Comments Elsewhere

Alex,

Thanks for the replies. For what it’s worth, when I was complaining about top-down ideas of “distribution,” I had most establishment economics in mind, and not just Marxist-Leninist-style command economies. I think it causes a great deal of evil in its state capitalist and managerial forms as well as in its state communist forms. I agree that the people who do it sometimes achieve the aims they set out to achieve (although they often achieve much less than you might expect); but I dispute that those aims are worth achieving at the cost of coercing any single person.

As for air, that’s a fair question; I think the answer to it is that all forms of property ownership allow for constructive abandonment of that property, but the concrete application of the principle for one kind of property doesn’t need to be the same as the concrete application for other kinds. Some things (land) can be left for long periods of time without being abandoned; others (air) can’t really be left at all without being abandoned; and most things (tools, chairs, books, etc.) are somewhere in between. There are lots of things that enter into a judgment about what constitutes abandonment in a given case; some of the salient issues include how easy it is to identify a good as previously owned, how easy it is to identify the owner of it, how much of a coherent separate existence it retains when you leave it, to what extent it could be recovered intact, how fungible the good is, how cheaply replaceable it is, what state it’s in when it’s left, etc. Since exhaled air immediately dissipates into an immeasurably larger atmosphere, from which the individual exhaled molecules become indistinguishable and in which they undergo transformative chemical reactions soon after they enter it, and since the molecules in air are fungible and almost costless to replace, and since the air exhaled is actually, unlike the inhaled air, biological waste that you’re trying to get rid of, air ends up holding up the extreme quick-abandonment end of the continuum. But being subject to instantaneous abandonment is not the same thing as being unownable; it just means that the conditions of ownership are of an especially flighty kind.

As for patents, I actually don’t know whether “owning a patent” is conceptually coherent or not; I think that advocates of patents have said things that are either conflicting or ambiguous about what constitutes owning a patent. If it just means “having the privileges conferred by patent laws or something sufficiently like them,” then that doesn’t answer the question of whether there’s actually any legitimate proprietary interest or not; you still have to determine whether the word “owning” is being used in a literal sense or a merely analogical sense. If it means owning an abstract object such as a scientific or technical discovery, or a multiply realizable set of structural properties, then I don’t know what that means any more than I know what owning the number 2 means. If it means owning a limited set of instances of that abstract object (such as the token of the fact in your own mind, or the tokens of it you wrote down in your notebook), I don’t dispute that you can own those, but that confers no right to determine how other people can or cannot use the token instances in their minds or in books that they own. If it means owning all the instances of the abstract object (including the contents of other people’s minds), then the claim amounts to slavery and is illegitimate as such.

I don’t actually think that the epistemological question here is as simple as foundationalism vs. coherentism. I do think that many philosophers are prone to make errors in a foundationalistic sort of direction, so moving them in a more coherentistic sort of direction may be dialectically useful. But I think the orthodox way of expressing both views ends up making a serious methodological error. There are points in moral deliberation where I think that the “mutual adjustment” going on is a matter of moral reality directly entering into deliberation, and cases where it’s appropriate to make foundationalist-looking appeals in light of that direct awareness (hence my interest in moral intuitionism).

As for the specific second-order intuitions that you’re discussing, I think that the view probably combines some genuine insights blown out of proportion, with some outright errors. As an example of the former, I think it’s true that there is a certain amount of reasonable variability in some of the rules between different species of property and that there may be elements of convention involved which can reasonably differ from case to case or community to community, but that many people make the error of drawing the conclusion that everything to do with property is purely conventional and can reasonably be infinitely varied. (The propensity is related to the sort of errors of inappropriate generalization and rigorization that Wittgenstein exposed in his later work.) As an example of the latter, I think that that sort of view is often reinforced by things such as the utilitarian willingness to subordinate all other forms of virtue to instrumental considerations about general benevolence, which I think is simply a serious mistake about the nature of virtue.