The moral breach of treating others as mere means to one’s own goals
This seems to presume that using others’ property as a means to an end constitutes using others so, which seems dangerously close to question-begging the whole issue.
This seems to presume that using others’ property as a means to an end constitutes using others so, which seems dangerously close to question-begging the whole issue.
Yes, it was an implicit assumption of what I wrote; if A takes the property that belongs to B then A is using B as a mere means to his own ends. Or, to take an example, that should be appropriate, when the government collects taxes from a producer they’re using that producer as a cash-cow to fund their own projects, that is treating him/her as a means to their own ends.
So, while an implicit assumption in the comment I made, it is nevertheless true that the thief is using others as mere means for his/her own end.
Well, my point was that this assumes a whole theory of property, and a specific one at that. There are others.
For instance, here is a contrary model; I am describing it, not necessarily endorsing it:
Describing a particular item or place as a specific person’s property implies the existence of a society that recognizes and enforces that property claim. Property claims aren’t enforced merely by the individuals making them, but by a whole society that teaches people to broadly respect them and has enforcement mechanisms to rein in those who don’t.
You can’t protect your property on your own, and you don’t really try. You depend on others’ cooperation — not merely that they will exercise restraint in not taking your property, but that they will (for instance) teach their children that it is wrong to steal, look askance at someone who cuts across your yard, consider a burglar who robs you to be a threat to them as well, actively participate in a criminal-justice system that imprisons the burglar, and so on.
After all, if all of society stopped teaching their children that it was wrong to steal, your property claim would not be enforceable for long. (Self-defense? That works until the moment you are too injured or sick to keep it up; or until the robbers outwit you. Also, you do have to sleep sometime.) This, in turn, means that a property claim is implicitly a claim to benefit from the efforts of others and not merely a claim on others’ restraint. Property is a positive right and not merely a negative right.
As such, making property claims involves a certain degree of “using others as a means to one’s own ends”. And if this is true, then the notion that violating property claims involves “using others as a means to one’s own ends” does not make much moral contrast with making property claims in the first place.
Private property is not a prerequisite to cooperation; private property is a form of cooperation. Making a property claim does require getting others to act for one’s own ends, but only out of recognition that doing so benefits themselves (possibly acausally). Treating private property claims as absolute, without regards for whether they benefit others, implies an absolute demand to use others as a means to one’s own ends. In scenarios where some greater (possibly acausal) benefit can be had by treating a property claim as less than absolute, that is the morally preferable alternative.
Well, my point was that this assumes a whole theory of property, and a specific one at that. There are others.
It seemed like your point earlier was that my argument lacked a proof that using others’ property also meant using others. The point you bring up now is, as I understand it, that while it may be true that stealing the property of others amounts to treating them as merely means for ones own end—another, equally plausible, view of property amounts to the view that simply owning property is the same as merely using others for one’s own end.
The argument states that if I own something I depend on others in two ways: first, that they don’t take my property, and second, that they assist in defending my property from those who would steal it from me. Both (or at least one) of these actions are positive rights, and when I claim my property I claim certain positive actions from others, that is I claim “to benefit from the efforts of others”. Thus, I am treating others as mere means to an end.
To summarize, the argument you present says two important things:
1) Property rights does not depend solely on people not doing something, but also that they do something.
2) Property is protected by a positive right that I expect people to uphold, or that, as a matter of fact, property is in today’s society (or necessarily?) upheld by forcing people to pay for that protection.
I believe that the first point is somewhat mistaken, and the second point (which I’m not sure I have interpreted correctly) is irrelevant, in that it is not a necessary feature of property.
(1) Is correct if one assumes that there are some people who actually steal property. If it is not the case the one does not depend on others cooperation, but merely their refraining from initiating force.
(2): To some extent one is dependent on state-backed force, because there is state-backed force (if there weren’t we’d live in a stateless society, probably something as described by David Friedman and Bruce L. Benson). But you are incorrect that having property is a claim on others, as a demanding claim. That is because property can be uphold by exchange, by me hiring others in defending my property or catching the thieves responsible. That is, upholding property can be like any other voluntary (among those who favor property, at least) activity. And, if you go back to the definition of theft, it was precisely taking others belonging without their consent.
So, theft of property is necessarily involuntary—but upholding property is not. In today’s society it may be upheld by force, and one may be dependent on it, but only because that force exist in the first place.
(1) Is correct if one assumes that there are some people who actually steal property. If it is not the case the one does not depend on others cooperation, but merely their refraining from initiating force.
One of the points I presented that you didn’t address is that other people in society teach their kids that stealing is bad and they shouldn’t do it. They don’t merely help to enforce your property claims; they also communicate and teach your property claims. This is the means by which you can count on almost everyone refraining from violating your property claims. Why is theft scarce enough that you can conceive of defending against it, instead of being so common that it is nameless? Why does the concept of “property” bear any weight at all? Because lots of people expend effort to make it so.
(Anticipated rebuttal: “The concept of property is part of human nature, or otherwise obvious; it is not socially constructed. It is available to people [for instance by introspection] and doesn’t have to be taught.” Responses: ① If so, why do we spend so much effort teaching it? ② People claim all sorts of things are inherently or obviously true in defiance of the observed fact that these things are controversial. ③ Even if the concept of property were inherent or obvious, that doesn’t mean that the specific sorts of property claims that are found in a specific society do not have to be learned, as they differ from society to society.)
Respect for your property claims isn’t provided just by the threat of retaliatory force, but also by people’s training to recognize specific sorts of things as likely property. You don’t have to post a guard outside your house to instruct each passerby that your apple trees are private property and that stealing your apples is bad. That’s something you can assume almost everyone has learned — through the positive efforts of parents, teachers, etc. (Yes, you might lose a few apples to naughty kids, but you won’t lose nearly as many as if all your neighbors just assumed that those apples were free for the taking.)
You’ve also introduced the idea of “force”, creating an analogy between theft (simple removal of property) and violence (e.g. robbery at gunpoint). This is non-obvious and most explanations for it depend on the notion that a person’s property is some kind of extension of themselves — which, in this discussion, would be a circular argument since that is kind of what the whole topic is here.
(2): To some extent one is dependent on state-backed force, because there is state-backed force (if there weren’t we’d live in a stateless society, probably something as described by David Friedman and Bruce L. Benson). But you are incorrect that having property is a claim on others, as a demanding claim. That is because property can be uphold by exchange, by me hiring others in defending my property or catching the thieves responsible. That is, upholding property can be like any other voluntary (among those who favor property, at least) activity. And, if you go back to the definition of theft, it was precisely taking others belonging without their consent.
(Doing the steel-man thing: You might cite Nozick here, too.)
Hmm. If you hire people to defend your property claims, who are they going to hire to defend theirs? If the problem of property defense is so big that you need to employ others to do it, that suggests that there is a scarcity of property-defense-power, which means some people’s property gets defended and others’ property doesn’t. That would make it not an implementation of a universal human right, but rather a special privilege accruing to some individuals.
And if the problem of property defense is not that big — if it is actually feasible for everyone’s property claims to be respected; if the number of claims that actually require defending by force is actually quite small compared to the amount of property actually in circulation; if, in short, people usually treat property more like a human right and less like a special privilege — then that leads us to ask by what means this is so; as above.
If people could only be hired to defend your property at the cost of not being able to defend their own, and if they expected to take a loss thereby, then nobody would choose that employment. (Unless, of course, they were excluded from holding property themselves, i.e. they were slaves or serfs of some sort.) People who actually do hire people to defend their property, therefore, benefit from their employees being able to take confidence that in so doing they are probably not sacrificing their own property claims — in other words, that undefended property is still relatively safe; and this in turn is because theft is scarce.
In order for property to act like the sort of thing we call a universal human right, the concept of property has to be maintained through the efforts of others, and primarily not through force. Others have a good — but acausal — reason to do so; everyone benefits from being able to expect that generally they can leave their house (or go to sleep) and usually not get burgled. But this is not in the nature of a voluntary, causal exchange — like employment or ordinary trade, where each person chooses to cooperate on the basis of expected future value. People most of the time choose not to steal even when they know they could get away with it. Why? Because they have been taught to do so as a matter of morality. And you can count on that because of the efforts of others.
One of the points I presented that you didn’t address is that other people in society teach their kids that stealing is bad and they shouldn’t do it.
I believe that also goes under the rubric of voluntary action, so it does not constitute treating others as mere means for my own goal. Like, if you exchange with people or do anything voluntary together all of you consents to being used (if one wants to put it like that). The same with morality; if people teach their children to behave nice, and property is somewhat depended on that condition, it does not change the character of that social phenomenon, that it is voluntary.
This is crucial, because it is the involuntary nature of theft that makes thieves into the disrespecting beings that they are; it is what makes the action amount to treating others as merely means for one’s own end. You do not touch upon it except for one mere assertion that moral action is not voluntary (which I think is crazy, but please enlighten me if you want to go that way), so most of what you wrote does not immediately concern this point, so I will not comment on it.
You’ve also introduced the idea of “force”, creating an analogy between theft (simple removal of property) and violence (e.g. robbery at gunpoint).
“Initiation of force” is a specific concept within libertarian circles; it means negating negative rights, because it is the first action that can legitimately force a conflict into violence, or as just a name for illegitimate action against others. I used it for my convenience, and I thought the concept was well known.
I also used the phrase “state backed force”, was it that which you reffered to? That is the view that all legislation issued by the states are threats of violence for those who do not comply, which I believe is obvious upon reflection.
(Doing the steel-man thing: You might cite Nozick here, too.)
What do you mean? Nozick wasn’t a market anarchist.
This seems to presume that using others’ property as a means to an end constitutes using others so, which seems dangerously close to question-begging the whole issue.
Yes, it was an implicit assumption of what I wrote; if A takes the property that belongs to B then A is using B as a mere means to his own ends. Or, to take an example, that should be appropriate, when the government collects taxes from a producer they’re using that producer as a cash-cow to fund their own projects, that is treating him/her as a means to their own ends.
So, while an implicit assumption in the comment I made, it is nevertheless true that the thief is using others as mere means for his/her own end.
Well, my point was that this assumes a whole theory of property, and a specific one at that. There are others.
For instance, here is a contrary model; I am describing it, not necessarily endorsing it:
Describing a particular item or place as a specific person’s property implies the existence of a society that recognizes and enforces that property claim. Property claims aren’t enforced merely by the individuals making them, but by a whole society that teaches people to broadly respect them and has enforcement mechanisms to rein in those who don’t.
You can’t protect your property on your own, and you don’t really try. You depend on others’ cooperation — not merely that they will exercise restraint in not taking your property, but that they will (for instance) teach their children that it is wrong to steal, look askance at someone who cuts across your yard, consider a burglar who robs you to be a threat to them as well, actively participate in a criminal-justice system that imprisons the burglar, and so on.
After all, if all of society stopped teaching their children that it was wrong to steal, your property claim would not be enforceable for long. (Self-defense? That works until the moment you are too injured or sick to keep it up; or until the robbers outwit you. Also, you do have to sleep sometime.) This, in turn, means that a property claim is implicitly a claim to benefit from the efforts of others and not merely a claim on others’ restraint. Property is a positive right and not merely a negative right.
As such, making property claims involves a certain degree of “using others as a means to one’s own ends”. And if this is true, then the notion that violating property claims involves “using others as a means to one’s own ends” does not make much moral contrast with making property claims in the first place.
Private property is not a prerequisite to cooperation; private property is a form of cooperation. Making a property claim does require getting others to act for one’s own ends, but only out of recognition that doing so benefits themselves (possibly acausally). Treating private property claims as absolute, without regards for whether they benefit others, implies an absolute demand to use others as a means to one’s own ends. In scenarios where some greater (possibly acausal) benefit can be had by treating a property claim as less than absolute, that is the morally preferable alternative.
It seemed like your point earlier was that my argument lacked a proof that using others’ property also meant using others. The point you bring up now is, as I understand it, that while it may be true that stealing the property of others amounts to treating them as merely means for ones own end—another, equally plausible, view of property amounts to the view that simply owning property is the same as merely using others for one’s own end.
The argument states that if I own something I depend on others in two ways: first, that they don’t take my property, and second, that they assist in defending my property from those who would steal it from me. Both (or at least one) of these actions are positive rights, and when I claim my property I claim certain positive actions from others, that is I claim “to benefit from the efforts of others”. Thus, I am treating others as mere means to an end.
To summarize, the argument you present says two important things:
1) Property rights does not depend solely on people not doing something, but also that they do something. 2) Property is protected by a positive right that I expect people to uphold, or that, as a matter of fact, property is in today’s society (or necessarily?) upheld by forcing people to pay for that protection.
I believe that the first point is somewhat mistaken, and the second point (which I’m not sure I have interpreted correctly) is irrelevant, in that it is not a necessary feature of property.
(1) Is correct if one assumes that there are some people who actually steal property. If it is not the case the one does not depend on others cooperation, but merely their refraining from initiating force.
(2): To some extent one is dependent on state-backed force, because there is state-backed force (if there weren’t we’d live in a stateless society, probably something as described by David Friedman and Bruce L. Benson). But you are incorrect that having property is a claim on others, as a demanding claim. That is because property can be uphold by exchange, by me hiring others in defending my property or catching the thieves responsible. That is, upholding property can be like any other voluntary (among those who favor property, at least) activity. And, if you go back to the definition of theft, it was precisely taking others belonging without their consent.
So, theft of property is necessarily involuntary—but upholding property is not. In today’s society it may be upheld by force, and one may be dependent on it, but only because that force exist in the first place.
One of the points I presented that you didn’t address is that other people in society teach their kids that stealing is bad and they shouldn’t do it. They don’t merely help to enforce your property claims; they also communicate and teach your property claims. This is the means by which you can count on almost everyone refraining from violating your property claims. Why is theft scarce enough that you can conceive of defending against it, instead of being so common that it is nameless? Why does the concept of “property” bear any weight at all? Because lots of people expend effort to make it so.
(Anticipated rebuttal: “The concept of property is part of human nature, or otherwise obvious; it is not socially constructed. It is available to people [for instance by introspection] and doesn’t have to be taught.” Responses: ① If so, why do we spend so much effort teaching it? ② People claim all sorts of things are inherently or obviously true in defiance of the observed fact that these things are controversial. ③ Even if the concept of property were inherent or obvious, that doesn’t mean that the specific sorts of property claims that are found in a specific society do not have to be learned, as they differ from society to society.)
Respect for your property claims isn’t provided just by the threat of retaliatory force, but also by people’s training to recognize specific sorts of things as likely property. You don’t have to post a guard outside your house to instruct each passerby that your apple trees are private property and that stealing your apples is bad. That’s something you can assume almost everyone has learned — through the positive efforts of parents, teachers, etc. (Yes, you might lose a few apples to naughty kids, but you won’t lose nearly as many as if all your neighbors just assumed that those apples were free for the taking.)
You’ve also introduced the idea of “force”, creating an analogy between theft (simple removal of property) and violence (e.g. robbery at gunpoint). This is non-obvious and most explanations for it depend on the notion that a person’s property is some kind of extension of themselves — which, in this discussion, would be a circular argument since that is kind of what the whole topic is here.
(Doing the steel-man thing: You might cite Nozick here, too.)
Hmm. If you hire people to defend your property claims, who are they going to hire to defend theirs? If the problem of property defense is so big that you need to employ others to do it, that suggests that there is a scarcity of property-defense-power, which means some people’s property gets defended and others’ property doesn’t. That would make it not an implementation of a universal human right, but rather a special privilege accruing to some individuals.
And if the problem of property defense is not that big — if it is actually feasible for everyone’s property claims to be respected; if the number of claims that actually require defending by force is actually quite small compared to the amount of property actually in circulation; if, in short, people usually treat property more like a human right and less like a special privilege — then that leads us to ask by what means this is so; as above.
If people could only be hired to defend your property at the cost of not being able to defend their own, and if they expected to take a loss thereby, then nobody would choose that employment. (Unless, of course, they were excluded from holding property themselves, i.e. they were slaves or serfs of some sort.) People who actually do hire people to defend their property, therefore, benefit from their employees being able to take confidence that in so doing they are probably not sacrificing their own property claims — in other words, that undefended property is still relatively safe; and this in turn is because theft is scarce.
In order for property to act like the sort of thing we call a universal human right, the concept of property has to be maintained through the efforts of others, and primarily not through force. Others have a good — but acausal — reason to do so; everyone benefits from being able to expect that generally they can leave their house (or go to sleep) and usually not get burgled. But this is not in the nature of a voluntary, causal exchange — like employment or ordinary trade, where each person chooses to cooperate on the basis of expected future value. People most of the time choose not to steal even when they know they could get away with it. Why? Because they have been taught to do so as a matter of morality. And you can count on that because of the efforts of others.
I believe that also goes under the rubric of voluntary action, so it does not constitute treating others as mere means for my own goal. Like, if you exchange with people or do anything voluntary together all of you consents to being used (if one wants to put it like that). The same with morality; if people teach their children to behave nice, and property is somewhat depended on that condition, it does not change the character of that social phenomenon, that it is voluntary.
This is crucial, because it is the involuntary nature of theft that makes thieves into the disrespecting beings that they are; it is what makes the action amount to treating others as merely means for one’s own end. You do not touch upon it except for one mere assertion that moral action is not voluntary (which I think is crazy, but please enlighten me if you want to go that way), so most of what you wrote does not immediately concern this point, so I will not comment on it.
“Initiation of force” is a specific concept within libertarian circles; it means negating negative rights, because it is the first action that can legitimately force a conflict into violence, or as just a name for illegitimate action against others. I used it for my convenience, and I thought the concept was well known.
I also used the phrase “state backed force”, was it that which you reffered to? That is the view that all legislation issued by the states are threats of violence for those who do not comply, which I believe is obvious upon reflection.
What do you mean? Nozick wasn’t a market anarchist.