, or unable to generate the kind and extent of property rights libertarians typically endorse. (shrink)

The preservationist duties that conservationists would lay upon landowners to protect the natural environment obviously interfere with what those people do with their land. That is often taken to be an equally obvious ? albeit possibly justifiable ? violation of their rights in that property. But to say that, as landowners often do, would be to imply that property rights somehow embrace a ?right to destroy?. Closer inspection suggests that they do not. That would be a further right, additional to (...) and independent of all the component rights standardly associated with the right to private property. A right to destroy is implicit neither in the concept nor in the justifications of property rights, as they are standardly conceived. Conservationist policies cannot, therefore, properly be opposed on the grounds that they would necessarily violate people's property rights. (shrink)

Private property forms the bedrock of the business/society relationship in a market economy. In one way or another most societies limitwhat people can claim as property as well as theextent of claims they can make regarding it. In the international arena today intellectual property rights are a focal point of debate. Many developing countries do not recognize the monopoly claims of patents and copyrights asserted by business as legitimate. This paper reviews contemporary areas of dispute and then presents the tasks (...) facing the construction of a fair intellectual property rights regime. (shrink)

Indigenous cultural possessions constitute a diverse global issue. This issue includes some culturally important, intangible tribal objects. This is evident in the Australian copyright cases viewed in this study, which provide examples of disputes over traditional Indigenous visual art. A proposal for the legal recognition of Indigenous cultural possessions in Australia is also reviewed, in terms of a new category of law. When such cultural objects are in an artistic form they constitute the tribe's self-presentation and its mechanism of cultural (...) continuity. Philosophical arguments for the legal recognition of Indigenous intellectual `property' tend to assume that the value of Indigenous intellectual property is determinable on external criteria. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen’s book brings together and elaborates on articles that he has written on selfownership, on Marx’s theory of exploitation, and on the future of socialism. Although seven of the eleven chapters have been previously published (1977-1992), this is not merely a collection of articles. There is a superb introduction that gives an overview of how the chapters fit together and of their historical relation to each other. Most chapters have a new introduction and often a postscript or addendum that (...) connect them with other chapters. And the four new chapters (on justice and market transactions, exploitation in Marx, the concept of self-ownership, and the plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership) are important contributions that round out and bring closure to many of the central issues. As always with Cohen, the writing is crystal clear, and full of compelling examples, deep insights, and powerful arguments. Cohen has long been recognized as one of the most important exponents of analytic Marxism. His innovative, rigorous, and exciting interpretations of Marx’s theories of history and of exploitation have had a major impact on Marxist scholarship. Starting in the mid-1970s he has increasingly turned his attention to normative political philosophy. As Cohen describes it, he was awakened from his “dogmatic socialist slumbers” by Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example in which people starting from a position of equality (or other favored patterned distribution) freely choose to pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play, and the net result is inequality (or other unfavored pattern). During the subsequent twenty years, political 1 philosophy has benefited from his thinking about the nature and plausibility of the thesis of selfownership, and about the scope and demands of equality. In what follows I will focus solely on the material dealing with self-ownership, but first I shall mention some of the interesting material on Marxism and socialism that I will be ignoring. First, at various points Cohen discusses how something like a principle of self-ownership is latent in the standard Marxist condemnation of capitalist exploitation (e.g., the capitalist steals labor time from the laborer).. (shrink)

Abstract.My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well‐known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance‐based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of (...) the paper, I point to the way in which “tacit obligation” emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants—and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain—to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests. (shrink)

Like the ownership of physical property, the issues computer software ownership raises can be understood as concerns over how various rights and duties over software are shared between owners and users. The powers of software owners are defined in software licenses, the legal agreements defining what users can and cannot do with a particular program. To help clarify how these licenses permit and restrict users’ actions, here I present a conceptual framework of software rights and duties that is inspired by (...) the terms of various proprietary, open source, and free software licenses. To clarify the relationships defined by these rights and duties, this framework distinguishes between software creators (the original developer), custodians (those who can control its use), and users (those who utilise the software). I define the various rights and duties that can be shared between these parties and how these rights and duties relate to each other. I conclude with a brief example of how this framework can be used by defining the concepts of free software and copyleft in terms of rights and duties. (shrink)

From the perspective of a realist philosophy of social science, the recent explosion of criticisms of mainstream economics, including reinvigorated Austrian criticism, provides what seems like a rich opportunity to join what are too often disjoined disciplinary interests and inquirers, and also to extend the arguments not only as regards the realist theory of social science, but also as regards the implications of this approach for economics. I begin with a minimum sketch of key features of realist philosophy of science (...) as I understand it. The central difference turns on the role and nature of explanation and of theory, between what is frequently termed ‘deductivism’, and on an alternative in which explanation requires the articulation of a causal mechanism, for example, the mechanism provided by molecular chemistry that gives us an understanding of oxidation. I take the position that in social science, explanation requires social causal mechanisms. I consider the Austrian contribution from this point of view and conclude with some hints regarding how the foregoing bears on our understanding of capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

The role of property theory as a framework for analysis and regulation of body parts has become a debate of topical importance because of the emergence of biomedical technologies that utilise body parts, and also because the application of the concept of property, even with respect to historically and traditionally accepted forms of property, raises serious challenges to the property analyst. However, there is another reason for the topicality of property in relation to body parts: a proprietary approach confers on (...) a claimant the advantage of continuing control that is tellingly lacking in non-property frameworks underpinned, for instance, by consent, negligence, privacy and unjust enrichment rules. In some circumstances, such as an unauthorised blood test performed on a blood sample obtained with consent, the continuing control provided by property law might be the only chance a claimant has to obtain a remedy. Economy of space, however, requires that only a prolegomenon on body parts and property theory is given below. Thus, the analysis begins by providing in outline a framework for comprehensive analysis of body parts within the realm of property theory; thereafter, the author engages with the normative question of whether body parts or rights exercisable over body parts could be admitted into the category of property. (shrink)