Was the hypothetical previous owner a citizen of a terrorist state, intent on genocide, that refused any and all compromises offered, decade after decade? — counterpunch

There are a near infinite number of possible scenarios here - but for simplicity's sake assume that the previous owner was the original owner and had always lived at peace with the current owner - up until the current owner forcefully took over the land without the previous owner's permission.

In this admittedly narrow situation do the descendants of the original owner have a legitimate claim to the land. And it so, how do we resolve things? E.g., what happens to the current title owner? They may be many generations removed - is it fair to deprive them of their home due to something that happened centuries past?

I don't have an answer to these questions.

I don't. All things being equal, one ought abide by agreed conventions. That's what an agreed convention is. — Banno

Ought references what morality demands and therefore an objective standard unless you adhere to subjectivism.

The problem is that there aren't mutually respected conventions. If there were, bombs wouldn't be flying in and out of Israel. If one side's conventions yield a different result than the others, do you remain agnostic as to the question of right and wrong, considering there is no principle applicable to all?

And let's be clear here, "convention" simply describes the rules imposed by the ruling power. Convention didn't dictate that the 13 colonies be the possession of the English except to the English. The natives certainly had other conventions and thought the seizure of their land unconventional.

It also seems we could have immoral conventions, like if the US barred blacks from owning real estate or England only allowed certain classes to own land.

But your opinion is insufficient. — Banno

Of course it is. You asked me for my opinion and I replied. My opinion is based on tradition, on religious and legal precedent. This is how justice has been historically understood. But it's not for me to decide.

In this admittedly narrow situation do the descendants of the original owner have a legitimate claim to the land. And it so, how do we resolve things? E.g., what happens to the current title owner? They may be many generations removed - is it fair to deprive them of their home due to something that happened centuries past? — EricH

That would need to be decided on a case-to-case basis. There is a general legal principle to be (1) followed as a general guideline and (2) applied differently in different cases as required by the specific circumstances of each particular case.

Ah, we bow before Counterpunch's ex- girlfriend! With such brilliantly expounded argumentation, how could he be wrong! — Banno

She was Estonian. They are very smart people. Few, but smart.

And why do think it's a myth? People do put their self interest ahead of a collective interest, where the costs are then is brought upon everybody later. But today is more important than next year.

I don't. All things being equal, one ought abide by agreed conventions. That's what an agreed convention is.

Which is preferable, a person who is true to their word or a person who is not? — Banno

What about when one never agreed to the convention (never made a promise to honor such-and-such arrangement, that they could be true to or not)? Or similarly, going back to this situation:

despite working the land, he did not own it until his neighbours agreed that he owned it. — Banno

When if at one point all of the neighbors agreed that he owned it, and then one, several, many, most, even all (please name where's the tipping point for you) of the neighbors changed their minds?

To all that, yes, I agree.

The salient point I've made here is that property is about convention; it's that observation which allows the discussion to proceed.

What about when one never agreed to the convention — Pfhorrest

Sure, that's another discussion we could have.

the neighbors changed their minds — Pfhorrest

...and that.

What do you think?

Whoever has enough power to over throw the land owner, has rights to the land.

Whether its in agreement with purchasing power, or with brute force. The owner is the one who can defend it.

I think the issue at hand, is a moral question of, will the current owner be oppressed by the requisition of the land. Even governments can force people to give up their land for power lines or gas lines etc.

Or, if your Russia, you just take what you want, when you want.

@Pfhorrest,@ssu,@Apollodorus,@Hanover

Is there any legal / moral framework that can be used to resolve these issues in an impartial manner? Or put differently - what are the rules for determining the rightful owner of said property? — EricH

The answer is that ownership is a function of social intentionality. Property is owned only with the agreement of those involved, and hence enforced in virtue of that agreement.

There are no rules for determining ownership beyond that.

This is why we have the issues folk have listed here.

I'm not offering a solution, just pointing to the cause.

I'm not offering a solution, just pointing to the cause. — Banno

Sure. But we don't need to agree with that.

Sure. But we don't need to agree with that. — Apollodorus

Hmm. I think you just made Banno's point about "property is owned with the agreement of those involved, and hence enforced in virtue of that agreement" and thus "There are no rules for determining ownership beyond that". :smile:

What do you think? — Banno

I think that a convention comes into existence when there is agreement on how to use something (be that the case of the physical use of land for production, or of using words to mean things, or whatever), so if there are parties (even a minority) who don't agree to the establishment of the convention, then there is no convention, and so "no rules": everything remains permissible, nothing impermissible.

And that since it's the convention that subsequently defines whether use is permissible or not, it's whoever breaks with that prior convention (even a majority) that is doing something impermissible.

:up:

and does the same, but with more words.

I think you just made Banno's point about "property is owned with the agreement of those involved, and hence enforced in virtue of that agreement" — ssu

Property isn't always owned with the agreement of the rightful owners. That's why we need to distinguish between legal and moral rights of ownership.

https://maaw.info/ChiefSealthsReply.htm

With the coming of individual ownership we lost the notion of common responsibility.

@unenlightened@Banno
I think we should all be cautious of taking up another people as reservoir for our moral ideals & fantasies. This stuff sucks for actual indigenous people. Imagine you're a 16 year old native dude trying to chill, doing normal teenage stuff, passing a bowl. Everyone get's baked - 'dude... chris is native. he knows that real land shit. Tell them Chris!" and now Chris is stuck in that role. A shrewd dude can deftfully maneuver out with a mix of self-irony and assertive push-back, but that's not easy, and its a dumb onus to put on people. (my examples tame, really Imagine being a native girl in the matrix of such fantasies at a party.)

(These are my own example, but Tommy Orange (Cheyenne/Arapaho) captures the idea better in his book 'There, There'. )

Anyway:

The Chief Seattle Reply is bullshit - and that shouldn't be a surprise.

As Gilles Deleuze said, 'If you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked'

That's why we need to distinguish between legal and moral rights of ownership. — Apollodorus

Apollodorus, what do you think is the basis of either legal or moral rights?

All land, everywhere, was under previous ownership. Just the way it is. Someone was there before, and someone will be there after, in the meantime we fight about who owns what based on "rights", whatever that means.

I own my piece of dirt because I bought it, meaning I won the financial war of pricing, and the land is my spoil of war. If I want to keep it I need to provide kickbacks to my local government, in the form of property taxes. This may be seen as normal, and more civil, than violent confrontation for land, however, only the medium has changed. Countless others have owned "my" dirt before me, and countless will after I have passed. That is the way of it. Each time it changes hands there will be a financial battle, which someone will win, while others lose. At no point do I feel entitled enough to have anyone in the future proclaim that I once had title to said land. It will be someone else's then, they have title to it, no need to mention me, or those that came before me. That list is too long, and entirely meaningless.

There are a near infinite number of possible scenarios here — EricH

Are you sure? It seems to me you're driving toward a particular point. The original question was 'Who owns the land?' - and it's an interesting, and difficult question of itself. Now you're asking about descendants of original owners - and the problem with your pretence is that, it consigns me to a hypothetical scenario you construct - with obvious allusions to real world events, without allowing me to make a real world counter argument. I'm not playing a rigged game.

I think we should all be cautious of taking up another people as reservoir for our moral ideals & fantasies. — csalisbury

They are no other!

And let all men say what they will, so long as such are rulers as call the land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of mine and thine, the common people shall never have their liberty, nor the land be ever freed from troubles, oppressions, and complainings, by reason whereof the Creator of all things is continually provoked... — Gerald Winstanley

https://www.diggers.org/digger_tracts.htm

But there you go; as white and Christian and historical as you could possibly wish for, and within a cannon shot of where I was born.

Apollodorus, what do you think is the basis of either legal or moral rights? — ssu

As I said, justice.

I could be wrong but I think @EricH was talking about the moral perspective of land ownership.

So, there is an implied distinction between what is morally rightful ownership and what is legally legitimate ownership.

This is why I gave the example of the British policy of native paramountcy in East Africa that was intended to settle the problems arising from Europeans and Indians encroaching on ancestral land belonging to native Africans.

The British were running East Africa under a League of Nations mandate.

The crux of the argument was that "a policy which leaves the native population no future except as workers on European estates cannot be reconciled with the principle of trusteeship". Therefore, the principle of native paramountcy was proposed as a solution.

See "Memorandum on Native Affairs in the East African Protectorates" and other papers.

Interestingly, Indians and Europeans supported the doctrine, even if for no other reason than that the interests of the rival group would not receive primary consideration by the British.

It seems to me that there are parallels between current situations e.g. in the Middle East and elsewhere, and British East Africa.

I'm not playing a rigged game. — counterpunch

My apologies if I came across that way - not my intent. I find find it very challenging to express myself succinctly yet clearly. My eyes glaze over when I see a post that goes on for paragraphs - but without sufficient detail you can lose context. Perhaps this will help:

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

could be wrong but I think EricH was talking about the moral perspective of land ownership. — Apollodorus

Jewish people vs Palestinians - who has the rightful claim to the land? Beats me. Perhaps no one.

Northern Ireland - should it be united with Ireland or stay part of Britain? Does anyone have the moral high ground here?

Kurds - are they entitled to their own country or should they forever be split out amongst Turkey, Syria, and Iraq?

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict - I don't have the time/energy to understand all the details, but it is an ongoing tragedy.

Etc/Etc/Etc

And one more: I don't know the full history, but here in the US my house sits on land that was undoubtedly seized from Native Americans about 400 years ago. If there are people alive today who could trace their ancestry back to that place & time, are they the rightful owners of the land my house sits on?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So apart from the messy details of each situation, are there any abstract principles that could in some way help come up with equitable solutions? Or are we doomed to having centuries long cycles of violence in these situations?

How do you define a nation? And of course - as several people have pointed out - this is begging the question of whether there should even be should entities as nation-states.

And one more: I don't know the full history, but here in the US my house sits on land that was undoubtedly seized from Native Americans about 400 years ago. If there are people alive today who could trace their ancestry back to that place & time, are they the rightful owners of the land my house sits on? — EricH

Your example strikes to the very heart of the issue. Nomads cannot be said to own the land, because ownership of the land is the essential difference between nomad-ism, and an agricultural, settled way of life. This is in part why I paraphrased Rousseau:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine" ... was the true founder of civil society. — counterpunch

This then raises the question of communal versus private ownership, with the justification of private ownership coming from Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, and the universal observation that any freely available resource will be exploited to exhaustion. The other examples are more complex. But morally, a nomad cannot refuse you the right to settle on land he wanders.

The answer is that ownership is a function of social intentionality. Property is owned only with the agreement of those involved, and hence enforced in virtue of that agreement. — Banno

So what you've done here is to pull out certain types of offenses, namely property related ones, and declared them not subject to moral analysis. So the argument goes: Theft in my country may be different than yours, but there is no objective right and wrong when it comes to theft. I assume you draw no distinction between real property issues (like who land belongs to) and personal property issues (like who a loaf of bread belongs to).

For further elaboration of your position, we now then have to isolate which wrongs you believe are subject to moral analysis and which aren't.

Using the Georgia Criminal Code as my guide to finding all the terrible things people can do to one another, I have listed out 6 categories of wrongs with examples of those sorts of wrongs. I left out property crimes because we've already decided those are not subject to moral analysis.

So, looking at the 6 categories below, I ask that you place each category into one of two buckets: Bucket A: Moral Question or Bucket B: Social Conventions:.

1. Crimes against persons (assault, battery, kidnapping, cruelty to children, feticide, stalking).
2. Sexual crimes. (rape, child molestation, sexual assault, necrophilia, bestiality, pimping, pandering, masturbation for hire).
3. Forgery and fraudulent practices (deposit account fraud, deceptive business practices, false statements, credit card fraud).
4. Offenses against public administration (obstruction, perjury, escape from prison, abuse of government office)
5. Offenses against public order and safety (treason, invasion of privacy, dangerous instrumentalities and practices, loitering, terroristic threats, unlawful assembly, harassing phone calls, public drunkenness)
6. Offenses against public health and morals (gambling, obscenity, abortion, human trafficking)
Controlled substances

If everything goes in B, then you're arguing for moral subjectivism. If some in A and some in B, then you'll have to explain your calculus as to how you've decided which go in which. If you can't provide that basis, then my objection seems valid, which is that your designation of property crimes as non-moral is arbitrary.

:100: :up:

Jewish people vs Palestinians - who has the rightful claim to the land? Beats me. Perhaps no one.

Northern Ireland - should it be united with Ireland or stay part of Britain? Does anyone have the moral high ground here?

Kurds - are they entitled to their own country or should they forever be split out amongst Turkey, Syria, and Iraq?

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict - I don't have the time/energy to understand all the details, but it is an ongoing tragedy. — EricH

Well, if we decide from the start that it's an intractable issue, then nothing can be done. But if we are serious about finding an answer in these and similar cases, we need to look at the historical events on which basis we may say that:

Jews have the rightful claim to (most) of Israel.

The Irish have the rightful claim to Ireland.

The Kurds have the rightful claim to Kurdish territories.

The Armenians have the rightful claim to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Obviously, these are just general and preliminary suggestions. They would need to be worked out in detail on the facts of each particular case.

Just to be clear - what is the basis for the "rightfulness" of these claims? Is it solely based on the ability to demonstrate to have inhabited the land before the other claimants?

Just to be clear - what is the basis for the "rightfulness" of these claims? Is it solely based on the ability to demonstrate to have inhabited the land before the other claimants? — EricH

I would say that would be a big part of it. As I said, if we are serious about finding a just solution, then historical events leading to the current situation can't be ignored.