Dear students, Before our midterm, as you remember, we asked about the legitimacy and morality of pursuing profit. We can easily imagine that pursuing profit is morally questionable when companies make money from something that does not belong to them, as in illegal logging. But when do things legitimately belong to someone? When can you say that this or that is yours and that it belongs to you and only you? These questions seem strange only at first. One may say: “It’s obvious! My computer belongs to me because I bought it with my own money! And I can sell it, if I want to.”
But this does not explain much. That only means you exchanged one thing that belonged to you (the money) for another thing (the commodity); you exchanged something that already belonged to you – the money for the item in the store. So we are back to square one. What makes the money yours? Well, the money you also obtained from an exchange. You exchanged something that already belonged to you, that is, your hard work; you exchanged your labor for money. So now it looks like the one thing that truly belongs to you is your labor, your hard work. (You can also say that something belongs to you because it was given to you as a gift, for example, the earrings belong to you because it was a gift for your birthday. But most things in life are not given to us, so let’s focus on the labor part. )
Now, how can your labor “belong” to you? Well, that’s easy – because you are performing the work with your own body, your own hands, or your brain and imagination (in the context of say creating songs or artworks). And no one else owns your body; your body is your body. No one else has the right to your body. So whatever you make with your own hands or your imagination and creativity presumably becomes clearly yours. If that’s true, then consider the following situation: you decide to put your body to work and plant potatoes in the ground and take care of that piece of land, thinking that whatever you manage to grow in the ground should belong to you because you worked on your little farm with your own hands. But then a stranger comes up to you and says: “What are you doing here? You can’t grow your potatoes here! This is my property!” Now we have a new problem. Who says the stranger that approached you can simply appropriate the land and make the land his property? What right does he have to say “this is my land”?
Well, one possible answer he can give is this:
“I appropriated this land because I was here first!”
To which you can respond: “So what you were here first! You are not even using the land. So you are wasting it all!”
He retorts: “I don’t have to make use of something to make it my own, just like I don’t have to drive my car to prove that it is mine. Something can be mine even if I do not use that thing.” To this you might object: “By this logic my friend, I can appropriate the moon and Mars! I can claim Antarctica, and I can make this river mine. I don’t have to use the planet Mars for anything, I simply decided the planet will be mine.”
He responds: “That’s not fair, you can’t just decide that Mars will be your property. You would have to inhabit the planet.”
To which you can say: “But you are not inhabiting the land where I’m growing my potatoes! So by your logic, you can’t forbid me from working on this land. Plus, you and I did not agree to the rules you are proposing. We would have to make an agreement that one can claim whatever one decides to own first. And, why would I ever accept your rules of how the land should be divided and appropriated as private property? What if my rule of distributing the land is different; I think we should have this rule: one has to sincerely deserve the land. So as you can see, you don’t deserve this land since you are not doing anything useful.”
At this point, a third person comes along and says: “Guys, nothing belongs to you because everything belongs to God! Our job is simply to divide everything equally.”
To this the two interlocutors respond: “But we don’t believe in that! I have a different religion and he is not religious at all.”
And so the argument continues.
Now, think about how would you respond to this intellectual exchange about private property. What would you contribute to the conversation? How would you defend the correct way of thinking about private property? How would you resolve the conflict? Please post your thoughts on Bb. More specifically, propose, in about 200 words, when or on what grounds, you can say that this or that belongs to you. Post by Thursday evening 10PM, May 13. Then respond to 5 classmates by Friday evening, May 14.
However, please first complete the background reading for this week. Once you finish reading the pdf you should be able to present more complex thought on this topic. (*You will notice that some pages are missing in the pdf. But do not worry about that. You are reading an excerpt from a much longer article. This is why the pages are missing. You also don’t have to read the footnotes in that pdf.) As you are reading the text, ask yourself which idea of private property, as discussed in the article, you agree or disagree with the most. *This is our last weekly assignment for the semester.
On Monday, May 17, we will have a review session. This means, you just need to go over the review questions and read carefully the info about the final exam.
The post Dear students,
Before our midterm, as you remember, we asked about the legitima appeared first on Homeworkassisters.
