Giving It All Away? Thomas Reid’s Retreat from a Natural Rights Justification of Private Property

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-389
Author(s):  
K.A.B. Mackinnon
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

[P]roperty must exist wherever men exist, and…the right to such property is the necessary consequence of the natural right of men to life and liberty.Thomas Reid 1788I proceed therefore to consider in what State or Order of Society there is the least temptation to ill conduct, and I confess that to me the Utopian System of Sir Thomas More seems to have the advantage of all others in this respect. In that System, it is well known there is no private Property. All that which we call Property is under the Administration of the State for the common benefit of the whole political Family.Thomas Reid 1794The few remarks on property that are found in the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind of the eighteenth century Scottish “Common Sense” philosopher, Thomas Reid, have led at least one commentator to treat him as a fairly traditional advocate of the natural right to (private) property, albeit one with a concern for the very poor. In an article on William Paley and the rights of the poor, Thomas Home remarks in passing that Reid’s (and Adam Ferguson's)major concern was to justify natural rights to property and that their interest in the poor was so little that a reader who accidentally skipped a paragraph or a page would miss all they had to say on the topic.

Beyond Strict Justice: Hugo Grotius on Punishment and Natural Right(s)

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Seth Geddert
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

AbstractHugo Grotius is often seen as reducing justice to the systematic protection of individual rights. However, this reading struggles to account for the surprisingly robust place he accords to punishment. An offender cannot plausibly claim punishment as a right, and the right to punish gives little direction about how best to carry out punishment. These difficulties point toward Grotius's little-noticed bifurcation of justice into “expletive” and “attributive” categories. While expletive (or “strict”) justice provides a grounding for the right to punish, its subsequent exercise must be governed by attributive justice. This higher justice considers persons and situations; requires imagination and prudential judgment; looks to the future; aims for the common good; acknowledges the importance of virtue; and never claims perfect solutions. Thus, Grotius's supposedly modern understanding of natural rights is best understood within an account of his specifically political thought—one that acknowledges an overarching framework of classical natural Right.

Development within the limits of order, 1820–70

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
State List ◽  
The French Revolution

After the upheavals of the French Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers were blamed for loosening the bonds of society. In nineteenth-century France, Saint-Simon advocated a social compromise whereby scientists and artists planned the path of progress while the propertied classes retained political power albeit acting as trustees for the interests of the poor. Comte called for a scientific sociology to inform the design of political institutions. In Britain, Bentham rejected the doctrine of natural rights in favour of the principle of utility, while J. S. Mill flirted with Comte’s positivism briefly. Marx made little impact and socialism came in the guise of Fabianism and middle-class trusteeship for the poor. In Germany, Hegel interpreted the French Revolution as a phase in a moral struggle for freedom and called for freedom to be reconciled with the idea of the common good embodied in the state. List envisaged the common good as protectionist trade policy.

scholarly journals On The Right to Private Property and Entitlement to One’s Income

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-74
Author(s):  
Andrei Marmor
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Entire System ◽  
Moral Argument ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Fair Assessment

In this short essay I argue that the main insight of Murphy and Nagel’s book, The Myth of Ownership, that people have no right to their pre-tax income, is not supported by their claim that the right to private property is not a natural right. The non-naturalness of the right to private property, I argue, is irrelevant to their moral argument. The plausibility of their moral conclusion derives from the thesis (which they also seem to endorse) that people have a right to the fruits of their labor, maintaining, however, that there is no possible conception, morally speaking, of what the fruits of one's labor are, independent of a system of legal and social norms that constitute the terms of fair bargaining, pricing, etc. People can only have a right to a fair assessment of the added value of their labor, and the latter cannot make any sense independent of the entire system of norms prevailing in the relevant society. I argue that this last conclusion is not affected by the nature of the right to private property.

Locke and Nozick on Property

1982 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. B. Drury
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

In this paper I hope to show that the differences between the Lockian and Nozickian ideas regarding the foundation of private property are far greater than is generally assumed. My purpose is not to criticize Nozick, but to show that the accepted interpretation of Locke on which he relies is mistaken. In particular, I hope to show (1) that the theory of appropriation by labour is not applicable after the invention of money; and is meant to show that the right to property is based on the right to life and self-preservation, and (2) that property arrangements after the introduction of money are justified primarily by utility rather than natural right, and (3) that the conditions created by the invention of money make the ‘regulation’ of private property necessary for the preservation of mankind which is required by the law of nature.

Hobbes on Sovereign AuthorityHow the Right of Nature Becomes Sovereign Right

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gauthier
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right

The right to (private) property in Hobbes’s Leviathan is established by each man authorizing the sovereign, acting in the person of each, to renounce the natural right to unlimited possession in favor of an exclusive claim right (i.e., one that obligates others) to goods acquired and exchanged in accordance with procedures established by the sovereign. Yet this useful way to ground the right to private property and other rights runs afoul of punishment because Hobbes both asserts and denies that a person may authorize his own punishment. This chapter introduces a “Neo-Hobbesian” definition of punishment, which permits authorizing the sovereign to punish oneself if one expects to gain from the system of punishment.

Natural Rights as Powers to Act

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Susan James
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Right

Spinoza grounds his political philosophy on a highly counter-intuitive conception of natural right as the right to do anything in your power. Just as big fish eat little fish by the right of nature, so humans act by natural right, regardless of what they do. In this essay I explain what leads Spinoza to hold this view and show how, in doing so, he contentiously rejects some of the most central assumptions of the natural law tradition. Finally, I consider whether Spinoza’s view can contribute anything of value to current discussions of natural right. I argue that he draws our attention to prerequisites of a cooperative way of life that contemporary theorists frequently neglect.

Hodgskin’s Libertarian Groundwork

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-98
Author(s):  
Daniel Layman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Working Out

Thomas Hodgskin, an Englishman who wrote widely in political economy during the first half of the nineteenth century, professed almost slavish devotion to Locke. In following in what he took to be Locke’s footsteps, he devoted his scholarly life to a polemic against “idle” capitalists and landowners. But he simultaneously defended an unflinchingly individualist interpretation of the Lockean project. According to Hodgskin, the world is common only in the sense of being originally unowned, and everyone has a right to anything he can create by laboring on it. He argues that the crushing inequality he observed around him in the fields and cities of the industrial revolution was attributable solely to the violence and cupidity of governments and their cronies. In working out this theory, Hodgskin sketched the principle features of a distinctly libertarian resolution of Locke’s property problem. According to this resolution, there is no problem about reconciling the common right to the world with the growth of private property because the common right is simply a liberty for each person to make use of the world as he might see fit. Thus, despite his left-leaning criticisms of capitalism and absentee landownership, Hodgskin planted seeds that would develop, in Spooner’s later work, into the core of the right-libertarianism we know today.

Teleological Groundings of Rights and Duties

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Rowan Cruft
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Right

Chapter 7 develops a teleological account of the grounding of duties and rights. It argues that a ‘natural’ right—that is, a duty that is owed to someone independently of anyone’s recognizing or deciding that it is owed to them (i.e. a duty that bears Chapter 4’s ‘Addressive’ requirements independently of anyone recognizing this or creating it)—must be a duty grounded wholly or predominantly on the right-holder’s own good. By contrast, legal, conventional, and promissory rights need not be grounded or justified by the right-holder’s good. Many alternative accounts of the grounding of ‘natural’ rights—from e.g. Darwall, Kamm, Nagel, Ripstein, Scanlon—are considered and rejected.

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