Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defence of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the notion of private property (...) presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimise: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language, and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique. (shrink)

Within a liberal, ‘law of things’ understanding of property, the donative trust is seen as a species of gift. Control over trust property passes from the hands of settlors to beneficiaries, from owners to owners. Trust property, like all other property, is silent and passive, its fate determined by its owners. This article questions this understanding of the trust by showing how beneath the facade of ownership, the trust inverts the relation between owner and owned, person and thing. It analyses (...) the relation that trustees, beneficiaries and settlors have to the trust property and argues that the role of each of these parties can be shown to consist in furthering the interests of the trust property rather than their own. It claims that this protects things from their owners at the same time as it ensures these owners’ ongoing care towards the things they own. This raises questions about the trust’s status within the institution of private property, justified as it is by the human autonomy it is said to enable. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a (...) sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility. (shrink)

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)

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's account of legal rights is now 100 years old. It has been much discussed, and remains very influential with philosophers and lawyers alike. Yet it is still sometimes misunderstood in crucial respects. This article offers a rigorous exposition of Hohfeld's framework; discusses its claims to comprehensiveness and fundamentality, reviewing recent work on the topic; and highlights the argumentative uses of Hohfeld's most important distinction.

The theory of unjust enrichment – the theory supporting the recognition of a doctrinal category of unjust enrichment – has been accepted across much of the common law world. The recognition of a doctrinal category is not just a matter of presentation. It has a role in legal reasoning that reflects the fact that it is based on a particular principle or distinct justification for a claim. The theory of unjust enrichment is misguided because there is no principle or distinct (...) justification common to the various claims that have been gathered together to form the new category. The theory has appeared attractive, it would seem, not because a plausible version of the principle of unjust enrichment has been identified, but because it has appeared impossible to explain these various claims in any other way, in particular as claims in property or contract. This difficulty has arisen, it is suggested, largely as a result of a mistaken analysis of primary and remedial rights. The article explores these issues with respect to contract law and property law. (shrink)

C.B. Macpherson's “Possessive Individualist” reading of Locke is one of the most radical and influential interpretations in the history of exegesis. Despite a substantial critical response over the past five decades, Macpherson's reading remains orthodox in various circles in the humanities generally, particularly in legal studies, and his interpretation of several crucial passages has unwittingly been followed even by his sharpest critics within Lockean scholarship. In order to present the definitive rebuttal to this interpretation, and so finally to lay it (...) to rest, I argue that every one of Macpherson's key pieces of textual evidence can be rejected entirely on its own terms; that is, by reference to no more than its immediate context. In this way I contend that fault of the Possessive Individualist reading lies far deeper than mere cherry-picking of the Lockean corpus, but centrally involves misreading, misplacing and misrepresenting the very parts of Locke's work Macpherson cites as evidence for his reading. (shrink)

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

This article challenges the long-standing boundary that separates human beings from non-human entities, whether animate or inanimate. In doing so, it engages with the jurisprudential strands that debate the transformative power of law in moving towards a fuller recognition of human relations with non-human entities. To this end, the article first examines the legal theoretical strategies that scholars have so far developed to overcome the dichotomous vision that pits humans against non-humans. It then argues for a new model of understanding (...) property, called cont(r)actualisation, which seeks to reconfigure existing strategies. It makes the case that the legal categories of person and object should be brought together under the overarching heading of ‘legal entity’. Rather than being built around humans as persons/subjects and non-human entities as objects/objects, law should be built around the contingent points of contact between particular entities in a particular web of relations. In this way, the article advances a view that does justice to how these entities contribute to what human beings are and do. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle. The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a (...) satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach. (shrink)

This article attempts to answer two basic questions. First, can body parts be the subject of property rights? This requires us to start with a definition of property rights, and this is set out in the first section. In the second section, it will be argued that rights in relation to body parts can come within this definition of property rights. However, as explained in the third section, the fact that body parts can be the subject of property rights does (...) not mean that they should. To answer the question of whether body parts should be the subject of property rights we need to consider policy arguments. This article will develop an argument in favour of the recognition of property rights in body parts which focuses on the notion of scarcity of resources. (shrink)

Intellectual property typically involves claims of ownership of types, rather than particulars. In this article I argue that this difference in ontology makes an important moral difference. In particular I argue that there cannot be an intrinsic moral right to own intellectual property. I begin by establishing a necessary condition for the justification of intrinsic moral rights claims, which I call the Rights Justification Principle. Briefly, this holds that if we want to claim that there is an intrinsic moral right (...) to φ, we must be able to show that (a) violating this right would typically result in either a wrongful harm or other significant wrong to the holder of the right, and (b) the wrongful harm or other wrong in question is independent of the existence of the intrinsic right we are trying to justify. I then argue that merely creating a new instance of a type is not the kind of action which can wrongfully harm the creator of that type. Insofar as there do seem to be wrongs involved in copying a published poem or computer program, these wrongs presuppose the existence of an intrinsic right to own intellectual property, and so cannot be used to justify it. I conclude that there cannot be an intrinsic right to own intellectual property. (shrink)

Common practices such as donating blood or selling hair assume rights of disposal over oneself that are similar to, if not indistinguishable from, property rights. However, a simple view of self‐ownership fails to capture relevant moral differences between parts of a person and other objects. In light of this, we require some account of the continuity in the form of ownership rights a person has over herself and other objects, which also acknowledges the normative differences between constitutive parts of a (...) person, on the one hand, and external objects, on the other. This paper provides such an account by arguing that there are reasons internal to a general justification of property rights to limit the extent of powers included in ownership of different kinds of object, depending on how the person is situated in relation to them. Rejecting a typical Hohfeldian view of property as a univocal, gradable concept allows us to make space for a new approach to property and self‐ownership: one which can make sense of various uses of the body as property without entailing that our relation to those parts is exhaustively characterised by an ordinary property right. (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)

This paper argues that the positive allocative decisions paradigmatically carried out by the application of legal rules are a necessary condition for arguments about particular justice (i.e., distributive and commutative justice) to make sense. If one shifts the focus from the distinction between distributive and commutative justice to what the two aspects of particular justice are for, namely, providing criteria to judge the allocation of goods, it becomes clear that the distinction is conceptually unstable. The paper argues that stabilizing the (...) distinction is worthwhile and that this can only be accomplished by the introduction of positive allocation schemes. (shrink)

The article provides an outline of the basic principles and conditions of criminalisation of interferences with others’ property rights in the context of a specific context: a liberal, social democratic state, the legitimacy of which depends primarily on its impartiality between moral doctrines and the fair distribution of liberties and resources. I begin by giving a brief outline of the conditions of political legitimacy, the place of property and the conditions of criminalisation in such a state. With that framework in (...) place, I argue that interferences with others’ property rights should be viewed as violations of political duties stemming from institutions of distribution. I then discuss three implications of this view: the bearing of social injustice on the criminal law treatment of acts of distributive injustice; the expansion of criminalisation over the violation of distribution-related duties, which are considered criminally irrelevant under moral conceptions of criminalisation; and, finally, the normative significance of the modus operandi. (shrink)

Research in recent history has neglected to address the moral foundations of particular kinds of public policy such as the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs). On the one hand, nation-states have enforced a tightening of the IPR system. On the other, only recently have national government and international institutions recognised that the moral justification for stronger IPRs protection is far from being plausible and cannot be taken for granted. In this article, IPRs are examined as individual rights founded upon (...) natural law, personality development, just reward and social utility. It is argued that these foundations cannot be philosophically sustained. IPRs constitute morally indefensible political developments which aim to reproduce the capitalist division of knowledge and labour at national, international and global levels. The need for such a critical approach to the moral foundations of IPRs has increased in importance as a consequence of their role in justifying corporate power, globalisation policies and harmonisation of such. (shrink)

The environment has often been thought to consist of resources that are unowned, and hence subject to the well-known tragedy of the commons. But in recent years, property ideas have been increasingly recruited for environmental protection, in a manner that appears to vindicate the view that property rights evolve along with the needs for resource management. Nevertheless, property regimes have some pitfalls for environmental resources: the relevant parties may not be able to come to agreement; property regimes may be weak (...) or ineffective; they may be aimed at purposes inconsistent with environmental protection; property rights definitions may not work well for environmental resources; modern property regimes may promote monoculture rather than diverse environments. This essay describes these problems and asks to what degree they apply to a new effort to use property rights approaches, namely cap-and-trade programs to control greenhouse gases. It concludes that property rights, while imperfect and something of a retreat from a regime of complete liberty, may offer gains for environmental protection. But success will depend on close attention to the accountability and effectiveness of the governmental institutions necessary to support environmental property regimes. (shrink)

It has been argued that organs should be treated as individual tradable property like other material possessions and assets, on the basis that this would promote individual freedom and increase efficiency in addressing the shortage of organs for transplantation. If organs are to be treated as property, should they be inheritable? This paper seeks to contribute to the idea of organs as inheritable property by providing a defence of a default of the family of a dead person as inheritors of (...) transplantable organs. In the course of discussion, various succession rules for organs and their justifications will be suggested. We then consider two objections to organs as inheritable property. Our intention here is to provoke further thought on whether ownership of one's body parts should be assimilated to property ownership. (shrink)