LSUnKaty
| Favorite team: | LSU  |
| Location: | Katy, TX |
| Biography: | UNO Grad, LSU Fan |
| Interests: | |
| Occupation: | |
| Number of Posts: | 4946 |
| Registered on: | 12/16/2008 |
| Online Status: | Not Online |
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I work in IT. UNO Grad - MS CompSci 1991!
Political philosophy is a hobby of mine, and this thread happened to hit on territory I know something about - although I still have a lot to learn.
"The Law" is a favorite of mine. I would encourage you to finish it. It's essential reading in free market and political economy thinking, and holds up quite well for a book written in the 19th century.
Political philosophy is a hobby of mine, and this thread happened to hit on territory I know something about - although I still have a lot to learn.
"The Law" is a favorite of mine. I would encourage you to finish it. It's essential reading in free market and political economy thinking, and holds up quite well for a book written in the 19th century.
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quote:Safety from what, exactly?
general desire to be safe
The minute you start talking about the things law can legitimately protect against you are making rights claims.
Safety is not a neutral biological preference. It's a normative claim about what others may and may not do to you.
quote:Anything can exist independently of anything else hypothetically. That's not an argument.
Laws can exist without rights, hypothetically speaking
In this case, law without rights grounding is simply the commands of whoever holds power, enforceable by force alone. And that's not a hypothetical, it's a description of every tyranny in history.
The question is whether such commands deserve the name law in any meaningful moral sense, or whether they are merely lawful coercion within an administrative framework.
quote:THis amounts to saying rights only matter when they can be enforced. But the need for enforcement concedes the point because it presupposes that something worth protecting was already there.
But rights, even as a concept, are unnecessary without laws
quote:Without rights, why would the question of laws even surface?
Without laws, why would the question of rights even surface?
quote:Don't abandon it. It's short enough to finish in a sitting.
I might abandon Bastiat
It's a genuine classic in the classical liberal tradition, and despite its length covers ground that many longer works don't match for clarity. I've read it multiple times and found something new each time. I tend to skip past the dated examples and focus on the philosophical core, which derives the proper function of law directly from premises about human nature and rights that remain largely defensible today.
Even if you're not sympathetic to classical liberal notions of natural law and negative rights, it's essential reading. The argument is stated so cleanly that it forces you to identify exactly where you disagree and why.
The person who knows only their own side of the argument knows little even of that, as someone, I think Mill, said.
quote:I think the issue may becomes clearer if we step back and ask what property is for at the most basic level.
Earlier in the thread I said that inheritance seems like just a convenient way to dispose of someone else's stuff. If it were really about "honoring" the wishes of the dead, wouldn't we all leave elaborate lists of how we want the world to look after we're gone that would be binding? I appreciate the thoughtful engagement and I hope my response doesn't seem adversarial or anything. I'm just trying to work this out.
I contend that property is not merely a social convenience for allocating objects but that it arises from the temporal nature of human survival. Human beings don't survive moment to moment, we survive by planning, producing, storing, improving, exchanging, and preserving resources across time. In that sense, property rights derive from self-ownership and the right of survival. If I own myself, I must also have some claim to the products of my labor, because labor is the exercise of myself in the world. And if survival requires acting today for the sake of tomorrow, then property cannot be reduced to mere present possession, it must include the ability to control resources over time. This is not arbitrary. It reflects the practical reality of temporal survival in a world of scarce resources.
Death creates a genuine problem. The person disappears, but the resources, obligations, dependencies, and competing claims do not. The stuff still there. The debts, contracts, tenants, employees, family dependencies, and accumulated labor all remain even though the original owner no longer exists.
So the question is not simply 'why should we honor the wishes of the dead?' The dead can no longer use, enjoy, or benefit from property. But that doesn't mean the claim becomes meaningless the instant the person dies. If property is the institution by which human beings project their labor and survival needs across time, then any coherent property system must have some rule for what happens when the current holder exits that system.
Inheritance is one such rule, and it is not best understood as sentimental obedience to will of a dead person. It is a mechanism for preserving continuity of title across the discontinuity of persons. If title simply evaporates at death, property collapses back toward mere possession. The system loses its temporal continuity. That is not a morally better arrangement. It merely replaces ordered succession with contestability.
To your specific point, that we don't leave binding instructions about everything we care about after death, my answer is that we don't need to. The inheritance question isn't about the full range of a person's wishes and preferences. It's about a narrower and more concrete question: what happens to valid property claims when the holder dies? The answer requires a rule. The relevant question is which rule best preserves the moral and functional basis of property: the right of human beings to sustain themselves through time by controlling the fruits of their labor. Voluntary transfer to chosen successors is the answer most consistent with that foundation.
I hope this is not too long winded and doesn't seem adversarial either!
re: Next Shoe to Drop in SPLC Fiasco
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/24/26 at 11:28 am to SlowFlowPro
quote:That's right.
SPLC giving money to leftist groups is 100% on brand.
I thought they were getting in trouble for funding right-wing groups. :dunno:
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/24/26 at 10:02 am to SlowFlowPro
quote:This is just a distraction.
Not to get too communist, but their distinction in private property and personal property is probably also applicable for this conversation. I think the examples being cited are primarily what would fall into personal property and not private property.
Yes, Marxists draw a distinction between "personal" property (clothes, tools) and "private" property (ownership of the means of production), but it's difficult to see how hunter-gatherers could meaningfully draw that distinction, nor do I see such a distinction drawn in this thread - the discussions seems to be centered around "personal" property more than "means of production" kinds.
And I would also note that the distinction doesn't affect my argument, because if property rights are grounded in the temporal dimension of human survival (planning, producing, storing, building) as I have said, then that logic justifies ownership of both personal and private property as distinguished above. A man who makes a tool and a man who builds a factory are doing the same thing just at different scales.
The difference is one of degree, not of kind, and drawing a moral line between them requires a separate argument based on the labor theory of value and a misunderstanding of voluntary exchange, both of which I know you reject.
quote::confused:
Called it
ETA: I did see that you referred to communal property, so that was discussed in this thread.
But the existence of communal ownership doesn't refute property rights as a concept per se. Communal property is property. A tribe that collectively defends hunting grounds against other tribes is exercising property rights on things held collectively rather than individually.
quote:My post was in response to your claim that history shows private property is not necessary for survival, not to address anything else you added later, like Bastiat, Locke, or modern liberal conceptions of property or property rights.
The evidence cited supports the existence of
“Mine.”
Conceptions are context dependent, certainly hunter-gatherers did not have similar conceptions of parasites or bacteria as we do today but they still knew that would get sick and maybe die if they drank rancid water or ate spoiled raw meat.
Your distinction between 'mine now' and 'mine even when not in use' is real, but hunter-gatherers didn't need to articulate a theory of persistent ownership any more than they needed germ theory to know that rancid meat would kill them.
The functional reality preceded the conceptual framework. A man who gathers food, stores it, and defends it against others is operating under the logic of persistent ownership, whatever language he uses to describe it, or whether he describes it at all.
The concept doesn't require philosophical articulation to be operative. It requires only that people act consistently with it, which the evidence shows they did.
I'm not an expert on Anthropology, Archaeology, or Developmental psychology so I asked Claude:
Then I plugged that into ChatGPT and asked for it's assessment. Here was it's bottom line:
quote:
Anthropology and ethnography give the most direct evidence. Detailed studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies — the !Kung San, the Hadza, Australian Aboriginal groups — consistently document personal ownership of tools, weapons, and clothing. These aren't inferences; they're observed and recorded. Individuals make, use, and are buried with personal possessions. Violation of those informal claims produces recognizable social responses — conflict, restitution, ostracism.
Archaeology supports it too. Grave goods are among the oldest and most consistent findings in the human record — individuals buried with their tools, ornaments, and weapons, distinguished from others. That practice presupposes a concept of personal ownership sufficiently shared that the community enacts it in burial ritual.
Developmental psychology adds another angle: children develop a sense of "mine" before they can speak, well before any legal or cultural instruction takes hold. The concept appears to be part of the cognitive architecture, not a cultural imposition.
No ethnographic record describes a society where individuals had no personal possessions whatsoever.
Then I plugged that into ChatGPT and asked for it's assessment. Here was it's bottom line:
quote:
If you bracket off modern legal regimes and focus only on whether humans in non-state societies recognized socially enforced claims over personal objects, then the statement is mostly strong and defensible.
“Detailed studies … consistently document personal ownership of tools, weapons, and clothing.” - That is true.
And:
“Violation of those informal claims produces recognizable social responses.” - Also true and important. Social enforcement is enough to establish a norm of possession or ownership even absent formal institutions.
And:
“No ethnographic record describes a society where individuals had no personal possessions whatsoever.” - That is, as far as anthropology knows, basically correct.
quote:Because honoring a prior disposition isn't about ongoing authority. The act, their transfer instruction, was completed by a living agent. We're not obeying the dead. We're completing a transaction that was legitimately initiated.
How are these different?
Would you say that if someone knew they were dying in 1 hour and they initiated transactions to transfer all their wealth to someone else, any transactions that didn't complete before they actually died should be expunged and not go through?
quote:Because the moral weight was never located in the deceased's ongoing interests. It was located in two places: the living person's right to dispose of what was theirs, and the legitimate interests of the living beneficiaries who are the actual recipients of the transfer.
But that person doesn't exist anymore. They cannot be harmed by our refusal to complete the transfer. They can't be benefited from our fulfillment of the transfer.
quote:Working from memory, but in an earlier post I think you stated something like: 'something can be a made up and still be real - like money'.
I am pointing out that identifying something as a social construct isn't an appeal to socialism or communism.
When you said 'something can be made up and still be real' I took you to be using 'real' to mean causally effective or functionally consequential. But I believe the person you were responding to was using 'real' to mean mind-independent, existing whether or not humans think about it. Both are legitimate senses of the word but they're different, and sliding between them doesn't meaningful address his argument.
In another post you said 'something can be legitimate and still be a social construct', but that's a loaded statement because almost anything can be described as a social construct. Our frameworks for understanding nature, science, and morality all emerge from human cognition, much of it transmitted socially. If everything qualifies, the category carries no philosophical weight. (setting aside the multiple meanings of “Legitimate”, permitted by law, justified or fair, real or not fake, accepted as rightful - and it's normative status)
The interesting question isn't whether something is socially constructed but whether it corresponds to something that exists independently of human agreement - or whether it is only the agreement, with nothing underneath it.
Your reply: "I am pointing out that identifying something as a social construct isn't an appeal to socialism or communism", while it certainly may be true, doesn't help me understand what you actually mean by the phrase "social construct".
I'm not suggesting bad faith, that's why I asked for an example of something that is not a social construct so I can maybe understand how you are using the term and avoid potentially talking past each other.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 1:51 pm to AllbyMyRelf
quote:Granted — but doesn't the prohibition on using others as mere means ultimately rest on the fact that they have a claim to their own body and the products of their labor that you cannot override? Whether you ground that claim in self-ownership or in the idea that each person belongs to God and therefore cannot belong to you, the practical conclusion is identical: no one has the right to direct another person's existence toward their own ends.
Regarding slavery—I don’t view slavery as evil because it’s a violation of self ownership. I view it as evil because it is treating someone with a separate purpose (telos) as something to be directed to my own ends.
The theological framing is coherent — if God is the source and owner of each life, that still prohibits anyone else from owning it. The slave owner's error on your account is the same as on mine: wrongful appropriation of something that isn't his.
From a political philosophy standpoint the two views converge almost entirely. The meaningful divergence is narrow — suicide, and perhaps a few other cases where a person's choices affect only themselves. That's a real disagreement, but it doesn't touch the core of what we've been discussing. On property rights, plunder, and the wrongness of slavery, we're describing the same structure from different foundations.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 1:38 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:I answered that in my post.
The 200-300 thousand years prior to society developing about 6-12k years ago
quote:We know from anthropology, archaeology, and developmental psychology.
How would we ever know this?
The humans who live most like this now are much more communal and egalitarian than how we see modern society.
From Claude
quote:Your claim that pre-modern humans were more communal and egalitarian may be true, but communal use of land and shared resources coexisted with individual ownership of personal items.
Anthropology and ethnography give the most direct evidence. Detailed studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies — the !Kung San, the Hadza, Australian Aboriginal groups — consistently document personal ownership of tools, weapons, and clothing. These aren't inferences; they're observed and recorded. Individuals make, use, and are buried with personal possessions. Violation of those informal claims produces recognizable social responses — conflict, restitution, ostracism.
Archaeology supports it too. Grave goods are among the oldest and most consistent findings in the human record — individuals buried with their tools, ornaments, and weapons, distinguished from others. That practice presupposes a concept of personal ownership sufficiently shared that the community enacts it in burial ritual.
Developmental psychology adds another angle: children develop a sense of "mine" before they can speak, well before any legal or cultural instruction takes hold. The concept appears to be part of the cognitive architecture, not a cultural imposition.
No ethnographic record describes a society where individuals had no personal possessions whatsoever.
quote:The right of disposal isn't exercised after death, it's exercised before it, in the form of a will. Death is the execution date, not the moment of decision.
I acknowledge that we have built a society that accepts, protects and litigates property rights. I'm not suggesting any policy to deviate from that. I'm questioning the premise for posthumous disposal rights.
The person who writes a will is alive, rational, and exercising ownership in exactly the way your framework describes. The fact that the transfer completes after death does not change that.
You might want to say "why should the living be bound by the wishes of the dead?" But that misframes it. The question isn't whether the dead can obligate the living. It's whether the living person's prior disposition of their own property should be honored. We're not obeying the dead. We're completing a transfer the living person initiated.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 1:18 pm to AllbyMyRelf
quote:Same for the slave then also?
If I don’t own my dog and instead there’s some secret inner idea of ownership that’s completely different than any other idea of ownership, and seemingly unknowable by anyone else, then ultimately it doesn’t mean much.
Do you mean to say slavery was wrong because the law eventually changed? Or was the law wrong because slavery violated something that was already there - i.e. self-ownership?
For sure, the moral reality and the legal arrangement diverged, but we judge the legal arrangement by the moral reality, not the other way around.
If "ownership" means only what the law recognizes and enforces, then slavery wasn't wrong, it was just later repealed, and could be reinstated again if enough people say so. Is that your view?
If that conclusion is unacceptable, then you must admit that there is a meaningful sense of ownership that exists independently of legal recognition, political consensus, or external enforceability.
quote:I don't know if you are doing it purposefully, but you are taking liberties with language here and in other posts.
Is democracy not a social construct? Money? Capitalism?
Something can be legitimate and still be a social construct.
Can you give us an example of something that is not a social construct?
quote:Huh? How do we know that is not true? When did man ever survive without property rights?
Man didn't or can't exist or survive without private property or property rights?
We know that's not true.
Certainly you are not advocating for a return to hunter-gatherer society. But even then, they didn't lack property rights, they had informal ones. Personal tools, weapons, clothing, and food stores were recognized as belonging to individuals.
But my point was about survival across time. Hunter-gatherer existence is characterized by its inability to do just that at scale. So that does not refute the argument, rather it illustrates the problem of not having a system that operates efficiently towards survival over time.
Others in this thread seem to think you are trying to covertly advocate for communism. I'm not sure that's true, but to answer that briefly I would just point out that all communists society that ever actually existed did not eliminate property rights but instead just transferred them to the state. The question then is whether that arrangement produced human flourishing, and the historical answer is fairly unambiguous on that score.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 12:41 pm to AllbyMyRelf
quote:Are you sure about that?
As a matter of fact, it does not own itself.
Did slaves own themselves? They were coerced by force to obey, but does that coercion mean their innate understanding was wrong, or simply that it was being violated?
Dogs have a clear sense of agency and a clear orientation toward the future, they signal wants, hide food for later, and anticipate consequences. If that doesn't constitute some innate sense of 'this is mine, including my own body,' it's hard to know what would. The fact that someone paid a breeder for the dog doesn't do away with that.
Which is precisely the point. The purchased slave and the purchased dog both have an inner claim that the transaction doesn't touch. Whether you think that claim rises to the level of full self-ownership or something less, self-ownership can't simply be dismissed by pointing to the bill of sale.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 12:18 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:Not quite - but i guess it depends on what you mean by society (or the absence of society to be precise).
It sounds like you're describing man in society.
I do not see how property rights would be an issue for Robinson Crusoe on a desert island. There's no society there, but he would still need to plan, produce, and store for the future. He just would not need to deal with the possibility that someone else might decide to take everything he produced. So, he would have no need for property rights enforcement per se when he is alone, but the moment Friday arrives that changes. What society adds is not the underlying claim but the problem of enforcement.
If you mean a state of existence before formal collective or governing arrangements, I would say property rights would then be crucial. Even in a pre-social state, a person still needs to plan, produce, and build on what they've made in order to survive, if nothing more complex than holding onto the tools they made, having foregone other activities to make them.
So, in my view, The right precedes the institution that codifies it. Society makes the need for enforcement visible. It doesn't create the underlying claim.
re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Posted by LSUnKaty on 6/23/26 at 11:54 am to AllbyMyRelf
quote:This sounds like you are saying your dog does not have an innate understanding that it owns itself.
This does not follow from my original question of what if I don’t have an innate understanding that I own myself. My dog is not looking to get killed and also has survival instinct, but I own my dog, and I don’t think of dogs as having natural rights.
If so, I would argue that is up for debate.
quote:I'm confused by what is meant by "someone else's stuff" here.
someone else's stuff.
Surely we are talking about the actual owner of the stuff, not someone else.
Do you dispute the idea that someone has the right to dispose of their own stuff however they see fit?
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