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Public: Law: Constitution
All you need is property   (+2, -9)  [vote for, against]
Simply define ones body and liberty to be inviolable property

Instead of having the right to life, liberty, and property, why not simply have it so that you have the right to property, and consider ones liberty and body as their inviolable property? This would, of course, mean that parents would legally be classed as holding the childs body and liberty in a state of stewardship. If their actions result in damage to the child, they can be tried as failing in the responsibility of stewardship blah blah blah.

If you attacked someone and killed them, then you would be unfairly depriving them of their property, and in return, government would be legally entitled to deprive you of the same.

It's not a fully hashed out legal system, but it's a start.
-- Selky, Jan 10 2010

http://www.onlibert...operty-and-morality Not endorsed [mouseposture, Jan 10 2010]

How Absolute are my Property Rights in a Libertarian System? http://everything2....rtarian+system%253F
A sample of a really old discussion. [Aristotle, Jan 11 2010]

I think this idea has some merits, partly because i think the concept of property can be extended into the mind. One may believe mental events are one's own, but are they? I don't know about the idea of the death penalty because to me, you can't usually deprive them of life and add that life to your own. That would make sense if you were acting in self-defence and someone was trying to kill you, or possibly if you needed a transplant organ, but neither of those can be made sense of here. Self-defence is normally a mitigation in homicide and in either situation, the property can't be returned to its owner.

Having said all that, i do think this is very thought-provoking.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 10 2010


Selky, others have been there before you. Many others: for example, see link.

People who disagree with this idea tend to consider it sophmoric, but many take it seriously. If the term "libertarian" isn't yet familiar to you, try Googling it: I think you'd be interested.
-- mouseposture, Jan 10 2010


Yeah, I know what libertarian is. I myself am in favour of Federal Nightwatchman state.

//what exactly changes?//

The concept of parenthood, for one. Also it means you only need to cover the issue of property, rather than life and liberty as well. Sort of.

I'd bring back corporal punishment as well. You punch someone in the face, you receive an equal (in respect to the effects, not the force) punch to the face. Then it's done, no criminal record or DNA sampling afterwards.
-- Selky, Jan 10 2010


The problem is one of inalienable possession. I am my children's father and they are my children, in a grammatical sense, but i don't own my children. That's alienable possession. Libertarianism can only apply to alienable possession because in principle it's transferable.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 10 2010


The problem becomes in defining liberty as property.

The problems with libertarianism are many, as well. It poorly protects items naturally ocurring in the public trust, for example. Like air, or ironically, property values.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 10 2010


//liberty as property// lack of liberty means somebody else has control of property.
-- FlyingToaster, Jan 10 2010


Yes, it means someone else has control of property... which is your, inalienable property, so they have no right to.
-- Selky, Jan 10 2010


We may be using the word "inalienable" in a different way. I don't mean inalienable in a legal or ethical sense. I mean it in terms of an attribute or relationship between two items or entities which is true of them by definition. Actually, that doesn't quite work, but it's a start. My children are necessarily mine or they wouldn't be the people they are. They will cease to be mine when one of us dies, in a sense. Alienable possession applies to things whose ownership can be transferred.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 10 2010


That seems like a very flawed proposition. By definition property can be transferred from one person to another. Personal liberty as a social value arose to address the very serious PROBLEM of individuals (bodies and intangibles) being treated as property. Slavery, child Labor, debtors prison, are all examples of the treatment of human life as a property. A property that can be traded. Objectifying personal liberty destroys the foundation of modern civilization. A dinosaur of an idea that deserves to remain in the museum: Bone.
-- WcW, Jan 11 2010


This is merely Libertarianism, or Anarcho- Thatcherism, which is widely known to exist as a political philosophy. A right-wing form of anarchy where that people tend to convert to with a religious fervour.

I see the idea even bored the poster, as evidenced by his "blah blah blah"s.

[marked-for-deletion: widely known to be drooled over]
-- Aristotle, Jan 11 2010


Roll on the 2010's liberty bubble.
-- wagster, Jan 11 2010


I disagree. I don't think this is the same as libertarianism at all, for the reasons [WcW] mentions apart from anything else. I don't agree with it at all, but i can see a clear distinction between it and libertarianism.

As i said, i think there's a fundamental flaw in it because it fails to distinguish between a necessary relation and a contingent one. There are situations where one's children can be bought and sold, but that's about as far from a free society as it could possibly be. However, you're saying that children are their own property held in trust by, for example, their parents? I think that fails to take into account a relationship which exists between a parent and child automatically. An absentee parent, which is what a child sold into slavery would have, is still a parent, so it's like a hydra - the ownership has been removed and "grows back" immediately. Can it then be sold again?

Also, what determines ownership? A child's genome is an amalgam of the parents', so to an extent, that part of the child's identity is not their own. Did they make it themselves? The child's personality and identity are then partly determined by the child's physiology and partly by its influences. The physiology is effectively inalienable without something like surgery or drugs. Some of the child's personality is theirs in the sense that they have made decisions about which experiences to have. They may have decided to hang out with the cool kids, to take up football or participate in drama or audiovisual stuff, and so on. But, how much is that the child's alienable property?

I think you need to go into the concept of property you're using here in more depth.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 11 2010


Okay. Your body is your own property, right? Which is why it is illegal to punch someone or kill them, unless it's done in defence. All this would do, in that respect, is codify that, making ones body legally theirs. The implications regarding the treatment of children, though - that would be difficult. At the moment, parents can choose what happens to their children medically. If they don't want their child vaccinated, they won't be, even if it puts the childs life at risk. If the childs body was the childs inalienable property, however, held in trust by the parents, they would be putting someone else's property at risk by the act of not getting the child vaccinated. Once they reach a certain age, of course, they can make their own choices and the parents have to back off.

??Personal liberty as a social value arose to address the very serious PROBLEM of individuals (bodies and intangibles) being treated as property. Slavery, child Labor, debtors prison, are all examples of the treatment of human life as a property.??

No, I don't think that was the case. The problem was defining it as alienable property - property that can be bought and sold. Besides, in most cases of slavery, the slave hadn't actually sold themselves, so they were still their own property.
-- Selky, Jan 11 2010


In that case, certain things are inherited as property and don't depend on working for them, for example one's own body belongs to one. What do you think about inherited property?

Concerning slavery, i think it has been used as a form of bankruptcy by the Romans, though i may be wrong, so i presume people did sell themselves into it.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 11 2010


Bonded servitude is still occurring now, you don't have to go back to the Romans.

Therein lays one of the problems with the law. Legally defining personal freedom is inherently self contradicting. If people 'own' themselves then they should be free to do what they like with their 'property'. If you apply restrictions on what they are allowed to do (such as sell themselves or their children into slavery) then they are no longer, technically, free. Anyone for irony?
-- DrBob, Jan 11 2010


Someone less lazy than me should explain why this idea is quite interesting as an illustration of the limitations of Occam's Razor.
-- pertinax, Jan 11 2010


//If people 'own' themselves then they should be free to do what they like with their 'property'. If you apply restrictions on what they are allowed to do (such as sell themselves or their children into slavery) then they are no longer, technically, free.//

Er, no, they couldn't sell their children into slavery. They could sell themselves (in a way, it's what people do now when they get a job), but they wouldn't own their children, so they couldn't sell them into slavery.

//In that case, certain things are inherited as property and don't depend on working for them, for example one's own body belongs to one. What do you think about inherited property?//

It's the dead persons own property, so they are allowed to give it to whoever they choose, be it their children or not.
-- Selky, Jan 11 2010


OK, so how would that apply to a child? They're born owning themselves, but that's not a Lockean concept of property for a start because they haven't "mixed their labour" with it. Then again, the Lockean concept of property may be flawed.

The property of one's own body and life doesn't seem to be acquired to me.

Oh, and bonded servitude: yes it does, but it can be disguised as something else and the Romans are the most straightforward example i could think of on the spot.

// As property goes, the human body isn't worth a lot //

Depends on how you count it. Alpha interferon, for example, is very expensive, and whereas it may be an organic compound made of the same elements as most of the rest of the body, you're not going to find it easy to make from those elements unless there's an actual living vertebrate body available to you. Besides, what about things like Napoleon's penis or locks of hair from a pop star's head?
-- nineteenthly, Jan 11 2010


...or stem cells?
-- DrBob, Jan 11 2010


Well exactly. A lot of it depends on how far down you do the rendering. On the whole, there seems to be a strong correlation between the complexity of the component and its value, and the logical conclusion of that is that an entire living human has the greatest economic value. Apart from anything else, they can (theoretically in my case) be employed, which is half a million quid minimum for the working life of an adult full time at minimum wage.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 11 2010


So you want possession to be 100% of the law?

When I visualize the 'bakery existing in physical space I usually don't imagine it as having this many armchairs.
-- rcarty, Jan 11 2010


Before the World Wide Web there was Usernet and Libertarians used to discuss this kind of nonsense even then. To explore the dark underbelly of this kind of philosophy is never a pleasant trip.

Essentially Libertarians believe that they can strip down society down to it's cruellest, most inhuman, legal axioms and still have it function.

This is a common example. See the link I've provided for a discussion of it.
-- Aristotle, Jan 11 2010


What if I don't like my neighbors?
-- Jscotty, Jan 11 2010


"All you need is property..."

Wa wa wa wa wa.

"All you need is property..."

Wa wa wa wa wa.

"All you need is property, property... Property's all you need."
-- DrWorm, Jan 12 2010



random, halfbakery