John Locke is generally seen as an unequivocal defender of private property. However, taken normatively, certain aspects of his argument leave room for interesting loopholes with relevance to some of today’s social and political crises. This paper focuses largely on the spoilage proviso—in which Locke warns against appropriating more than one can make use of—and its possible application to abandoned buildings and the potential for legitimate productive use to be made of them by people other than the legal owner. Using (...) two case studies in which squatters have actively reversed the dereliction of abandoned buildings, this article aims to build a defence of certain types of squatting based on the limitations Locke has placed on the appropriation and the retention of property. (shrink)

Within the small literature on homelessness in political philosophy, freedom-based accounts loom large. Such accounts, however, give rise to minimalism concerns: concerns that these accounts are too modest in what they demand for those who are homeless, particularly when homelessness is considered in the context of wealthier countries. In this paper, I consider the success of minimalism charges against freedom-based accounts of homelessness. I argue that whilst such charges are aptly levelled against two major freedom-based accounts, from Jeremy Waldron and (...) Christopher Essert, a third account can evade or respond to such charges. This is the autonomy-based account of homelessness. Although the autonomy-based account has come in for significant recent criticism on grounds of minimalism, I argue that properly understood and developed, it has the resources to ground a plausible account of homelessness. (shrink)