That’s an unfortunate truth.

Forgive the facetiousness. — Virgo Avalytikh

But of course! I can hardly write parables at you and not expect some facetiousness in return. :smile:

On the understanding that that which is expropriated by taxation is the rightful property of her who is taxed, taxation would indeed be coercive, for precisely the same reason as theft and extortion are coercive. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is what we are arguing about. Whether we should accept this as a premise, and why. Holding the background fixed.

But this takes a good deal for granted. Your assumption seems to be that, if the State declares itself, by means of the law that the State itself produces, to own object x, then the State rightfully owns object x. Moreover, you seem to imply on one or two occasions that all ownership rights in general are what they are because the State declares them to be so. Perhaps you would want to refine this further, but since you haven’t, I am going to tease out some problems with this view. — Virgo Avalytikh

Yes. My view is that the social customs that define who owns what are sufficient to define who owns what. More formally, a person's property is defined by what the social customs of property say is their property. Sometimes there may be legal disputes over the specifics, but as a rough and ready characterisation, yes, this is my view. Who owns what is defined by social custom. What it means to own something is defined by social custom. I believe this is accurate to how property works in the world.

One problem with this view is that it gives rise to in-compossible property claims. If, as currently obtains, there is more than one State in the world, then they may both lay claim to one and the same object (a landmass, for instance), which would show the above principle to be deficient in establishing a rightful property claim. To counteract this, we may limit the State’s ‘expropriation powers’ only to a certain territory. This seems like a plausible move, since this is already how we think of States as being distinguished from one another. — Virgo Avalytikh

Yes. Because who owns what is defined by social custom, property claims are incompossible. That is, it may be the case that nations and groups and firms disagree about who owns what and it what way. This is a fact of life. When an oil company builds a pipeline on a reservation, there is an ownership dispute. This doesn't get resolved by who has the most moral claim, it usually gets resolved by who has the most power. That is, it gets resolved politically rather than conceptually, and usually there is a huge power asymmetry which is leveraged in the resolution.

These are not logical contradictions, "X claims P exclusively" and "Y claims P exclusively" entail no logical contradiction, just a political or legal dispute. I am not providing a moral justification of this, just a description of how things are. What happens will happen even if there is no argument for why it must be so.

This is consistent with my strategy of showing that what you're talking about has no basis in reality. You are attributing blame to the state (which still, apparently cannot exist) for failing to live up to an impossible standard (and failing to behave like another thing which cannot exist). It really is like humanity being torn between God and Devil.

The contingent character of coercion – or, as I would rather put it, the fact that the NAP is philosophically dependent upon a system of property rights – is an observation I have made enthusiastically elsewhere. I resist strongly the identification of the law which the State produces with ‘social norms’. This should not be surprising, given how anti-social I believe the State to be in its essence. If you really do wish to make this identification, then the consequence would seem to be that the State can never be a coercive institution, by definition: any ostensibly coercive act in which the State engages may be legitimised as the State doing as it wishes its own property, on the understanding that its property is what it is because the State has declared it to be so. — Virgo Avalytikh

It is extremely bizarre that you criticise the definition of property ownership through social customs like a state's laws on property ownership, but that you also think that the non aggression principle depends upon a social system of property rights. Presumably, in that system, whatever it is, who owns what on which basis and what ownership means is specified by the social code, such that owning something within that system is being in a situation of ownership as defined by the code!

Perhaps you are saying that ownership is defined entirely by social custom, but that different systems of ownership can be more or less coercive. Specifically, perhaps you are claiming that a system of ownership is non-coercive only when it satisfies the non-aggression principle.

To that end; I'll re ask a question from earlier which you dodged (or otherwise neglected to answer): a new resource is discovered in your ideal system, two distinct firms make a property claim for "productive transformation", how can you possibly establish which is right without defining ownership through the code and coercing the loser to back off?

Unfortunately for the Statist, it is difficult to give a non-question-begging account of why these persons in particular come to own this territory in particular. — Virgo Avalytikh

I'm perfectly happy to accept that ownership rights are typically coercive - they are enforceable claims! How in the hell are you going to have a system of property rights without each right in accordance with the social customs being a claim backed up by violence? How are property rights established in a non-coercive way in your ideal system? It must be possible for property rights to be established non-coercively in order for the claim "we ought establish property rights non-coercively" to make sense; ought implies can, therefore if it is impossible to abide by a standard we are not obliged to follow it!

In absence of spelling out how this mythical system of non-coercive property works, how to put the social customs in place to ensure they satisfy the non-aggression principle, what you're talking about does not function as standard to hold current property rights up to

I am not defending excesses of coercion here, I am recognising that legal codes are always coercive to some degree; they are enforceable claims. By virtue that if one fails to abide by them one suffers the consequences. Politics top to bottom is saturated by power; negotiations, leverage, the "continuation of politics by other means", subterfuge, sabotage etc etc. Firms need no hand outs from the state to fuck with each other as much as possible, it's all in the spirit of competition.

What would it take for me to be wrong about this? It would take my scrabble club’s having a ‘mind of its own’. When I and my co-scrabblers sit, the four of us, around our square table, what exactly do you think ‘emerges’? Have we now been joined by a ‘someone’, a 'who', that is not identifiable with any one of the four of us? It sounds like a séance to me. Forgive the facetiousness. — Virgo Avalytikh

You're missing a vital distinction, I'll try and spell it out formally. Say there is an aggregate A of individuals I. The individuals have a collection of properties, relations and functions (behavioural outputs) P(I), call these I type predicates. The aggregate has a collection of properties, relations and functions P(A), call these A type predicates.

Your claim amounts to the observation that I type predicates need not be a subset of A type predicates. Prosaically, individual predicates need not transfer to aggregates. I agree.

My claim amounts to A type predicates and I type predicates are distinct.

An example; the ability to communicate is an I type property. The ability to negotiate is an A type predicate. Laws are not I type predicates, laws are A type predicates.

A type predicates may depend existentially upon the presence of select I type predicates; writing requires hands. A type predicates need not be reducible to I type predicates: humans want, cells do not (non-reducible); gas molecules have speeds, gases have temperatures (average speeds, reducible in some sense).

For a given collection of individuals in an aggregate, can A type predicates constrain or promote I type predicates? Yes. Gas molecules have speeds but not enclosing volumes, decreasing the enclosing volume of the gas increases their temperature; the average speed of the gas molecules goes up. Does this require any specific change in gas molecule speeds? No, lots of speed distributions produce the same average.

In societies: an A type predicates like a system of ownership can promote an I type predicate like rent seeking behaviour. Does this require that any individual must rent seek? No, it makes it possible and advantageous; it introduces a statistical proclivity, just like decreasing the enclosing volume of a gas introduces a statistical proclivity for its molecules to speed up.

Do firms have A type predicates? Yes, they can change investment strategy or mandate the use of new technology. Does this mean that firms have minds? No. It does mean that firm structure can constrain or promote individual behaviour. Firms have properties like corporate personhood! Corporate persons can be legally responsible for things. That's a legal responsibility attributed to something which is not an agent. Update your metaphysics to accommodate this.

Firms have properties like corporate personhood! Corporate persons can be legally responsible for things. That's a legal responsibility attributed to something which is not an agent. Update your metaphysics to accommodate this. — fdrake

:brow:

I was with you til the above...

How did you get there from where you were?

How did you get there from where you were? — creativesoul

If agency is only applicable to humans, and legal responsibility is only applicable to entities with agency, then agency is only applicable to humans. No agency => No legal responsibility. Flip that about. Legal responsibility => agency. Firms themselves can be a party in legal contracts. So firms can be legally responsible for things.

I don't believe they have agency in the sense humans have agency, but they do have causal powers and their own kind of existence, recognised by law, distinct from each of their employees (you could change every employee with another and keep the legal responsibilities intact, though this is not necessarily independent from employee roles within the firm (who signs the contracts for the firm.)

Isn't there a missing premiss? Something like humans are the only entities with agency... then agency is only applicable to humans.

If that is the case, and firms have responsibility, then it is not the case that responsibility requires agency.

Isn't there a missing premiss? Something like humans are the only entities with agency... then agency is only applicable to humans. — creativesoul

Yeah, that makes sense. I think @Virgo Avalytikh's presentation suggests they agree with this premise.

Yes. My view is that the social customs that define who owns what are sufficient to define who owns what. More formally, a person's property is defined by what the social customs of property say is their property. Sometimes there may be legal disputes over the specifics, but as a rough and ready characterisation, yes, this is my view. Who owns what is defined by social custom. What it means to own something is defined by social custom. I believe this is accurate to how property works in the world. — fdrake

I have to confess some disappointment with how little you have engaged with the argument I presented. I have denied precisely the identification which you insist on making, between 'social customs' and 'the laws which the State produces'. The State is not 'us'; it is an association of persons who hold certain monopolistic privileges over an arbitrary territory. If you are going to insist on identifying 'social norms' with 'what is written on a piece of paper by these particular persons in this particular territory', then you must give an account of political legitimacy. That is, you must address, which you have as yet neglected to do, the two questions I posed previously regarding the State's expropriation powers:

‘Why may these persons, in distinction from all other persons, do so?’ and ‘Why may they do so over this landmass, in distinction from all other landmasses?’

However, I have argued that attempts to do so end up being circular. You seem to have ignored this problem completely, even though it is fatal for the position for which you are arguing. The State is not legitimate, so the view that 'rightful property claims are what they are because that is what the State declares them to be' is false.

It is also surprising for you to resort to this avenue of argumentation. My initial impression was that you were sympathetic to my libertarian critique of the State, but felt that I ought to widen my critique to private firms. Now, it seems, you are arguing for straightforward authoritarianism: rightful property claims are determined by social norms (this is fine), social norms just are the content of the pieces of paper the State writes on, so everyone rightfully owns what they own because that is what the State declares them to own. As I pointed out above, this really implies that the State owns everything within the territory in question, for everyone else's 'ownership rights' are only ever provisional, and are potentially expropriated by the State at any time.

Apart from the fact that this view is not remotely plausible (you haven't actually presented an argument for it, that I have seen), and ends up being formally circular (as I laid out in my previous post), it is also a hugely unattractive view, which is why I am so surprised to see you resorting to it. It would entail that the firm's power structure really is justified, because everyone involved is simply exercising their own government-granted property rights. Is this really the result for which you were aiming?

Yes. Because who owns what is defined by social custom, property claims are incompossible. That is, it may be the case that nations and groups and firms disagree about who owns what and it what way. — fdrake

The very purpose of a system of rights is to determine who may do what, and when. A system of rights which gives rise to in-compossible results is simply not fit for purpose. That is not to say that there cannot be competing claims, but what a system of rights is intended to do is to distinguish the rightful from the non-rightful claims. My point is that there are principled ways of doing this which give rise to a set of compossible rights, and there are ways of doing this which do not, and the latter are unfit for purpose.

It is extremely bizarre that you criticise the definition of property ownership through social customs — fdrake

I do not. I have objected, with no small amount of philosophical rigour, to the identification of 'social customs' with the State's edicts. Government and society are not the same. It is not us.

I'm perfectly happy to accept that ownership rights are typically coercive - they are enforceable claims! How in the hell are you going to have a system of property rights without each right in accordance with the social customs being a claim backed up by violence? How are property rights established in a non-coercive way in your ideal system? It must be possible for property rights to be established non-coercively in order for the claim "we ought establish property rights non-coercively" to make sense; ought implies can, therefore if it is impossible to abide by a standard we are not obliged to follow it! — fdrake

There is a linguistic issue which ought to be cleared up. When I speak of 'coercion', I am referring to violations of the non-aggression principle. The NAP distinguishes between forceful acts which are initiatory, and those which are not (those, for instance, which are defensive or consensual). In order to make this crucial distinction, there must be a system of property rights. For this reason, it is putting the cart before the horse to describe systems of ownership as being more or less coercive; actions are coercive, and it is only on the basis of a system of ownership that they may be judged as such. What is more, if we acknowledge that there are ways of using force which do not violate the NAP, we are in a position to address the following kind of question:

a new resource is discovered in your ideal system, two distinct firms make a property claim for "productive transformation", how can you possibly establish which is right without defining ownership through the code and coercing the loser to back off? — fdrake

Rights are indeed enforceable. I have the right to turn down offers of employment, and I am prepared to enforce this right. If you try to coerce me into working for you, without my consent, then I may (and will) use force to defend my property (I am assuming that my body is my own rightful property). But this does not make me a coercer. To say that it does is to fail to allow the distinction which the libertarian makes when she invokes the NAP.

So, anyone may transform the land, in whole or in part. They are then within their rights to resort to force to defend their property.

Your claim amounts to the observation that I type predicates need not be a subset of A type predicates. Prosaically, individual predicates need not transfer to aggregates. I agree.

My claim amounts to A type predicates and I type predicates are distinct.

An example; the ability to communicate is an I type property. The ability to negotiate is an A type predicate. Laws are not I type predicates, laws are A type predicates.

A type predicates may depend existentially upon the presence of select I type predicates; writing requires hands. A type predicates need not be reducible to I type predicates: humans want, cells do not (non-reducible); gas molecules have speeds, gases have temperatures (average speeds, reducible in some sense).

For a given collection of individuals in an aggregate, can A type predicates constrain or promote I type predicates? Yes. Gas molecules have speeds but not enclosing volumes, decreasing the enclosing volume of the gas increases their temperature; the average speed of the gas molecules goes up. Does this require any specific change in gas molecule speeds? No, lots of speed distributions produce the same average.

In societies: an A type predicates like a system of ownership can promote an I type predicate like rent seeking behaviour. Does this require that any individual must rent seek? No, it makes it possible and advantageous; it introduces a statistical proclivity, just like decreasing the enclosing volume of a gas introduces a statistical proclivity for its molecules to speed up. — fdrake

I actually see very little here that I would disagree with. But, nor do I see anything which looks particularly threatening to my thesis. What I said is true: my four-membered scrabble club is not joined by a fifth agent, with plans and purposes of its own, hovering above us when we gather, and spontaneously dispersing when we go home. You seem to be exaggerating my fairly innocuous observation into something far more ambitious, for which I have not argued, like 'aggregations can't have properties or causal powers'.

Firms have properties like corporate personhood! Corporate persons can be legally responsible for things. That's a legal responsibility attributed to something which is not an agent. Update your metaphysics to accommodate this. — fdrake

This, though, is a very poor argument. Are you really suggesting that the pieces of paper on which the State writes determines metaphysics? Are you really saying that things which would otherwise be non-persons become persons because the State writes on a piece of paper that they are? Are there any constrains on this? And, more pressingly, does the reverse also hold true? If the members of the set 'person' are just those things which the State declares to be persons, then I am sure that I do not need to remind of you the dangers of this.

So, no, corporations are not persons, and the State does not have the power to render them persons by legal fiat. It is a legal fiction.

f you are going to insist on identifying 'social norms' with 'what is written on a piece of paper by these particular persons in this particular territory', then you must give an account of political legitimacy. — Virgo Avalytikh

Why do I have to give an account of political legitimacy? I've never been arguing that states or markets are inherently moral institutions, I've been arguing that your criticisms of them are incoherent.

There's no more to a system of property rights than how it's set out in the law and how that law's enforced. A claim that you seem to believe, as you seem to believe that ownership is determined by social systems. The law is certainly a social system that determines who owns what. So, the state has the benefit of actually existing here, your proposed social system does not, it provides no enforceable claims to property, it cannot decide what is expropriative and what isn't.

I've never been arguing that "We ought to follow every law because it's written on a piece of paper" or "We ought to follow every social norm because it's there", I've been arguing that what it means for a person to be subject to a law is to be in the territory of a governing body, or other social form, that has that as its law. Laws are social customs, in the sense that laws are a subset of social customs, they can be changed. They're codes. Ought one follow a law? Depends on the law. Ought one follow a mandate from a political body? Depends on the mandate. The normative force follows both from social customs (the widespread belief and teaching that we should follow the social codes, which includes the law, and so includes private property) and from some social customs being enforceable claims (when they're laws). This says nothing about whether the social customs, laws, states, etc are somehow "legitimate" or "moral".

What it does say, however, is that how you're criticising them is based on category errors. If a law or social custom holds, it holds whether it is moral or not. Ought it not hold if it is not moral? Sure. Ought it not hold if it not holding for a specified reason cannot happen? No, ought implies can, cannot implies not ought. My argument strategy has been to show that what you're talking about couldn't possibly happen, or is based in category errors. Hence the argument about what it means to own something being solely a legal matter, or a matter of social custom.

I do not. I have objected, with no small amount of philosophical rigour, to the identification of 'social customs' with the State's edicts. Government and society are not the same. It is not us. — Virgo Avalytikh

You're right, governments aren't identical with the societies that they're in. Governments are (minimally) a collection of legislative bodies in a society.

Why I've been arguing is because if laws are social customs, private property is also a social custom. What you own and how you own it is determined by the laws that apply to where you live. There's no further sense of ownership for private property above and beyond how the law says private property works. Does that mean how people own things and who owns what is moral in any particular social system? No. It does mean that an impossible social system (such as you've described or elided to describe), where property ownership is not just legally mandated social relationship irrelevant of how moral it is or how expropriate it is is an inappropriate standard to judge societies by, by virtue of being logically contradictory.

Does the government own your tax?
Yes.
Is it expropriating your property when you pay it?
No.

When a loan shark legally reclaims all your stuff for failed repayments, are they expropriating your property?
No.
Because the law entitles them to reclaim their damages from what you own, they have their choice of what you own up to a specified value. They already owned it.

That is, in neither circumstance, no one is violating any property rights, because they're defined by the law.

When two people claim ownership for the same thing in a legal dispute, do they have conflicting items of property?
No, they have conflicting property claims. Who owns the thing is decided in the legal dispute. If the second person won, and the first person was preventing the second from access, maybe the first person has to pay damages, because the second person already owned it.

That's all there is to ownership of commercial private property. It's determined by the law, which is a kind of social custom - albeit a social custom that few affected by it can change. Your use of "expropriation" and the like are merely poetic (insofar as laws are sufficient to define who owns what!)

Are you really suggesting that the pieces of paper on which the State writes determines metaphysics? — Virgo Avalytikh

No, it's our capacity to form social institutions that can be held responsible for things that makes such a thing a necessary part of our social ontology. As far as the law goes, corporations are legal persons; they can be held legally responsible for things. What I'm doing is feeding facts like that into entailments you've suggested to show they're incoherent.

If your claim goes: "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X has a mind", then corporations have minds because they are held legally responsible for things. If your claim goes "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X is an agent", then I guess corporations are agents, so agents need not be humans at all.



In general, you continue to criticise the state for failing to behave the same as something which does not and cannot exist, you agree that who owns what is determined by a system of property rights - like our system of property law - but you continue to criticise the state for "expropriating" what it already owns by that standard.

If anything, I'd hope that you pay your taxes with glee now, now that you know you're giving someone their own property back when they demand it. Hell, you are initiating force when you deprive them of their property! Non-aggression requires you pay it.

So, anyone may transform the land, in whole or in part. They are then within their rights to resort to force to defend their property. — Virgo Avalytikh

Indeed! The owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline were well within their rights to beat the shit out of protestors and Native American land residents on the land to defend their property. The protestors, in an attempt to deprive the firm of what was rightfully theirs, initiated brutal force. It was only right for protestors to be stripped naked and ogled by police, beaten and pepper sprayed, consistent with the defending the property rights of who rightfully owned the property. The violence of police was not coercive as they did not initiate it, the fault goes to the protestors and Native American residents. The owners were only defending themselves.

But you are right, in an ideal world, the State would not have provided police officers, the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline would have hired a mercenary group, or hired a private security firm, for a modest sum, who spend their time freely due to agreeing to the contract. Strictly speaking, these mercenaries could never have been coercive, as they did not initiate the violence. They were simply protecting the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline's right to transform the land...

There's no more to a system of property rights than how it's set out in the law and how that law's enforced. — fdrake

This is not true. In my original post, I cited an article of David Friedman’s, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’, in which he argues – convincingly, to my mind – that a set of non-overlapping rights domains, as well as a set of self-enforcing contracts, can be bargained up to in the absence of centralised State dictum; indeed, without any communication at all. He also makes a case for this in the 3rd edition of The Machinery of Freedom. He gave a short lecture to this effect in 2018 (unfortunately I could not attend this one, although I did see him speak at my university that same year): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORLmB57zrc

A claim that you seem to believe, as you seem to believe that ownership is determined by social systems. The law is certainly a social system that determines who owns what. — fdrake

No, this does not follow, logically. It is fallacious to argue as follows: ‘Rights are produced by social norms; laws are social norms; therefore rights are produced by laws.’ It is fallacious because, even if it is the case that rights are produced by social norms, this does not imply that they are produced by just any kind of social norms. That is like arguing, ‘Heat is produced by chemical reactions; dissolving ammonium chloride in water is a chemical reaction; therefore dissolving ammonium chloride in water produces heat’. But it doesn’t.

So, in order to make the argument formally valid, we must add a premise: we must have some reason for thinking that the laws which the State produces are adequate to generate property rights. This is why I am pressing you on the question of legitimacy. Unless you can give a (non-circular) reason for supposing that the pieces of paper that are written on by these particular persons, whom we identify as a ‘State’, over this particular territory, which we identify as a ‘country’, have some special rights-bestowing power which my pieces of paper do not have, there is simply no reason for thinking that we require centralised State dictum in order to determine who owns what.

This is all on the assumption, which I have disputed repeatedly and for which you have not even attempted to argue, that the pieces of paper on which the State writes are appropriately identified with ‘social norms’. I see no reason at all to make this identification. It looks to me as a typical case of equating ‘government’ with ‘society’, or our rulers with ‘us’.

So, the state has the benefit of actually existing here, your proposed social system does not, it provides no enforceable claims to property, it cannot decide what is expropriative and what isn't. — fdrake

Yes it can. Why shouldn’t it? I don’t see what point you are trying to make here. The only thing which the State has going for it is that it happens to obtain in the present status quo. But what philosophical bearing does this have? This is a surprisingly conservative argument to see you making.

I've never been arguing that "We ought to follow every law because it's written on a piece of paper" or "We ought to follow every social norm because it's there", I've been arguing that what it means for a person to be subject to a law is to be in the territory of a governing body, or other social form, that has that as its law. — fdrake

Your original words were:

How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what.

This looks to me to be a very uncomplicated way of expressing exactly the position which I have subsequently attributed to you, on the basis of this very statement. What are you saying here? You are saying that the law is precisely that which determines who owns what. Everybody owns what they own because that is what the law says that they own, and they own no more and no less than this. Who produces the law? The State. The law is the pieces of paper on which the State writes. But this view – that rightful property claims are the generated by the declarations of the State – forces us back onto the two questions which I keep pressing you to answer: Why these persons, in distinction from all others? Why this territory, in distinction from all others?

My argument strategy has been to show that what you're talking about couldn't possibly happen, or is based in category errors. Hence the argument about what it means to own something being solely a legal matter, or a matter of social custom. — fdrake

I don’t see how you have done all this. What you claim to have ‘argued’ you really have only asserted, despite my repeated objections. There is no reason why the existence of the State is necessary, or even sufficient, to generate property rights. There is no reason to equate the law which the State produces with social norms. And there is no reason why property rights cannot exist and be enforced in the absence of the State.

You're right, governments aren't identical with the societies that they're in. Governments are (minimally) a collection of legislative bodies in a society. — fdrake

This won’t do, even as a partial definition, since a State is not necessary for the production of law. Stateless societies can have, and have had, legal systems in the absence of a State (Iceland, which was Stateless for the first three centuries of its existence, had an elegant justice system). Many libertarian theorists have discussed the private production of law. Many of the ingredients of such a system are already in place (private security and alternative dispute resolution, for example). The State is a human association which maintains a monopoly on the use of physical force over a territory. Not only is the State not equivalent to society, it is precisely anti-social, in the sense that it preserves for itself the prerogative to engage in behaviours which it would put you and me in a cage for engaging in.

That's all there is to ownership of commercial private property. It's determined by the law, which is a kind of social custom - albeit a social custom that few affected by it can change. Your use of "expropriation" and the like are merely poetic (insofar as laws are sufficient to define who owns what!) — fdrake

Again, why? I still have not seen an argument for this; at least, not one which does not require you to make assumptions which I have repeatedly challenged.

No, it's our capacity to form social institutions that can be held responsible for things that makes such a thing a necessary part of our social ontology. As far as the law goes, corporations are legal persons; they can be held legally responsible for things. What I'm doing is feeding facts like that into entailments you've suggested to show they're incoherent.

If your claim goes: "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X has a mind", then corporations have minds because they are held legally responsible for things. If your claim goes "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X is an agent", then I guess corporations are agents, so agents need not be humans at all.

"doesn't have a mind => can't be held legally responsible" flipped around is "can be held legally responsible" => "has a mind". Something you have used to criticise what I've said — fdrake

I have not even mentioned legal responsibility as a precondition of personhood, or of being an agent of purposeful action. So I fail to see how any of this could be a faithful reconstruction of my position. To say that a corporation has ‘legal responsibility’ means nothing more than that it is spoken of in that way on the pieces of paper which are written on by an arbitrary association of persons. If these same pieces of paper declared rocks to have legal responsibility, this would not have any metaphysical bearing whatsoever. It would just be another absurd legal fiction, and there is no philosophical reason to take it seriously.

‘Rights are produced by social norms; laws are social norms; therefore rights are produced by laws.’ — Virgo Avalytikh

More precisely; people have no rights except for the ones afforded to them by social systems. If you want to know what a person is entitled to in a social system like ours, look to its laws, and look at how they may change. When the laws change, the rights changed. I assumed you believed this, perhaps you are arguing that there is some non social system by which people are afforded rights? Perhaps by some divine agent like the Free Market, the purveyor of all Goods, Services and Natural Rights?

If you could find me a natural right which is not merely stipulated to hold as a contingent feature of a social system, and which is not an enforceable claim when and only when it also holds in a social system or a legal system (which is a particular type of social system), I would believe they exist.

And these rights apparently

can be bargained up to in the absence of centralised State dictum; indeed, without any communication at all — Virgo Avalytikh

can be bargained, without any communication, and are not purely social or legal in character? Despite that they resemble how ownership works in a market society in almost every respect, except that they are somehow "legitimate"? Nonsense on stilts!

This is not true. In my original post, I cited an article of David Friedman’s, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’, in which he argues – convincingly, to my mind – that a set of non-overlapping rights domains, as well as a set of self-enforcing contracts, can be bargained up to in the absence of centralised State dictum; indeed, without any communication at all — Virgo Avalytikh

Let me see if this jibes with you, as a summary of your argument.

(1) Legitimate rights are of form X.
(2) All legal rights afforded by a state are of form Y.
(3) Y precludes X.
(4) Therefore all legal rights afforded by a state are illegitimate.

Y are "incompossible" or "coercive" or "do not satisfy the non-aggression principle".

And all this time you've been arguing about natural rights? Presumably they also flow from God The Free Market, the hitherto inexistent paradise on the hill.

Why these persons, in distinction from all others? Why this territory, in distinction from all others? — Virgo Avalytikh

You're looking for a philosophical (precisely moral) justification rather than a historical or political one, why must history have gone the way it did? I can't answer that, a state is as contingent a social form as a tribal council. What legal rights we have are ultimately a function of politics and history. Since there are no natural rights, what rights we have simpliciter are a function of politics and history. Why would different people in different countries in different time periods have different numbers of different rights if it worked any other way?

This won’t do, even as a partial definition, since a State is not necessary for the production of law. — Virgo Avalytikh

You're right, it is sufficient for the production of law. A collection of legislative bodies which produces codes that entitle select people to enforceable claims is necessary for the production of law. If you can find a social system with laws that does not have such a collection, I would be extremely surprised.

Sometimes, we might speak of groups as though they were an organism with their own inherent capacity to act, but this is non-literal. The Greeks called this linguistic phenomenon synecdoche, the improper predication of a property of a part to the whole. We do this in sport, when we say ‘Portugal has scored a goal’ when in fact it is not true that a country has kicked a ball into a net. — Virgo Avalytikh

I have not even mentioned legal responsibility as a precondition of personhood, or of being an agent of purposeful action. So I fail to see how any of this could be a faithful reconstruction of my position. — Virgo Avalytikh

What I have denied is that aggregations of agents of purposeful action – persons – may be counted as ‘extra’ agents of purposeful action, above and beyond the members.

You may not have explicitly stated that legal responsibility is a precondition for personhood. But you have denied responsibility to aggregates, like firms, on the basis that responsibility applies only to individuals (humans). I just flipped the implication; if responsibility applies only to individuals (humans), then firms must be humans, on the basis that they are legally responsible for things. Clearly you don't believe that, which is inconsistent.

It's much more plausible that the only rights things have are of the same character; legal ones, socially mediated ones, and it doesn't matter whether they apply to agents or aggregates.

I would agree that we have obligations to each other in absence of the law, though. And would further stipulate that something being legal is not the same as it being moral. I'd also stipulate that something being socially obliged does not entail it is moral, though it would surprise me if there weren't things in a three way overlap of what is legal, what is socially obliged and what is moral. I'm going to continue to frame that what's illegal is outside of the set of what's socially obliged though; in particular, we're socially obliged not to do that which is illegal. We may be morally obliged to do that which is illegal sometimes.

More precisely; people have no rights except for the ones afforded to them by social systems. If you want to know what a person is entitled to in a social system like ours, look to its laws, and look at how they may change. When the laws change, the rights changed. I assumed you believed this, perhaps you are arguing that there is some non social system by which people are afforded rights? Perhaps by some divine agent like the Free Market, the purveyor of all Goods, Services and Natural Rights? — fdrake

One of the problems we are having here is the fact that you are making unwarranted assumptions, and taking for granted that for which you have not offered philosophical justification, despite my calling on you to do so. To allow that the content of our rights is determined socially is not to allow that our rights are determined by the State’s edicts, which are something else entirely. Why you would think that I believe that the content of our rights is determined by the laws the State passes, I haven’t a notion. I have denied such repeatedly, and offered reasons for thinking that such a view is indefensible; which is why, I assume, you have not tried to defend it, but have merely asserted it instead.

What is really happening, I suspect, is that we have a different understanding of the relationship between rights and law. Law, on my understanding, exists in service of rights, such that rights have a logical priority over law. This is certainly the more ancient view, as far as I can make out. It is also the correct view: if we accept Friedman’s argument, which seems to me a good one, rights-respecting behaviour pre-dates the human species, and so a fortiori it pre-dates the State.

What has happened to our thinking about rights, it seems to me, is analogous to what has happened to our thinking about money. Money, originally, was a commodity, such as gold, silver, iron or seashells. Banks, in their initial form, were little more than safes, which offered the service of storing money securely. Banks would offer paper receipts, ‘bank notes’, which served as entitlements of withdrawal for the bearer. Because it made more practical sense to trade in these notes directly, rather than ‘cashing in’ the notes and then giving the gold to someone else to deposit again, the notes themselves would come to be thought of as ‘money’; i.e., if I have given you a ten-gold-ounce note, I have functionally given you ten ounces of gold. Though, this is not literally what has happened. Rather, I have given you a receipt which entitles the bearer to withdraw ten ounces of gold from the bank. The note ‘represents’ the real money, and acts as a guarantor of it. However, as the world’s monetary systems have evolved (which, historically, has consisted in gradual invasions of the monetary system by States), the notes themselves would be divorced from any real commodity, and they would become ‘money’ straightforwardly, by little more than legal fiat. Cue periodic financial crises, though that is a rant for another time . . .

If you ask most people, they would probably tell you that the State, or something like it, is a sine qua non of having a monetary system. Surely, there must be a law which tells us what money is or isn’t; surely, the money supply must be overseen by a ‘regulatory body’ (none of which is true). Lurking underneath these claims is the intuition that the State, somehow, makes money ‘official’. You can call something money, but ultimately, money is what it is because of what the State declares it to be.
A similar phenomenon has occurred with rights. Rights can and do exist independently of the State. This is the case, whether they are determined by God, by nature, by philosophical reflection, or by the kind of successive ‘bargaining’ of which Friedman speaks (I don’t consider these possibilities as being necessarily exclusive). ‘Law’, then, comes rather late on the scene. Law, unlike the rights themselves, which are essentially conflict-resolution principles, is a service which exists so as to formalise rights, so that they might be protected and enforced. In producing law, one must ask ‘What kinds of things are worth recognising as rights?’, which gives rise to the concept of a ‘legal right’. But these legal rights are rather like the bank notes which would eventually come to be considered ‘money’: unoriginal, derivative, merely iconic. It is only because we have rights over our own selves and the things we produce that ‘law’ is created so as to defend them.

As with money, our thinking would come to be utterly inverted: now, the law is the indispensible source of rights, not merely their protector or guarantor. As with money, the common-sense view is that the State is that which makes our rights ‘official’; ‘You would not have any rights,’ the saying goes, ‘were it not for the State granting them to you.’ Frédéric Bastiat, in his most famous work The Law, bemoans this reversal in our thinking: ‘It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws.’ It is because of man’s nature, that we are persons, purposeful creatures, acting creatures, and also social creatures, that talk of ‘rights’ and ‘property’ (which is simply an extension of our personality) makes sense, in a way that would not make sense for rocks, trees or spleens, which do not exemplify these qualities.

‘Natural rights’ theory has often been accused of espousing a flimsy ontology, where the content of our rights is simply stipulated. In fact, this comes from a failure to appreciate what kind of philosophical project ‘natural rights’ theory is: man has a nature, as a purposeful, creative and social agent, and there are ways in which we might think of rights which allow man to act in accordance with that nature, and ways that do not. Perhaps this would become clearer by reflecting on the many ways in which a proposed system of rights may be contrary to man’s nature, some of the ways in which the individual may be dominated or have her ends constantly frustrated. See Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, chs. 1–6: https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty%2020191108.pdf

What is more, the critic of natural rights will tend to view the ‘legal rights’ which the State grants as being more real, more concrete. The rights we really have, the positivist will say, are those which the State declares you to have. The State makes rights ‘official’. But the ontology of rights which is presupposed by the positivist is no less ‘wispy’ than that which the natural rights theorist is accused of espousing. The State is just an association of persons, like you and I. The ‘laws’ it produces are just pieces of paper, like those on which I might write. Why are the ‘laws’ which I produce not ‘official’? Why are the rights that I grant myself by writing ‘I am the rightful owner of all the oreos in the world’ not as 'real' as those which are afforded me by the pieces of paper on which States write? This is why I have pressed you to give an account of the State’s legitimacy. Until you do, there is simply no reason to think that the State’s pieces of paper are remotely special, and therefore no reason to agree with your thesis that the rights we have are what they are because that is what the State says that they are.

can be bargained, without any communication, and are not purely social or legal in character? Despite that they resemble how ownership works in a market society in almost every respect, except that they are somehow "legitimate"? Nonsense on stilts! — fdrake

My point, again, is that you are making a false equivalence between the law which the State produces, and ‘social norms’. Because you are making this equation in your head, when I allow that rights are indeed social phenomena, you hear this as a concession that our rights really are granted by the State. Similarly, when I deny that the State is really the source of our rights, you hear this as a denial that rights are ‘social’. Because you make this equation, you see a gap in my philosophy. But the gap is yours: you are making a leap from one thing to another, without philosophical justification. I have already pointed out why this move is formally fallacious. But it is also a mistake to consider the State as being equivalent to, or the apotheosis of, ‘society’. States are no more ‘social’ than a mafioso protection racket, to which it bears a striking praxeological resemblance. If the State really were a part of, or representative of, ‘society’, then what we should expect to see is that the State is subject to the very same rules and constraints as the rest of us. But this is precisely what we don’t see. Rather, the State invades and is parasitic upon ‘society’, sustaining itself by engaging in the very activities which it locks the rest of us in cages for engaging in.

You're looking for a philosophical (precisely moral) justification rather than a historical or political one, why must history have gone the way it did? — fdrake

On the contrary, I see no historical justification for the State, either. The kinds of mythologies which are typically related concerning the State’s inception – which usually take the form of a ‘social contract’ – are quite fictional, and do nothing to secure the State’s legitimacy. This is true even of the United States, minarchism’s failed experiment. See Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority: http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2194/Spooner_1485_Bk.pdf

You may not have explicitly stated that legal responsibility is a precondition for personhood. But you have denied responsibility to aggregates, like firms, on the basis that responsibility applies only to individuals (humans). I just flipped the implication; if responsibility applies only to individuals (humans), then firms must be humans, on the basis that they are legally responsible for things. Clearly you don't believe that, which is inconsistent. — fdrake

All I deny is that which you have quoted me as denying, no more and no less. Human collectives are not persons, agents of purposeful action, and should not be considered as extra instances of such in addition to the individuals which comprise them. When you behold me and the rest of my scrabble club in the middle of our game, and ask yourself, 'How many persons are there?', the answer is 'Four', not 'Five'. You may deduce however many other implications from that as you wish to. As far as legal responsibility goes, my point remains the same: a human association may write on a piece of paper that rocks are persons, but they are not. They have ‘legal responsibility’, only in the very modest and unimpressive sense that an association of persons whom we are accustomed to thinking of as ‘governmental’ have written on a piece of paper that they may be held responsible for things. The ontology for which I have argued is not in the least threatened by such an occurrence.

What is really happening, I suspect, is that we have a different understanding of the relationship between rights and law. Law, on my understanding, exists in service of rights, such that rights have a logical priority over law. This is certainly the more ancient view, as far as I can make out. It is also the correct view: if we accept Friedman’s argument, which seems to me a good one, rights-respecting behaviour pre-dates the human species, and so a fortiori it pre-dates the State. — Virgo Avalytikh

I understand a natural right as way people morally ought to be treated based solely on their nature. For people, natural rights are to be derived solely from human nature, they thus apply to all people and at all times.

I understand a social obligation as a way people normatively ought/are expected to be treated within a social system or society. Social obligations are particularly strong norms. They vary widely over social systems and societies.

I understand a legal right as an enforceable claim within a legal system. Legal rights vary widely over legal systems. It is possible for these to be codified to a large degree, as we're used to, to be based largely on custom, as is older, or some mixture of the two, as in appeals to documented precedent.

Since legal rights are enforceable claims, they induce particularly strong social norms, and thus induce social obligations. Historically, codified legal systems arise much later than customary ones; all societies have rules which are enforced, whether or not they are codified, and whether or not they have a central government.

‘Natural rights’ theory has often been accused of espousing a flimsy ontology, where the content of our rights is simply stipulated. In fact, this comes from a failure to appreciate what kind of philosophical project ‘natural rights’ theory is: man has a nature, as a purposeful, creative and social agent, and there are ways in which we might think of rights which allow man to act in accordance with that nature, and ways that do not. Perhaps this would become clearer by reflecting on the many ways in which a proposed system of rights may be contrary to man’s nature, some of the ways in which the individual may be dominated or have her ends constantly frustrated. — Virgo Avalytikh

Everything humans have ever done is possible for humans, and is thus within our nature. From the most brutal of tyrannies to hippy communes, from pre-monetary societies to capitalist states. Natural rights, then, are not a constraint on what is possible for humans to do, they are a constraint on what we ought to do, what is proper for us. How does property fit in here?

Let's stipulate that so long as there have been tribes, there have been possessions in some sense; a society in which people may claim exclusive access to land is much different from one where people may not, a society in which people may claim exclusive access to other people's bodies (like slavery) is different from one where they may not. Even this stipulation does not confer a natural right of possession, as it only recognises a historical coincidence of human societies with rules regarding what humans can claim to possess within them. It is not a derivation from human nature to possession, it's a historical observation. Further, in each case, a society has existed which has customs of possession which may differ depending upon historical circumstance, so we cannot attribute a natural sense of possession to humanity on this basis alone - we cannot distinguish what someone owns in a society by virtue of its customs, like laws, and what someone owns in a society by virtue of natural right on this basis.

We'd have to abstract from all societies and all senses of possession within them, to see through mere historical circumstance and its contingent forms of ownership, to something basic and shared for all humanity for all time; but notice that due to this historical variability of customs of possession, we cannot infer that such a natural right of possession is ever sufficient for the customs to reflect that right. Is there a sense of ownership from which all the others are derivative? In the sense of enforceable claims and consistency with custom, no then, there is always a gap between what ought to be, what is legitimate, and what is. If we are to derive a criterion of legitimacy for a mode of social organisation, it must be independent of the contingent features of all of them; firms haven't always existed, states haven't always existed. But within those, human bodies have, and have remained roughly the same.

Based on this, a promising candidate for the derivation of natural property rights seems to be the sense of possession one has over one's body; let's call that autonomy. Can we derive from autonomy conditions of possession which actually hold or have held? No, see the above, human bodies have been much the same for all this time, but the historical circumstances regarding possession vary wildly. In some customs of possession; like slavery; autonomy does not even entail the possession of one's body to be ensured in a social custom.

There needs to be a principle to bridge autonomy to social customs of possession; equating the senses of possession in each will not do. Each person stands in a unique relationship with their own body, nothing like dominion over any object. For stipulation's sake, let's say that a person possesses an item they have produced solely through their own labour in the same sense that they do their body. Then by what criterion do we judge social acts of production within an economy's division of labour? What about items produced through machines, ought the person who turns the plugs on at a factory own everything? Maybe the electricity is what is doing the work... As soon as productive labour requires any sense of teamwork or social dependence, the principle would no longer apply. Read. it has never applied, since as you say we are intrinsically social. It would also be impossible to ought to own anything regarding land or what is produced from it without intervention, as it is not produced solely through a person's labour since it is not produced by labour at all. Impossible to ought to own on the basis of autonomy alone.

It seems like what we need to transfer from autonomy to more abstract and socially mediated senses of possession is an equivocation between my possession of my own body and possession within a social custom. To think that Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos in precisely the same sense he owns his body is insane; bodies do not have shareholders or corporate headquarters, human bodies do not coordinate within themselves entire other human bodies. If Jeff Bezos has a shit, someone does not poop for him.

The idea that the Principles Of the Free Market can be derived and legitimated through human nature alone is just as nuts. "See this contingent social form in which production and exchange are organised? Yeah, that's the one true human nature, the only social form consistent with it. Btw, it has never existed."

So, anyone may transform the land, in whole or in part. They are then within their rights to resort to force to defend their property. — Virgo Avalytikh

People transform the land simply by taking part in the ecosystem. Your logic here would give indigenous tribes the rights to all the land outside of Europe. Mind you, there's those Homo floresiensis that the Indonesian Homo sapiens might have stolen from...

Your property rights strategy is going to get complicated quite quickly, but I'm all in favour of returning land rights back to the indigenous population, so that would be a good start, yes?