Episode 126 - Listener Q&A with Agnes Callard and Ben Callard
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What is the opening premise of the listener Q&A episode?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Tykman.
I'm Agnes Keller.
I'd benchow it. And today is our listener QA episode, which means that we'll be answering questions that you recorded and sent to us. So I guess we're about ready to get started, so let's listen to the first one.
The problem of property the phrase taxation is theft is probably well known because theft is only possible if someone takes another's property unlovely. That principle always made me think of the question where the right of property comes from, especially because this phrase is often paired with the non aggression principle, the notion that if you start from first principles and you follow through, the conclusion should stand. But how should one proportion the claims of property? Can the first one to reach Marsh claim it all? Should you, if you can, repay or return stolen property. Think not just of common theft but of reparations or the land that the Romans stole from the Gauls, etcetera. Can property even make sense, let alone practically as above, but even conceptually?
So I kinda wanna just introduce two thoughts here. about property and see where you guys want to go with this. So one of them is from Oliver Wendell Holmes writing in eighteen ninety seven. He is sort of talking about like the foundations of property law and he's saying that it is rooted in a certain fact about human instinct, namely that we get attached to stuff that we hang around for a while. So here's the quote. It is in the nature of man's mind, a thing which you have enjoyed and used as your own for a long time, whether property or an opinion, takes root in your being and cannot be torn away without your resenting the act and trying to defend yourself however you came by it. The law can ask no better justification than the deepest instincts of man.
So Holmes is saying, like, this is why we've got property law. It's just like someone hangs around something for a while and it's sort of they sort of become convinced that it's part of them or who they are.
And if you imagine like a little kid with a toy, they get so attached to those things. It's like it's like this little inanimate object is like their best friend. It's nuts, right?
Yeah, and if you think about just one step before getting attached to the toy, it would be like Hegel thought that like the first kind of property that you have is your own body, right? And it's like, why think your body is yours? It's like, well, whenever you've been around, it's been there. You know, you just you've gotten really attached to it, um, to thinking of it as yours. And maybe that's it, maybe that's all there is to the basic idea of property is you've just hung out with something forever. Like as long as you can remember.
I feel like if we took this really far, it we like maybe we would start thinking of our property as like kind of an extension of our bodies if we have that relationship to our bodies. I don't know. That seems like a way to take that view to the extreme. I don't know what you guys think.
How do the hosts argue about the foundations of property rights?
Yeah. I mean I guess I'm not convinced that Holmes is right about this. Um the It's not exactly a cynical theory, but it's a kind of reductive theory, right? It's saying there's nothing more to the root idea of property than familiarity or something like that. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And I'm not sure what would count as an argument for against that view that he has. I also don't know what will count for and against the following view that I'm about to give, but I uh you know. Why not think the root idea is the idea of earning? We sometimes earn something. We all have that concept. We all feel that we know when we've earned something, when it's due to us. when it's not due to somebody else. And of course, many of the things that we earn are going to be things that are there for near us and that we're familiar with and so it might even entail or explain
Holmes's intuition. But why not think that it starts with the idea of I earn this thing. I it's because of me that it exists.
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