Recently, I've been listening to a lecture course on Justice by Michael Sandel. For a Harvard professor, he's not all that bad. At least he doesn't come across as a know-it-all, and there is none of the smug eliteness that we often find in people in his position. He appears level-headed and patient, and he gives you the sincere impression that he's more interested in what you are thinking and why than in what it is you think you know. Besides being interesting, I admire how he makes it possible for a discussion to arise in a lecture that is being attended by over a 1,000 students.
He takes you through a recent history of moral thinking, and invites us to explore just why some thinkers have thought the way they have and what that could mean for us today. Let's face it: we're faced with many of the same problems that faced Socrates, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Rawls, and others. The more things change, the more some things remain the same. In one of the lectures, he spends a bit of time with Locke, and what caught my attention was Locke's attitude toward property. What does property have to do with ethics?
Well, a lot, actually, and not the least since the line between what's just and what's legal has become increasing blurred. You see, it was about the time of Locke that we moderns picked up again on a very old idea, namely the importance of property rights. In ancient Rome, by about 50 BC, the master of a household, the dominus (from which we derive "dominate") had complete power over his property, which included not just his lands and money, but his wife, children, and, of course, slaves. In fact, his power was absolute; he could do whatever he wanted with the things and he could even execute the people, if he so desired, without fear of legal repercussions. This was a form of "having" that probably makes some people drool, even today. It is difficult, however, in our modern minds to justify this, especially where the people are involved, but the artificial relationship it creates towards the things has hung around for quite a while.
In the second century AD, then, the Romans actually redefined what the word "freedom" (Lat. libertas) meant, making it in essence indistinguishable from the rights of dominium (that is, the rights of the master over his property) (cf. Graeber, 2011, pp 198ff). I mention this because it was fellows like Locke who dug deep into our past to find ways to break the authority of the Church which had been dominating the ethics business for centuries. It became a matter of reason, not faith, that things should be one way and not another. Even that other great Enlightenment thinker, Kant, based his entire philosophy of morals on the notion of "freedom" (though he defined it as the ability, no the duty, to obey only those maxims which one gave to oneself; he assumed every human being was in the end, by virtue of his being in existence, free). Ever since, there has been a very thin line in our modern minds between the notion of "rights" and what is in fact "right" (or ethical).
But what does all this mean for Locke and for us today? Freedom, rights, and property ... how easy it is to get them all mixed up.
First, let's get clear on what Locke was up to, and I will admit that I have singled him out because he had such a strong influence on America's so-called Founding Fathers, and their legacy is haunting not only Americans but the rest of the world today. Locke decided that if you made something in nature productive (or useful) you then had a right to call it yours. For example, say I find a long, sturdy stick in the woods. I take it home, work on it, shape, sand and shellac it, and I then have an impressive staff that could be used as a walking aid on long treks or as a weapon of defense. According to Locke, it is mine and I can use it or sell it as I wish. Intuitively this seems very reasonable.
By a similar token, there's a patch of land, only lightly wooded, so I clear it, plow it, plant it and then harvest the crops I have sown. Is the field mine? Am I entitled to the crops it yields? This is a more difficult scenario than the one with the stick, isn't it? Whose patch of land was it to begin with? That depends. If it were today, it could certainly belong to someone else, and you would be required to determine who that is then come to an agreement with that person about using it. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that we're on the North American continent, say, somewhere around present-day Pittsburgh, 250 years ago. What about now?
There are those who would argue that, yes, first come, first served and the one who makes the most productive use of that land is entitled to it. Well, what about the Native Americans who used that land as part of their hunting grounds and where they gathered other things to use and eat? According to Locke, since the use of the land for agriculture produces a greater value, it's the farmer's. He arrives at this conclusion by simple economic reasoning: the grain produced can be used to bake more bread to feed more people than the "mere" use of that land for hunting and gathering. And it is here that any thinking individual will see there's something of a problem. He uses a quasi-utilitarian argument (the greatest good for the greatest number of people), but this argument is culturally determined. The loss of that land, of course depending on the size, reduces the quality of life for the hunter-gather culture. Utilitarianism is used to culturally define what is "more" or "better". It's not a convincing argument. The pragmatists among you will say, well it didn't really "belong" to anyone, so what's the problem?
My question is why is something not obviously owned by a specific individual not owned by anyone? Why don't we consider it owned by everyone: a common good? That is more or less how the Native Americans were viewing it: whoever was passing through could use it for their purposes. The notion of "ownership" doesn't make a lot of sense, yet it is the notion of "ownership" that drives almost all of our thinking these days. Property rights are a very big deal. They were (and are) at the heart of the financial and economic crisis from which we have not yet recovered. Property rights are something we need to think about seriously and deeply.
Locke was, among other things, an administrator of one of the American colonies. It is not hard to surmise that he may have had a person, vested interest in viewing property as he did. It was certainly to his advantage, and he used his arguments to morally justify what was happening with the Native Americans. We have every right ... in fact, I believe we have the obligation ... to re-examine this position today, not because we're smarter now than we were then, but because it was questionable then, and it is still questionable now.
The next time, I'll go into why this is so.
Reference
Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: the first 5,000 years, Melville House Publishing