Chapters 7 and 8 start examining the myth of appropriation and the need for physical evidence to justify the appropriation hypothesis of private property.
While I respect Widerquist's reasons for doing this, I'm going to be honest, even if the propertarians' account of history is true, that does not mean that natural rights theory is true.
Coming at this as an ex-Christian, it becomes quite clear that this appropriation idea is just a myth that our culture made to order to justify private property. It sounds a lot like the original premise I was thinking of basing a book on, that the world is not "fallen". After all, the Christian ideas of work and property come out of the Biblical accounts of creation. God made the world, humans lived in a garden, they didn't have to work, and then they decided to eat a magical piece of fruit at the suggestion of a talking snake and got kicked out of the garden and told they had to work to survive. And therefore, we all have to work for our existence, and nothing can ever be free, ever. The idea of appropriation actually does have a direct biblical reference, in which humans were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, and to have dominion over the earth (Gen 1:28). I mean in the Biblical account, God is literally telling people "these are the rules of the game, this is what you're supposed to do." And I feel like a lot of our western ethos with property and natural rights is based on that. After all, in the Biblical worldview, the god in the Bible in the god that supports natural rights are the same. I know the 18th century enlightened thinkers were deists, but I do feel like they can't help but be influenced by this Christian conception of god, and that that's where they got this idea of natural rights from. While deists rejected the special revelation of the Bible, they still accepted the natural revelation of what god can reveal through nature.
And that's one where where i diverge from widerquist's perspective here. Widerquist looks at the prehistory of private property (hence the book title) in order to debunk long standing myths that our society's "social contract" is based on. But for me, it kind of doesn't matter even if humans regularly lived like this. Because it is apparent to me that we shouldn't rely on anything remotely related to divine command theory to define our ethical systems and laws. "God says" is a horribly weak excuse to justify ANYTHING, and all morality and thus law (which is just morality we deem important enough to enforce) based on divine command theory does not have a valid basis in ANYTHING.
It seems very obvious, coming at this from a secular humanist perspective, that this is all a bunch of crap that someone made up at some point. Every culture has its myths about our origins. The Bible was based on other ancient accounts in mesopotamia at the time. Enuma Elish, stuff like that. These accounts were, at best, very unreliable, I mean the Biblical view of earth looked like a freaking reverse snowglobe. And I even recall stories that were, I crap you not, involving gods using obscene bodily functions that I will not describe to make the earth. I mean, this stuff is just so wrong that it's ridiculous. Honestly, this idea that the world is like minecraft with all of these pristine land and that the original people who farmed on it have legitimate ownership rights to it is just...absurd. It's a complete fabrication by modern society. The people who made it were European colonizers who basically decided to settle new continents, take the land for themselves, and didnt really even accept that the native americans were there first. Widerquist even mentioned that these stories were made as literal propaganda to justify private property, and often tried to delegitimize competing theories. And as far as native americans go, I know a lot of right libertarians/propertarians are VERY racist toward native Americans. Like didn't Ayn Rand believe that the native Americans were too stupid to settle the land themselves and therefore it was right of the colonizers to take it for themselves? I mean, just reading the wikipedia article above and how it also tried to justify the state of Israel and lumped Arabs in with native Americans, it's obvious that these are very ethnocentric accounts justifying private property and just seizing lands from other people. It's ridiculous.
Even if appropriation hypothesis was true and the history was correct, I do not think that is a valid basis for an objective idea of morality and rights that can never be broken ever. It is, at best, one model for how we can do things. Because ultimately, this rests on divine command theory via natural rights theory to justify. But the fact that Widerquist is going to go on and prove that this ISN'T correct (honestly given the past 1.5 books I've seen enough to have a rough worldview for how people lived in our past) is just especially damning.
I mean, this crap is made up. This stuff is about as valid as some guy being chosen to be an absolute monarch because he pulled a sword from a rock by a lake. It's just nonsense. Humans need to make the rules that serve human needs. I am not saying that private property is not, in some ways, valid. I think that we are free to make whatever rules we want to live by. But we should also make rules, ideally, that allow us to live well, and to ideally be free to undue interference. A rigid right wing conception of private property absolutism is a rather poor model to live by in the 21st century. It's a system that ensures that a lot of human suffering will happen, and that people will be inherently unfree, as private property protects the absolute rights of the rich to own way too much, while everyone else languishes and starves and is forced into servitude to survive. I'm not saying that any complex state society isn't going to have some conception of property, I think some important questions all societies must grapple with (and are often thus, a major focal point of their internal politics) are "who gets what?" and "who does the work necessary for society to thrive?" I dont think propertylessness is valid with a society of our scale, but it seems apparent that all property should be distributed in such a way to ensure that everyone's needs are met, and the mechanisms for deciding who should work should be as voluntary as possible. I say as voluntary as possible rather than as widely distributed as possible, because widely distributing work is just what our society tries to do, where we see work as this obligation that all must engage in, and therefore we must all engage in it and we should keep creating "opportunity" in order to allow for that. No, work is a means to an end, not an end to itself. We should distribute work in whatever way is most favorable to everyone involved. I prefer a system in which we have work based on needs, and then people choose voluntarily to work within the market system, like classically liberal models of market economies are supposed to give us. All we really need are enough people to do the jobs that need to be done, and over time, our work needs should go DOWN as automation frees us from having to do labor to survive.
It's all of these systems of private property and natural rights and work being associated with our needs being met and legitimizing property that doom us to living the way we do. And I really think as a whole, we as a society need to deprogram ourselves out of this absolutism, recognize that all of these social conventions are arbitrary (in a sense of objective morality), that we don't have to be bound by them, and that if we want to live another way, we can just collectively choose to live another way.
Again, I respect what widerquist is doing here. He's looking to dispute specific claims, so he does it. But I just think my perspective is a bit broader, given my previous experiences with leaving the fundamentalist christian worldview, becoming a secular humanist, and basing my morality on that rather than all of these cultural myths. And yeah, I just wanted to get my thoughts out there.
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