A chapter reviewing recent experimental work on people's conceptions of ownership rights.

This book defends an account of justice to nonhuman beings – i.e., to animals, plants etc. – also known as ecological or interspecies justice, and which lies in the intersection of environmental political theory and environmental ethics. More specifically, against the background of the current extinction crisis this book defends a global non-ranking biocentric theory of distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings, because the extinction crisis does not only need practical solutions, but also an account of how it is (...) the outcome of large-scale injustice. This book not only provides a novel theoretical framework that supports such a claim, but it also develops the theoretical tools to find just compromises between the entitlements of intraspecies and intra-human global distributive justice to ecological space for the purpose of working towards a vision of just conservation. -/- Content: 1. Introducing Ecological Justice 2. Political Non-Ranking Biocentrism 3. The Community of Justice 4. The Currency of Distributive Justice 5. The Principles of Distributive Justice 6. Ecological Justice and the Capabilities Approach 7. Biodiversity Loss: An Injustice? 8. Who Owns the Earth? 9. Visions of Just Conservation 10. Outlook for Implementation . (shrink)

The expiration of intellectual property rights has been seen to amount to a problem for non-consequentialist theories of intellectual property. In this article, I assess whether the difficulty is real. I maintain that, as things are at least, there is no sufficient reason to believe that the termination of intellectual property rights is an insurmountable problem for non-consequentialist theories of intellectual property rights.

The moral acceptability of intellectual property rights is often assessed by comparing them to central instances of rights to material property. Critics of intellectual ownership claim to have found significant differences. One of the dissimilarities pertains to the extent of the control intellectual property rights bestow on their holders over the material property of others. The main idea of the criticism of intellectual ownership built around that dissimilarity is that, in light of the comparison with material property rights, the power (...) is excessive. In this article, I assess this objection to intellectual property rights in connection with patents and copyrights. I maintain that it is implausible. (shrink)

Until now, the debates around genetically modified seeds in agriculture have converged towards two main issues. The first is about hazards that this new technology brings about, and the second is about the ownership of seeds and the distribution of their economic benefits. In this paper, I explore an underdeveloped topic by linking these two issues: how ownership shapes the distribution of moral responsibility for the potential hazards of genetically modified seeds. Indeed, while ownership is debated in terms of economic (...) rights and hazards in terms of “good” or “bad” science, no one has looked at whether or not we could and should ascribe and distribute moral responsibility for hazards based on ownership of genetically modified seeds. I argue that we should. Using the notion of ownership as a bundle of rights, I argue that from a moral perspective, the genetically modified seed has several owners at the same time. Although different owners may not have the same economic rights over the seed, they all have a moral responsibility, possibly to varying degrees, for the potential hazards brought about by the seed. Secondly, I argue that, as long as a seed carries the character trait that was intentionally modified, then it calls for moral responsibility. All in all, I formulate a way for linking issues of ownership and hazards of genetically modified seeds in agriculture through the concept of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper begins with a sketch of a few themes in the philosophy of property insofar as they relate to the concept of cultural appropriation. It then offers a survey of Edmund Husserl’s account of culture. These reflections put us in a better position to ask whether property ownership provides a suitable interpretative framework for acts of intercultural copying and influence. On the contrary, Husserl’s account of culture leads us away from the claim that members of a cultural group should (...) be understood to have property in cultural formations arising within their group. By putting meaning, rather than ownership, at the center of our understanding of culture, the paper offers an alternative account of what might be wrong, when there is something wrong, with events typically labeled culturally appropriative. The paper concludes by connecting concerns for cultural appropriation with conceptions of cultural authenticity, distinguishing between an autochthonal sense of authenticity, focused on internal origins and protection from outside forces, and a Husserlian sense of authenticity, connected to reason, responsibility, and truth. (shrink)

PurposeIn this paper, patient information is approached from a Heideggerian perspective with the intention to gather an understanding about the personal nature of the information. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ownership of patient information and then present Datenherrschaft as a suitable model for patient ownership of patient information.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is theoretical in approach. It is based on arguments derived from Heidegger’s work in the Being and Time.FindingsBased on this Heideggerian approcah, a proposal for using the special (...) definition of ownership of patient information – Datenherrschaft – given to a patient is suggested. From a Heideggerian perspective, it can be stated that the patient has the strongest rights towards patient information because this information is crucial for a patient to have an understanding about their Dasein.Research limitations/implicationsDatenherrschaft is used as an example of an ethically justified way of regulating the patient information ownership and should be analysed further. Especially the practical implications of implementing Datenherrschaft need more research.Originality/valuePatient information ownership is an issue that is neither unambiguously solved in many countries, nor has it, in our view, been ethically justified. The potential solution – Datenherrschaft – presented in this paper is clear and has strong philosophical justifications. (shrink)

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

Research Articles Donald C. Hubin, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

ABSTRACT The publication of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 established a tradition of Catholic social teaching concerned with the moral obligations that should exist between capital and labour. In Ireland the encyclical instigated enthusiasm among some clergy for their congregation's welfare. An urgency given to social and economic questions coincided with the co-operative movement's introduction to the Irish countryside. Rural co-operative societies were established as part of a wider programme of economic democracy that placed ownership of production (...) in the hands of farmers. The growth of the co-operative movement benefitted from the participation of members of the clergy at both a national and local level. Co-operative organisers and socially minded priests shared an interest in addressing the iniquities of capitalist modernisation. Co-operators championed a communal form of business organisation that emphasised the moral importance of economic activity as much as its productive importance. The involvement of Catholic priests in the co-operative movement naturalised priest-led social action in the sphere of rural development. This article analyses intersections between the economic objectives of co-operation and Catholic social teaching to understand how attempts to promote a more democratic economy had a profound influence over the country's economic development. (shrink)

John Kinsella is an important literary witness to the acknowledgement of native title in Australia, and Indigenous rights more generally. His writings also bear witness to continuing forces of resistance to those rights in Australian society. This paper traces Kinsella’s engagement with the Mabo case, the 1992 legal decision that recognised native title as part of Australian law, and rejected the fiction that Australia was terra nullius at the time of British colonisation. Focusing on “Graphology: Canto 5” and other texts, (...) it argues that Kinsella presents a sustained reflection on the implications and the limits of this decision, in law and in wider cultural understandings and practices, through poetic allusions, paratexts and personal commentary. His writing since the mid-1990s reveals an acute awareness of how imported concepts of property and law are concealed within Western poetic traditions such as pastoral. To counter the effects of this ideology, Kinsella interpolates and appropriates terms from the discourse of property law, juxtaposing them against other ways of understanding and living in the land. In several collections, but especially in Jam Tree Gully, he seeks to develop an ethically reflective account of ownership of land taken from others, critiquing the dominant idea of property and articulating an alternative way of living in the land based on co-existence. The rights of the dispossessed traditional owners are central to a new mode of “writing the land.”. (shrink)

Who owns nature? The question could be less important than reducing animal sufferings in nature. It does not matter if nature does not belong to anyone or if it belongs to someone, because in both cases there are limitations, linked with animal welfare, regarding what we should do in nature. Sentient beings have interests that we must take into account when designing environmental policies. Since neither ecosystems nor plants have interests, preserving nature is less important than reducing animal sufferings. The (...) relevant moral issue is, therefore, knowing what happens to sentient animals in nature and developing policies to reduce their sufferings. This implies that we have the moral obligation of intervening in nature with the aim of reducing animal sufferings, so conservationist environmental policies defended by ecologists are morally unacceptable. (shrink)

When we talk about intellectual property, it is often implicitly assumed that we are talking about private intellectual property. However, private property and the idea of private ownership do not exhaust the possibilities for accounts of ownership and of property. There are other ways that ownership can operate, such as common property. A resource is common property if its use is ‘governed by rules whose point is to make them available for use by all or any members of the society.’.

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...) ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

O conceito de self-ownership é frequentemente utilizado nos campos da Ética e da Filosofia Política para justificar ou negar a justeza de determinadas situações, atos ou práticas. As críticas a tal conceito são predominantemente focadas em seus corolários. No presente artigo a análise se concentra sobra as condições de possibilidade da existência de uma relação de propriedade de si mesmo – auto-propriedade – procurando-se demonstrar a impossibilidade de tal relação pela ausência de multiplicidade de elementos que possam constituir um proprietário (...) e uma propriedade. A propriedade de si mesmo é fundada em um dualismo ontológico, cuja ilusão procura se respaldar na percepção de si como um outro na constituição da identidade e na confusão da relação genitiva com uma relação de propriedade. (shrink)