Now, the issue I have with the concept of ownership is that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a transfer of ownership, let alone what qualifies as a legitimate claim to owning any given material good. The transfer of goods or capital is not the sole method for the transfer of ownership as we have the lumberjack becoming the owner of the lumber through the mere act of felling the tree, or a thief having stolen something can be said to now own it (though this is deemed as an illegitimate ownership relation by many due to the illegality of it afaik), or even items being given away for free give a claim to ownership.
The concept of ownership seems very ill-defined to me. — Dorrian
Ownership is an artificial construct where you apply an arbitrary personal authority over a physical object or domain, or an intellectual one - be it an idea/concept or piece of art etc. — Benj96
I don't think so. It's about language. the contention is:That was Marx's argument — Paine
If this were so, then a thief, who gains control over what they steal, would correctly be said to own the the thing stolen.Basically ownership is about control. — Benj96
Any convention that is sufficiently pervasive can come to seem like a law of nature -- a baseline for evaluation rather than something to be evaluated. Property rights have always had this delusive effect. Slaveowners in the American South before the Civil War were indignant over the violation of their property rights [by actions such as] helping runaway slaves escape to Canada. But property in slaves was a legal creation, protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the justice of such forms of interference with it could not be assessed apart from the justice of the institution itself. — The Myth of Ownership
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