WEBVTT NOTE Ownership and Possession - Where Do You Draw the Line? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 This really is, just once more, okay, let me start again. 2 00:00:06.120 --> 00:00:09.320 I'm motivated to write anything I write by sort of conscience, 3 00:00:09.320 --> 00:00:11.240 which is to say, I don't know what the hell is going on 4 00:00:11.240 --> 00:00:12.400 in a particular area, right? 5 00:00:12.400 --> 00:00:14.720 And I can't find anybody else whose story 6 00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:17.520 is completely satisfactory, so I gotta DIY it. 7 00:00:17.520 --> 00:00:19.140 That's the only reason, okay? 8 00:00:20.560 --> 00:00:23.200 So this is part of a larger project, 9 00:00:23.200 --> 00:00:26.000 and which I'm working on, it's the book 10 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:28.960 I'm currently working on, on liberty and property. 11 00:00:28.960 --> 00:00:34.960 And I'm really, really not at all happy with the accounts of property that I find in the literature. 12 00:00:34.960 --> 00:00:39.960 It's not to say that they're all defective, radically defective. It's just that they're not all completely satisfactory. 13 00:00:39.960 --> 00:00:45.960 And it's really problematic. And what's most problematic for me is the relationship between liberty and property. 14 00:00:45.960 --> 00:00:48.960 I regard myself as a libertarian, not a propertarian. 15 00:00:48.960 --> 00:00:55.960 And it seems sometimes that the emphasis on property in libertarian literature runs the risk of devaluing liberty, right? 16 00:00:55.960 --> 00:00:57.960 And I'm concerned about trying to work that out. 17 00:00:57.960 --> 00:01:00.960 So that's the framework within which this little paper sits. 18 00:01:00.960 --> 00:01:09.960 And it's much more tentative, by the way, than my exuberantly natural dogmatic manner I might suggest. 19 00:01:09.960 --> 00:01:13.960 So, okay, I can't stop doing that, that's the way I am, but it is actually very tentative. 20 00:01:13.960 --> 00:01:16.960 I'd be grateful for any comments you might have. 21 00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:21.960 My sons often tease me by suggesting that the best way to send me to sleep 22 00:01:21.960 --> 00:01:25.960 is to put a film in glorious technicolor on the DVD and make me watch it. 23 00:01:25.960 --> 00:01:30.620 Watch It. According to them, I manifest signs of life only in the presence of black and 24 00:01:30.620 --> 00:01:36.440 white films. Now, whatever about the aesthetic advisability of preferring black and white 25 00:01:36.440 --> 00:01:41.320 over color in cinematic matters, black and white thinking, the application of rigid, 26 00:01:41.320 --> 00:01:46.680 sharply delineated distinctions may not always be appropriate or even possible in intellectual 27 00:01:46.680 --> 00:01:50.280 and conceptual matters. I want to run a little experiment here. I'd like to do it in full 28 00:01:50.280 --> 00:01:54.800 if I have time, but I don't, so this will be a truncated form. What I want you to do 29 00:01:54.800 --> 00:01:57.800 I want to show off hands in response to various questions. 30 00:01:57.800 --> 00:02:03.800 Taking the class of male human beings and the concepts of tall and short, 31 00:02:03.800 --> 00:02:10.800 I want to show off hands how many people would consider a man six foot six to be tall? 32 00:02:10.800 --> 00:02:15.800 How many people would consider a man of six foot six to be short? 33 00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:17.800 Here's another one. 34 00:02:17.800 --> 00:02:25.880 How many people again would consider a man 4 foot 4 to be short? How many would consider 35 00:02:25.880 --> 00:02:33.720 him to be tall? Okay, third question. How many people would consider a man 5 foot 7 36 00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:39.520 and a half inches to be tall? How many people would consider a man 5 foot 8 and a half inches 37 00:02:39.520 --> 00:02:45.800 to be tall? Okay, you don't like 8 and a half? How about 9 and a half? Okay, thank you, Roderick. 38 00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:59.800 Okay, I feel like an auctioneer. Okay, five foot ten. Now, notice what happens here. I mean, if you were my unfortunate students, I could torture you at a much greater length, but you're not. 39 00:02:59.800 --> 00:03:09.800 So, what happens is, there was complete unanimity on six foot six. No dissenters, okay? Complete unanimity on four foot four, for short. 40 00:03:09.800 --> 00:03:16.800 I had only one taker for 5'6", so that show, obviously, I'm in North America, people are generally taller and thank you very much for being the only one to put your hand up, okay? 41 00:03:16.800 --> 00:03:19.800 Don't feel a bit embarrassed, she's back there if you all want to look, okay? 42 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:29.800 Okay, but as you move towards 5'8", 5'9", you tend to happen, and I've tried this experiment with my students, and what tends to happen when you hit the kind of midpoint, 43 00:03:29.800 --> 00:03:35.800 hands go up and down and then you get this kind of up and down thing where people are kind of thinking, 44 00:03:35.800 --> 00:03:41.800 You get the half-arm, not the full one, not the down, but the kind of half-arm. 45 00:03:41.800 --> 00:03:45.800 What I'm talking about here is the phenomenon known as the sorites. 46 00:03:45.800 --> 00:03:50.800 The paradox of the sorites, the so-called S-O-R-I-T-E-S, has been around for ages. 47 00:03:50.800 --> 00:03:58.800 The making of binary distinctions between things like tall, short, good and bad, beautiful, ugly, generous, mean, is commonplace, 48 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:03.800 but all such distinctions appear to be beset by the scourge of the sorites. 49 00:04:03.800 --> 00:04:17.300 In the sororities, by traversing a series of incremental steps or stages between two countries we can show that one shades into the other in a seemingly inexorable manner, thus eroding or appearing to erode the distinction between them. 50 00:04:17.300 --> 00:04:21.300 The standard example of it, the very name sororities comes from the Greek word for a heap. 51 00:04:21.300 --> 00:04:25.800 The idea is you've got a heap of sand and the story goes, will you take away one grain? What have you got left? 52 00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:30.300 Well, it looks like you've got a heap. You take away another one. And then another one. 53 00:04:30.300 --> 00:04:34.300 and, of course, you can see where we're going in this, because eventually, even if it's going to take you a long time, 54 00:04:34.300 --> 00:04:37.700 there's not going to be any sand in the heap, it's all going to be scattered and then it's gone. 55 00:04:37.700 --> 00:04:42.300 At what point does the heap cease to be a heap, right? 56 00:04:42.300 --> 00:04:46.300 Or for most of us, the men approaching my age, the more dramatic one is hair loss, okay? 57 00:04:46.300 --> 00:04:51.300 When you start losing bits of hair and eventually you have to confess you're bald, right? 58 00:04:51.300 --> 00:04:53.100 Okay, I haven't reached that stage yet. 59 00:04:53.100 --> 00:04:58.300 Okay, so the sororities problem can be applied to libertarian topics and, in fact, 60 00:04:58.300 --> 00:05:03.640 has been so applied in a 2008 article written by Walter Block and William Burnett. They 61 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:08.540 identify what they call the continuum problem, that is the sororities problem, in law and 62 00:05:08.540 --> 00:05:13.560 political economy and they argue, or at least they appear to argue, that there is no real 63 00:05:13.560 --> 00:05:18.780 solution to it. So they begin with this example. What, they wonder, constitutes a genuine threat 64 00:05:18.780 --> 00:05:23.380 of violence. So they imagine somebody shaking his fist three inches away from somebody else's 65 00:05:23.380 --> 00:05:29.220 Presumably under circumstances such as it's not being playful or a joke or part of rehearsal 66 00:05:29.220 --> 00:05:31.900 for a play or something like that, okay. 67 00:05:31.900 --> 00:05:35.100 And then they imagine him doing it three miles away. 68 00:05:35.100 --> 00:05:42.220 Now they then go on to say, if the same action is a thread at three inches but not at three 69 00:05:42.220 --> 00:05:48.100 miles, it follows ineluctably that at some point in between these two distances its very 70 00:05:48.100 --> 00:05:52.480 nature changes from the one to the other. 71 00:05:52.480 --> 00:05:58.560 But the point of change where, for example, 30 yards and fist shaking at 29 yards 11 inches 72 00:05:58.560 --> 00:06:06.040 would still be a threat, but not at 30 feet 1 inch, which seems a little bit odd to me, 73 00:06:06.040 --> 00:06:07.040 okay? 74 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:11.160 Now, as we saw in the little experiment I did here, on any continuum we can move progressively 75 00:06:11.160 --> 00:06:15.040 from a given point which can correctly be described as, let's say, to take the example 76 00:06:15.040 --> 00:06:22.040 I gave short, to another point which can correctly be described as tall, so that as we move along 77 00:06:22.040 --> 00:06:29.040 To return to Block and Barney's example, at one point on their continuum, what we have is clearly not a threat, and at another it clearly is a threat. 78 00:06:29.040 --> 00:06:36.040 However, it doesn't follow that the change occurs at a point. That's, I think, the problem. 79 00:06:36.040 --> 00:06:43.040 Some people are clearly and unambiguously short, others clearly and unambiguously tall, and others, well, who can tell? 80 00:06:43.040 --> 00:06:50.040 To return to Block and Barney's example, at one point on their continuum, what we have is clearly not a threat, 81 00:06:50.040 --> 00:06:54.080 okay and another clearly is a threat and in between we have a fuzzy area where we 82 00:06:54.080 --> 00:06:55.880 simply can't tell for sure 83 00:06:55.880 --> 00:07:00.080 whether someone is making a threat or not and they concede as much when they 84 00:07:00.080 --> 00:07:03.640 when they conclude quote how then can we solve the problem of whether or not a 85 00:07:03.640 --> 00:07:07.080 response or retaliation against the threat is justified or not given the 86 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:09.200 conditions depicted above 87 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:13.280 and they say the only answer is there is no answer 88 00:07:13.280 --> 00:07:16.600 at least not one that admits of geographical extension 89 00:07:16.600 --> 00:07:19.320 that is no single cutoff point 90 00:07:19.320 --> 00:07:23.320 will be both reasonable and non-arbitrary. 91 00:07:23.320 --> 00:07:27.320 So while we may be unable to draw a dimensionless dividing line between threat and non-threat, 92 00:07:27.320 --> 00:07:33.320 it doesn't follow that there is no difference between them, or that there is no way of making a reasonable judgment as to which is which. 93 00:07:33.320 --> 00:07:41.320 Now they come down to this conclusion. They say there is a way to address this problem that does not rely upon some necessarily arbitrary point along the continuum. 94 00:07:41.320 --> 00:07:48.320 It is to resort to common, that is to say economically efficient, practice. End of quote. 95 00:07:48.320 --> 00:07:53.360 Such reasonable judgments, in fact, are the function of municipal systems of law. That's 96 00:07:53.360 --> 00:07:57.800 what you go to a jury for. They're the ones who try to make a reasonable judgment in circumstances 97 00:07:57.800 --> 00:08:02.480 where it may not be entirely clearly one situation or another. 98 00:08:02.480 --> 00:08:07.680 In response to such problems, the law elaborated the concept of assault as a symptom battery 99 00:08:07.680 --> 00:08:14.320 to signify any act that created a reasonable apprehension in another of an imminent, harmful, 100 00:08:14.320 --> 00:08:20.680 or Offensive Contact. Such an act to consist of a threat of harm accompanied by an apparent 101 00:08:20.680 --> 00:08:28.040 present ability to carry out that threat. That's why, for example, in English law, where silent 102 00:08:28.040 --> 00:08:35.640 phone calls were held by the courts to constitute assault. Not battery, obviously, since it's 103 00:08:35.640 --> 00:08:39.480 a little bit difficult to touch somebody through a telephone. But assault, it's quite, and 104 00:08:39.480 --> 00:08:44.400 And so the objection against it was, of course, where is the imminent threat? 105 00:08:44.400 --> 00:08:47.040 The other person is at the end of the phone line, unless it's a mobile phone and they're 106 00:08:47.040 --> 00:08:48.600 just outside your window. 107 00:08:48.600 --> 00:08:51.160 Anyway, leave that to one side. 108 00:08:51.160 --> 00:08:56.480 Whether or not an act of fist shaking constitutes assault is a matter of judgment, but the judgment 109 00:08:56.480 --> 00:09:02.540 while requiring the exercise of discrimination is not based upon arbitrary factors. 110 00:09:02.540 --> 00:09:07.000 So their overall conclusion is that libertarian theory, and I would argue, in fact, that not 111 00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:24.000 has continuum problems in which it's not possible simply to set arbitrary cut-off points and they conclude from this that this is not a shortcoming in the principles of non-aggression but rather the importance of private institutions in the law industry. 112 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:32.000 Now, I've just taken this thing about the continuum in the particular example from Block and Barnett to illustrate the point and I want to apply it now to the concepts of ownership and possession. 113 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:35.000 This is the tentative bit. 114 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:41.440 So, in daily speech, property is taken to be such things as car and bicycles, houses 115 00:09:41.440 --> 00:09:46.000 and TV sets, robust physical entities of various kinds. Unless, of course, you're watching, 116 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:49.000 by the way, these programs where they buy and sell houses, because everything in there 117 00:09:49.000 --> 00:09:52.440 is described as a property for some reason. I don't know why that is. And it's never 118 00:09:52.440 --> 00:09:56.200 a house, okay? It's never a cottage. It's always a property. But anyway, that's nothing 119 00:09:56.200 --> 00:10:01.520 to do with me. Property, however, is not so much a bunch of things such as cars or TVs, 120 00:10:01.520 --> 00:10:06.160 and rather a right to dispose completely or partially of such things in whatever ways 121 00:10:06.160 --> 00:10:13.040 one sees fit, subject only to not infringing upon the property rights of others. Possession, 122 00:10:13.040 --> 00:10:16.840 that is, mere possession, is a factual matter that can for the most part be determined by 123 00:10:16.840 --> 00:10:22.480 observation and any living thing can possess other things. So, you know, a dog can possess 124 00:10:22.480 --> 00:10:26.240 a bone, quite clearly, as you'll find out if you try to take it from it. 125 00:10:26.240 --> 00:10:41.240 Ownership, on the other hand, is a normative notion and implies the right to dispose of things in a variety of ways, by use, by exclusion, by transfer, even things that one doesn't currently possess. You can, of course, own things and not possess them, and you can possess them and not own them. 126 00:10:41.240 --> 00:10:51.240 E. Adamson Hubel takes the conventionalist approach to the concept of property, arguing that possession only becomes property when recognized as such by society at large. 127 00:10:51.240 --> 00:10:52.240 Research. 128 00:10:52.240 --> 00:10:55.920 Things don't become property, he says, quote, until the members of the society at large 129 00:10:55.920 --> 00:11:01.000 agree tacitly or explicitly to bestow the property attribute upon the object by regulating 130 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:06.280 their behavior with respect to it in a self-limiting respect, end of quote. 131 00:11:06.280 --> 00:11:10.840 On the other hand, Anthony de Jaese energetically disputes the idea that property is socially 132 00:11:10.840 --> 00:11:11.840 produced. 133 00:11:11.840 --> 00:11:16.320 Which idea, if true, he says, would imply that individual owners hold their property 134 00:11:16.320 --> 00:11:20.480 only by the grace and favor of the rest of society. 135 00:11:20.480 --> 00:11:26.440 is not necessarily a social product, it can come about by individual effort, totally isolated 136 00:11:26.440 --> 00:11:27.440 from society. 137 00:11:27.440 --> 00:11:32.160 It would seem that these two positions cannot both be true at the same time and in the same 138 00:11:32.160 --> 00:11:36.440 respect, yet there is something intuitively plausible about both of them. 139 00:11:36.440 --> 00:11:40.780 Hubel's conventionalist approach recognizes that rights are dual matters and are therefore 140 00:11:40.780 --> 00:11:44.240 necessarily embedded in a human social context. 141 00:11:44.240 --> 00:11:47.860 Ownership is not something that can be seen, heard or touched. 142 00:11:47.860 --> 00:11:53.740 It is, rather, a trilateral relationship among persons, at least two, in relation to an object. 143 00:11:53.740 --> 00:11:58.100 In contrast, and I think incorrectly, the J.C. defines ownership as a bilateral relation 144 00:11:58.100 --> 00:12:03.060 between an owner and the thing owned, such that the owner is at liberty to use it, to 145 00:12:03.060 --> 00:12:07.260 concede specific rights into others and to alienate it, as well as to exclude access 146 00:12:07.260 --> 00:12:11.380 to it by others except with his consent. 147 00:12:11.380 --> 00:12:15.260 Defined trilaterally, property has two aspects, the object owned and the network of social 148 00:12:15.260 --> 00:12:19.780 Social Relationships that establish the connection between persons and the object. 149 00:12:19.780 --> 00:12:23.660 On the other hand, and here I think Tijese is correct, property rights are not, at least 150 00:12:23.660 --> 00:12:28.660 not initially, arbitrary social creations, but in some sense a recognition by the members 151 00:12:28.660 --> 00:12:34.940 of society of the validity of a pre-existing claim by one or more of its members. 152 00:12:34.940 --> 00:12:39.660 Alright, so let me then start from the position of mere possession. 153 00:12:39.660 --> 00:12:42.540 Actually when I wrote this, first of all, possession suddenly mysteriously turned into 154 00:12:42.540 --> 00:12:55.220 If you start from a position of mere possession, where no one owns anything, how do you arrive 155 00:12:55.220 --> 00:12:59.140 at a position in which people actually come to own things? 156 00:12:59.140 --> 00:13:00.300 Consider the following. 157 00:13:00.300 --> 00:13:04.480 There are two opposing positions in respect of the ownership of natural resources. 158 00:13:04.480 --> 00:13:08.580 We can hold that such resources are initially owned by mankind in common, or we can hold 159 00:13:08.580 --> 00:13:11.540 that they are initially unowned. 160 00:13:11.540 --> 00:13:15.900 These two basic options are often taken to be equally tenable. A moment's reflection 161 00:13:15.900 --> 00:13:21.000 will show, I think, that this is simply not so. Imagine a world without human beings. 162 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:26.220 Who owns it? Well, leaving theological reflections to one side, the answer would have to be no 163 00:13:26.220 --> 00:13:32.500 one because there's no one around to own it. Okay. Now let's admit Adam and Eve onto the 164 00:13:32.500 --> 00:13:37.880 scene frolicking happily in the garden of Eden. Can you do that in the state of original 165 00:13:37.880 --> 00:13:50.880 Do they own the whole world, including those parts of it that they've never heard of, visited or used, but which they might, such as Alaska or deep as Siberia, assuming that presumably the Garden of Eden isn't in either of these two places? 166 00:13:50.880 --> 00:14:04.880 If you are inclined to answer yes to this question, ask yourself if by parity of reasoning they could be said to own Pluto or Betelgeuse, entities whose existence they are similarly not aware and of which they have no prospect of ever reaching. 167 00:14:04.880 --> 00:14:12.880 Now substitute for Adam and Eve all the human beings in existence in, say, 35,000 BC, living somewhere in East Africa. 168 00:14:12.880 --> 00:14:19.880 Suppose they number 50 or 500,000. Do they own the whole world, Alaska and Siberia included collectively? 169 00:14:19.880 --> 00:14:23.880 See, claims of ownership cannot be constituted merely by existence. 170 00:14:23.880 --> 00:14:30.880 In order to acquire property originally, you have to do something specific. You have to, you know, mix, I beg your pardon, 171 00:14:30.880 --> 00:14:39.880 I beg your pardon, you have to mould this piece of clay or fence this piece of open ground or clear this section of woodland with the intention which can be latent to exclude others from its use. 172 00:14:39.880 --> 00:14:46.880 The core of the lock-in, the very controversial lock-in metaphor, is that one must do something to acquire natural resources. 173 00:14:46.880 --> 00:14:48.880 One acquires nothing by sitting around and looking pretty. 174 00:14:48.880 --> 00:14:57.880 And that doing must have the effect of altering those resources or controlling them or demarcating them in some significant way so as to exclude others from using them. 175 00:14:57.880 --> 00:15:01.880 Exclusion is, I believe, the key element in the notion of initial acquisition. 176 00:15:01.880 --> 00:15:03.880 It's not enough merely to be first. 177 00:15:03.880 --> 00:15:07.880 The key element in the notion is you have to be first in acquiring, 178 00:15:07.880 --> 00:15:13.880 and acquiring means appropriating resources in such a way as to exclude their use by others. 179 00:15:13.880 --> 00:15:19.880 Now, how this exclusion is to be manifested, of course, depends on the nature of the resources appropriated. 180 00:15:19.880 --> 00:15:23.880 Something of this notion of exclusion can be seen in the Roman law doctrine of usucapio, 181 00:15:23.880 --> 00:15:29.880 and Remains of it is, you can be found in the Common Law Doctrine of Adverse Possession. 182 00:15:29.880 --> 00:15:33.880 So, I want you to imagine this. Suppose, again, let's go back to our desert island. 183 00:15:33.880 --> 00:15:36.880 How could I actually give a lecture without mentioning a desert island? I don't know. 184 00:15:36.880 --> 00:15:39.880 Suppose you were on a desert island and you cleared some ground, 185 00:15:39.880 --> 00:15:42.880 plant some carrots and give them the tender loving care that they need 186 00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:44.880 until they're ready to be picked and eaten. 187 00:15:44.880 --> 00:15:50.880 Wouldn't you own the carrots? No. Oh, why? 188 00:15:50.880 --> 00:15:58.880 Because I'd rather say that if you were to live in such a radical social isolation, you would neither own nor not own the carrots. 189 00:15:58.880 --> 00:16:05.880 The question of ownership simply doesn't apply. There's nothing for the concept to latch onto in that situation. 190 00:16:05.880 --> 00:16:09.880 But now suppose another person were to appear and attempt to appropriate the carrots. What then? 191 00:16:09.880 --> 00:16:17.880 Well, in that case, you would be in a position to make a counterclaim that all things considered would seem to be better grounded than that of the would-be carrot snatcher. 192 00:16:17.880 --> 00:16:23.320 In so doing, you would be attempting to actualize a kind of latent or virtual ownership 193 00:16:23.320 --> 00:16:27.880 that pre-existed any actual claim or recognition of that claim by others. 194 00:16:27.880 --> 00:16:33.880 So it would seem, here's my likely story, and you'll recognize this, of course, I'm stealing this from Grossius. 195 00:16:33.880 --> 00:16:37.880 Who else? I mean, this is the, hey, Grossius is the flavor of the day, right? 196 00:16:37.880 --> 00:16:41.880 It would seem that in the course of human history, after the first agricultural revolution, 197 00:16:41.880 --> 00:16:44.880 when people began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals, 198 00:16:44.880 --> 00:16:48.960 When it was required to bring land under cultivation and to make it suitable for pasture, this 199 00:16:48.960 --> 00:16:53.600 work represented an expenditure of labour that could not easily be recovered if the one who 200 00:16:53.600 --> 00:16:58.180 expended it could legitimately be forced to give up by others. At this stage, however, 201 00:16:58.180 --> 00:17:02.800 we still have de facto possession rather than ownership, or if ownership, then only virtual 202 00:17:02.800 --> 00:17:08.520 or latent ownership. That virtuality became actualised when other land users settled around 203 00:17:08.520 --> 00:17:13.300 the original user and, requiring undisturbed possession of their own tracts, were able 204 00:17:13.300 --> 00:17:17.980 to demand this only if there was mutual recognition, not just of the fact of possession, but of 205 00:17:17.980 --> 00:17:23.340 the right so to possess, in a word, a recognition of property. 206 00:17:23.340 --> 00:17:27.340 Now these reciprocal claims, of course, require that the boundaries between adjacent properties 207 00:17:27.340 --> 00:17:32.820 be reasonably clearly demarcated, a requirement celebrated in the proverb that good fences 208 00:17:32.820 --> 00:17:37.780 make good neighbors, and as people began to lay claims to territory and to market by signs 209 00:17:37.780 --> 00:17:42.140 what they regarded as their territory, neighbors started, in some cases at least, to accommodate 210 00:17:42.140 --> 00:17:43.900 themselves of these claims. 211 00:17:43.900 --> 00:17:48.620 To do this though, it had to be true that neighbors could discern and were prepared 212 00:17:48.620 --> 00:17:52.100 to respect the boundaries of territorial claims. 213 00:17:52.100 --> 00:17:56.500 You can see where the stuff about the sororities here because again, if you were to ask me 214 00:17:56.500 --> 00:18:03.140 at what precise point do you move from possession to ownership, the answer has to be there is 215 00:18:03.140 --> 00:18:05.220 no precise point. 216 00:18:05.220 --> 00:18:09.220 Does it follow therefore that we can never get from possession to ownership and the answer 217 00:18:09.220 --> 00:18:18.040 Acquisition, possession or occupation is a kind then of virtual ownership that becomes 218 00:18:18.040 --> 00:18:22.980 actual ownership eventually by means of reciprocal recognition. In this way, Hubel's and the 219 00:18:22.980 --> 00:18:28.020 JSA's approach can be reconciled. The JSA's account provides the matter to Hubel's form. 220 00:18:28.020 --> 00:18:32.900 My settled use and reuse of my possessions requires you to refrain from interfering with 221 00:18:32.900 --> 00:18:37.820 them, but your use and reuse of your possession requires me to refrain from interfering with 222 00:18:37.820 --> 00:18:42.860 M. Mutual recognition of one another's exclusive control amounts to the transformation of factual 223 00:18:42.860 --> 00:18:48.540 possession into normative ownership. Cicero wrote that private property has been endowed, 224 00:18:48.540 --> 00:18:53.860 he said, not by nature, but by long-standing occupancy in the case of those who settled 225 00:18:53.860 --> 00:18:58.520 long ago on empty land, since what was by nature common property – and he meant by 226 00:18:58.520 --> 00:19:01.740 common here, common in a negative sense, that is, not belonging to anybody in particular 227 00:19:01.740 --> 00:19:07.780 – has passed into the ownership of individuals. Each should retain what has accrued to him 228 00:19:07.780 --> 00:19:13.340 and if anyone seeks any of it for himself, he will transgress the law of community. 229 00:19:13.340 --> 00:19:17.940 The requirement of reciprocal recognition then cannot sensibly be made a universal requirement 230 00:19:17.940 --> 00:19:22.220 but must be limited to one's immediate neighbors in space and time. 231 00:19:22.220 --> 00:19:26.180 Recognition of your property claims by those geographically remote is not required. 232 00:19:26.180 --> 00:19:30.220 Still less is it the case that your property claims demand the recognition of those yet 233 00:19:30.220 --> 00:19:31.220 to be born. 234 00:19:31.220 --> 00:19:33.580 Okay, so the conclusion. 235 00:19:33.580 --> 00:19:36.540 There was a time when nobody owned anything. 236 00:19:36.540 --> 00:19:43.340 There must therefore have been a point when we went from mere possession to ownership. 237 00:19:43.340 --> 00:19:46.900 So where do you draw the line between possession, mere possession and ownership? 238 00:19:46.900 --> 00:19:51.540 And the answer is you don't, because there was no point. 239 00:19:51.540 --> 00:19:57.200 There is no point where the transition suddenly happens, but the transition happens nonetheless. 240 00:19:57.200 --> 00:20:01.980 And many of the conceptual tangles we get ourselves into regarding property come from 241 00:20:01.980 --> 00:20:06.180 assuming that all the human beings suddenly arrived on earth as if from nowhere and we 242 00:20:06.180 --> 00:20:36.180 This, of course, only needs to be stated to be seen to be nonsensical. We have to be historical in our approach to the emergence of the notion, or rather, at this stage I'm inclined to say, to the notions of property, and the story I told a little earlier was adumbrated in the 17th century by such as Grotius and Profendorf. That doesn't mean it's right in every respect, but it does suggest perhaps a less sterile way to approach the vexed question of property than the ahistorical, analytical 243 00:20:36.180 --> 00:20:39.540 approach used by many theorists of property. 244 00:20:39.540 --> 00:20:42.700 The task, by the way, of a speaker in a conference such as 245 00:20:42.700 --> 00:20:44.540 this is to speak, and the task of the people in the 246 00:20:44.540 --> 00:20:45.580 audience is to listen. 247 00:20:45.580 --> 00:20:47.940 It's usually a good idea if the speaker finishes first.