• Dorrian
    4
    The concept of ownership seems very ill-defined to me.
    Take the example of a tree cut by a lumberjack. A lumberjack fells a tree in the woods. He is now responsible for this tree. In some sense, it can be said he owns the tree. The lumberjack also has a boss however (I'm not exactly well-versed in the lumber industry but stick with me) who in a way owns the lumberjack by virtue of him being in his employ. The lumberjack can be said to own the lumber he has felled but his boss can be said to own him, so therefore his ownership of this lumber is an amorphous and ultimately illusory relationship superseded by his own ownership. The distinction of owned and owner is a futile one if you add enough scope I feel. Then as well the lumberjack loads his lumber onto a truck for it to be driven and delivered to a paying customer or to someone who will sell this lumber. The truck driver is now responsible for the lumber yet no transaction has taken place between him and the lumberjack for the transfer of ownership of the lumber to be deemed legitimate in a capitalist framework. The lumber is eventually turned into a table sold to a family who pay a couple hundred dollars for it in order to become the owner of this lumber.
    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. So clearly ownership isn' transferred only when capital is and any given act can create an ownership bond. The transfer from something being a natural resource to a material good is also loosely defined. Despite all the transfer of goods that has occurred with the lumber, it can be argued that the lumber still essentially belongs to "Mother Nature".
    Apologies for the roughly written nature of parts of the above. I'm not well-versed in structuring my writing in an academic style and I realise much of what I've written may come off as rambling. The question of defining ownership in philosophical terms and investigating the concept itself may seem pedantic but I do believe it is important because of how integral it is to the concept of capitalism and how we all live our day-to-day lives. Any literature on this topic would be appreciated. To summarise, my question is this: how do we define the concept of ownership, how does this relate to the transfer of ownership, how does ownership relate to our capitalist societal structures, and is the concept of ownership ultimately necessary? (I don't expect anyone to answer all these questions btw, I'm just curious for everyone's 2 cents and trying to stimulate discussion on a subject I find interesting.)
  • Paine
    2.5k

    I recommend starting with Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.

    We use natural resources for our ends. But the idea of property is a claim restricting competing claims. The exchange of commerce proceeds from ways of establishing a right to something versus simply people taking stuff from each other as they can.

    And that last bit gets one ready to read Hobbes.
  • kudos
    407
    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.

    It is a valid question, the concept of property is fundamental to any form of state organization. However, we must distinguish between ownership without qualification and owning property with respect to the state, and private and/or shared property. There are certain forms of ownership such as owning your country, your body, and your livelihood, that are included at the level of general human rights that are left indeterminate in the realm of custom and diplomacy. However, ownership within a state as private or shared property is a special case. The state attributes it's own very particular rationality of value to things that are considered property.

    If I own something as property, it means the state will protect and enforce my right to that thing. Furthermore, it means I have a duty to protect and enforce the rights to property of others. In capitalism, everything relates to property, because the 'capital' part essentially means, 'property for the purposes of generating profit.' just about anything can be property, even the forms invented by artists are considered so in the form of intellectual property. That being said, the word 'own' with respect to capital doesn't necessarily mean the same as property either. Do businesses really 'own' items when the businesses themselves are financed by creditors? Is debt-claim the same as ownership? Owning is part of the act of property, but just because you act as if you own something doesn't make it your property by law.

    In my view, it doesn't always make sense to think of things in capitalism as owned items being used. Goods are financed as shared property to be used as capital and private property is owned by individuals, but businesses are funded by citizens' needs, and needs are brought upon them through the their economic ideology. Ultimately, the immediate view is simple, that businesses aim for profit to survive and should/will do whatever necessary to survive. This is the mechanism of capitalism, but it is not what makes capitalism good. Citizens must see satisfaction in their lives at differing levels of particularity, and this is rarely achieved with a rat-race-for-the-top mentality. Excessive hording and greed-obsession is distasteful to us, not because it goes against any of the tenants or aspirations of capitalism, but because it aims to destroy it's underlying pillars: the idea that happiness is distributed via particularity across the ownership spectrum, not lying somewhere distant to be enjoyed by a select few.
  • unenlightened
    9.2k
    The concept of ownership seems very ill-defined to me.Dorrian

    It is defined by law. Human laws are various and varied through time and space, I am not the person to explicate the precise laws applicable to your particular interest, but then you are not looking for legal advice I guess.

    But perhaps you do not want so much a universal definition as a rationale. In which case Marx is your man, more so than Rousseau or Hobbs. I have done a bit of lumberjacking in a small way, and I have never felt or imagined that I owned a tree that I chopped down. It would always belong to the landowner, standing or felled until she sold it or gave it away, or it rotted to nothing. I guess there might be a logging concession sold to a lumberjack such that they did own what they felled and then transported it and sold it on. These things are decided by contract and agreement, and perhaps that is why they seem ill-defined to you?

    Anyway back to Marx. If you think about the beginnings of agriculture, that is when one begins to have something to defend, because one has to put a deal of work into a patch of land, clearing it of stones and trees and weeds, improving the soil with whatever is available, planting some seed one has saved and tending it, watering and so on. So one wants to defend it from wandering nomads, rabbits, birds, slugs, elephants, and humans. One invests all this labour, and one wants to reap the benefit. That is the rationale for property ownership.
  • Benj96
    2.3k
    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.

    Even personhood is a construct based on ownership and the "inalienable rights/entitlements" that come with that. That is to say this conscious awareness owns/ is an authority over the body it resides in.

    Even that can be superceded in the case of slavery, torture, rape, assault, psychological manipulation and murder etc -where one person believes or exerts unrestricted dominion over the body and mind of another. But this is generally considered at its core inhumane or immoral.

    Basically ownership is about control. Any anything physical and mental can theoretically be controlled by a third party, despite whether it ought to be or not. That's a matter of ethics.
  • BC
    13.6k
    Most of us live under a capitalist system of property which is owned by individuals or collective entities like companies or a statez. J P Morgan Bank may own the building in which it does business, but an old New York family may own the land on which the building sits, and will collect rent from JP Morgan for decades to come. The space above the land had to be acquired too, by buying the "air rights" of owners of nearby low-rise buildings. Below the bank building are the tunnels and tracks of New York City's subway, which the city owns and could not be moved.

    Most of us are surrounded by layers of ownership. I own my iPad on which I have stored books; I don't own the software that operates the iPad, and I don't own the copyright of the digital books that I have bought, nor do I own the electronic media system that delivered the book to the iPad. Amazon collects information about my reading habits. If a lot of other people who are reading the same book highlight a certain passage, that text will be underlined in my copy and updated over time. So, in some ways, I don't really 'own' the books I bought from Amazon.

    "Intellectual property" is another complicated arena of ownership. Who 'owns' the content of the posts in this philosophy forum? Can @Jamal take our incredibly brilliant, insightful, creative, and amusing texts and sell them to a large publishing house which would edit them into a big glossy coffee table book selling for $59.99? Would we sources of content be entitled to a share of the fat check Jamal would receive? Or would we, more likely, just be shit out of luck?
  • Vera Mont
    4.3k

    Yes!

    A pack of wolves 'owns' its territory by marking it and defending it against another pack that may try to hunt there. Their 'right' to this territory is neither God-given nor inalienable: they designated it for their own use and can lose it to a more powerful pack.
    Humans do the same thing. We simply occupied some ares of the globe, declared it to be ours, and defended it from other tribes - sometimes successfully, more often unsuccessfully. Nobody has a natural right to own anything; we just take what we want from the world and keep it if we're strong enough.

    Social animals have rules to govern ownership and rights within the society, but can't impose those rules on any other society, unless by force of arms or negotiated agreement. There is always contention over territory, two or more tribes claiming the same piece of land. There is always contention over the ownership of land, resources and material goods within a tribe.

    In the first example, if a man chops down a tree on common land where he is permitted to log, the tree belongs to him. If he does it on land legally claimed by a landowner, the lumber belongs to the landowner and the man is punished for poaching. If a lumberjack cuts down a tree in his capacity as an employee of a logging company on land in legal possession of a landowner, the landowner owns the lumber and the logging company is liable for damages. The lumberjack gets nothing but upbraided or fired for getting caught poaching. If he cuts down a tree as an employee on legally ceded land, he gets a paycheck and his employer own the lumber. The employer does not own him; they rent his skill for 8 hours a day and have no claim either on his private thoughts or his free time. The logging company also owns the truck and rents the driver's skill; the driver has no claim on the lumber and the company has no control over the driver's private life or free time. The lumber is then sold to a sawmill, which then owns it and alters it into a further saleable commodity to be owned by others once they'd paid for it.
    While ownership may be disputed in certain situations, it is never ambiguous.
  • Dorrian
    4

    Thank you, I think this is what I had in mind in my attempt to attack ownership. You've hit the nail on the head for defining ownership imo. Contextualising ownership within legal or capitalist frameworks (themselves based upon arbitrary rules I suppose) as other posters have done, for me anyways, fails to define the concept itself in a metaphysical way as its own distinct concept. I, like you, believe that ownership is arbitrary and amorphous.
  • Banno
    25k
    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

    So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen.

    And folk hereabouts think this a good argument?
  • frank
    15.8k
    So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen.

    And folk hereabouts think this a good argument?
    Banno

    There might be a society where you "keep what you kill" so to speak, proving that it's relative to culture and time period, right?
  • Paine
    2.5k
    So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen.Banno

    That was Marx's argument

    And folk hereabouts think this a good argument?Banno

    What?
  • NOS4A2
    9.3k


    Societal structures these days stipulate that the land is owned by the state. Concepts such as jurisdiction, eminent domain, national sovereignty, and so on, indicate this ownership. So in a way the system is more manorial and feudal than legal.

    I gravitate towards a more Lockean theory of property, that resources and land are an extension of the body and life. Given that man needs both resources and land in order to survive, he is therefor entitled to have some, so long as everyone else is entitled to the same. It’s not clear how this should be determined, but if a man works on land and resources, and in a way mixes himself with it, it ought to be his.
  • Banno
    25k
    That was Marx's argumentPaine
    I don't think so. It's about language. the contention is:
    Basically ownership is about control.Benj96
    If this were so, then a thief, who gains control over what they steal, would correctly be said to own the the thing stolen.

    But that ain't so.

    Instead a thief is considered to illegitimately deprive the owner of control.

    So ownership cannot be about control.

    But pretending it is suits the needs of the authoritarians amongst us.
  • Banno
    25k
    Ownership is public. You own something only if the rest of us agree that you own it.
  • Paine
    2.5k
    Instead a thief is considered to illegitimately deprive the owner of control.

    So ownership cannot be about control.
    Banno

    if you have got it right in the first sentence, how does the 'acquisitive' spirit featured in the second type differ from the original desire?
  • Banno
    25k
    What? Can you clarify?
  • Paine
    2.5k

    Property is the result of the luck of inheritance or the gains of conquest. Rousseau described the initial move as the result of calling a certain area "mine." That would seem to fill the bill of "legitimate control." Can such an idea be free of competing interests?
  • Banno
    25k
    Property is the result of the luck of inheritance or the gains of conquest.Paine
    Property is a legal convention, as pointed out. You don't inherit unless there are conventions of inheritance. Conquest is theft until ratified. Something is "mine" only if relevant others agree.
  • Paine
    2.5k

    Agreed. I think Rousseau agrees.
  • hypericin
    1.6k
    Ownership is a triadic relationship between owner, owned, and society that ratifies the ownership.

    Between owner and owned, we think and behave differently with things we own than with things we don't. We use them as we please, exploit them, care for them, discard them. They bring us pride, or shame. We attach them to our identities like medals on our breast.

    Society sanctions and enforces this special relationship. Enforcement includes shame and loss of social status, financial penalty, confinement, and violence. One of the jobs of parents is to instill the concept of ownership, and mete out (hopefully far less severe) punishments for violating it.

    Without this social system underwriting ownership, it would exist only in the owner's mind, and so would be unreal. Because of our training, we implicitly understand our special perquisites with our belongings, and generally have a healthy respect of other's. We attach moral significance to the concept of ownership, and violate it at our peril.
  • J
    630
    The question I see being raised here is, "Are property rights always just?" Most of us would want to reply, No, not always. What counts as property, and as a right to hold property, varies from society to society. Justice, arguably, does not, or should not. That something is a right does not make it just. Murphy & Nagel's The Myth of Ownership is good on this:
    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

    In other words, you can't usefully ask "Was Harriet Tubman wrong to break the property-rights law?" without also asking "Was the law itself wrong?"
  • Leontiskos
    3.1k
    - What is at stake here are natural rights, not civil rights, and natural rights are always just.
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