Main source: Waldron, Jeremy, “Property and Ownership”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Property and Ownership in Philosophy

Property is a general term for rules governing access to and control of land and other material resources. Because these rules are disputed, both in regard to their general shape and in regard to their particular application, there are interesting philosophical issues about the justification of property. Modern philosophical discussions focus mostly on the issue of the justification of private property rights (as opposed to common or collective property). ‘Private property’ refers to a kind of system that allocates particular objects like pieces of land to particular individuals to use and manage as they please, to the exclusion of others (even others who have a greater need for the resources) and to the exclusion also of any detailed control by society. Though these exclusions make the idea of private property seem problematic, philosophers have often argued that it is necessary for the ethical development of the individual, or for the creation of a social environment in which people can prosper as free and responsible agents.

1. Issues of Analysis and Definition
2. Historical Overview of Property
3. Is Property Really a Philosophical Issue?
4. Genealogies of Property
5. Justification: Liberty and Consequences.
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1. Issues of Analysis and Definition

More than most policy areas dealt with by political philosophers, the discussion of property is beset with definitional difficulties. The first issue is to distinguish between property and private property.

Strictly speaking, ‘property’ is a general term for the rules that govern people’s access to and control of things like land, natural resources, the means of production, manufactured goods, and also (on some accounts) texts, ideas, inventions, and other intellectual products. Disagreements about their use are likely to be serious because resource-use matters to people. They are particularly serious where the objects in question are both scarce and necessary. Some have suggested that property relations only make sense under conditions of scarcity (Hume [1739] 1888, pp. 484-98). But other grounds of conflict are possible: there may be disagreements about how a given piece of land should be used, which stem from the history or symbolic significance of that piece of land, whether land in general is scarce or not. (Intellectual property provides an example of property rules that do not respond directly to scarcity; moreover unlike material objects, the objects of intellectual property are not crowdable, for their use by any one person does not preclude their use by any number of others.)[1]

Any society with an interest in avoiding conflict needs such a system of rules. Their importance can hardly be overestimated, for without them cooperation, production, and exchange are virtually impossible, or possible only in the fearful and truncated forms we see in ‘black markets.’ This necessity is sometimes cited as an argument in favor of private property (Benn and Peters 1959, p. 155). In fact, all it establishes is that there ought to be property rules of some kind: private property rules are one variety. Some human societies have existed for millennia, satisfying the needs and wants of all their members, without private property or anything like it in land or the other major resources of economic life. So the first step in sound argumentation about property is distinguishing those arguments which support the existence of property in general from arguments which support the existence of a system of a specific kind (Waldron 1988).

There are three species of property arrangement: common property, collective property, and private property. In a common property system, resources are governed by rules whose point is to make them available for use by all or any members of the society. A tract of common land, for example, may be used by everyone in a community for grazing cattle or gathering food. A park may be open to all for picnics, sports or recreation. The aim of any restrictions on use is simply to secure fair access for all and to prevent anyone from using the common resource in a way that would preclude its use by others. Collective property is a different idea: here the community as a whole determines how important resources are to be used. These determinations are made on the basis of the social interest through mechanisms of collective decision-making-anything from a leisurely debate among the elders of a tribe to the forming and implementing of a Soviet-style ‘Five-Year Plan’.

Private property is an alternative to both collective and common property. In a private property system, property rules are organized around the idea that various contested resources are assigned to the decisional authority of particular individuals (or families or firms). The person to whom a given object is assigned (e.g., the person who found it or made it) has control over the object: it is for her to decide what should be done with it. In exercising this authority, she is not understood to be acting as an agent or official of the society. She may act on her own initiative without giving anyone else an explanation, or she may enter into cooperative arrangements with others, just as she likes. She may even transfer this right of decision to someone else, in which case that person acquires the same rights she had. In general the right of a proprietor to decide as she pleases about the resource that she owns applies whether or not others are affected by her decision. If Jennifer owns a steel factory, it is for her to decide (in her own interest) whether to close it or to keep the plant operating, even though a decision to close may have the gravest impact on her employees and on the prosperity of the local community.

Though private property is a system of individual decision-making, it is still a system of social rules. The owner is not required to rely on her own strength to vindicate her right to make self-interested decisions about the object assigned to her: if Jennifer’s employees occupy the steel factory to keep it operating despite her wishes, she can call the police and have them evicted; she does not have to do this herself or even pay for it herself. So private property is continually in need of public justification-first, because it empowers individuals to make decisions about the use of scarce resource in a way that is not necessarily sensitive to others’ needs or the public good; and second, because it does not merely permit that but deploys public force at public expense to uphold it.

It may be thought that the justificatory issue is nowadays moot, with the collapse of socialist systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the triumph of market economies all over the world. It is tempting to conclude that since economic collectivism has been thoroughly discredited, the problem of justifying private property has been solved by default: there is simply no alternative. But the point of discussing the justification of an institution is not only to defend it against is competitors. Often we justify in order to understand and also to operate the institution intelligently. In thinking about property, there are a number of issues that make little sense unless debated with an awareness of what the point of private property might be. Some of these issues are technical. Consider, for example, the rule against perpetuities, the registration of land titles, or the limits on testamentary freedom; all these would be like an arcane and unintelligible code, to be learned at best by rote, unless we connect them with the point of throwing social authority behind individual control (or behind the individual disposition of control) over material resources. (See Ackerman 1977, p. 116.)

The same is true of some grander issues. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that private property not be taken for public use without compensation. Clearly this prohibits the simple seizure of someone’s land for use, say, as a firing range or an airport. But what if the state places a restriction on the use of a person’s land, telling the owner that she may not erect a modern skyscraper because it will compromise the historical aesthetics of the neighborhood? Does this amount to a taking? Certainly the owner has suffered a loss (she may have bought the land with the intention of developing it). On the other hand, we should not pretend that there is a taking whenever any restriction is imposed: I may not drive my car at 100 m.p.h. but I am still the owner of the car. Such questions cannot be answered intelligently without revisiting the reasons (if any) that there are for giving private property this sort of constitutional protection. Is it protected because we distrust the state’s ability to make intelligent decisions about resource use? Or is it protected because we want to place limits on the burdens that any individual may be expected to bear for the sake of the public good? Our sense of the ultimate values that private ownership is supposed to serve may make a considerable difference to our interpretation of the takings clause and other doctrines.

Plainly private property and collective control are not all-or-nothing alternatives. In every modern society, some resources are governed by common property rules (e.g., streets and parks), some are governed by collective property rules (e.g., military bases and artillery pieces), and some are governed by private property rules (toothbrushes and bicycles). Also, there are variations in the degree of freedom that a private owner has over the resources assigned to him. Obviously, an owner’s freedom is limited by background rules of conduct: I may not use my gun to kill another person. These are not strictly property rules. More to the point are things like zoning restrictions, which amount in effect to the imposition of a collective decision about certain aspects of the use of a given resource. The owner of a building in an historic district may be told, for example, that she can use it as a shop, a home, or a hotel but she may not knock it down and replace it with a skyscraper. In this case, we may still say that the historic building counts as private property; but if too many other areas of decision about its use were also controlled by public agencies, we would be more inclined to say that it was really subject to a collective property rule (with the ‘owner’ functioning as steward of society’s decisions).

It is probably a mistake therefore to insist on any definition of private property that implies a proprietor has absolute control over his resource.[2] Some jurists have even argued that the terms ‘property’ and ‘ownership’ should be eliminated from the technical discourse of the law (see Grey 1980). They say that calling someone the ‘owner’ of a resource conveys no exact information about her rights in relation to that resource: a corporate owner is not the same as an individual owner; the owner of intellectual property has a different array of rights than the owner of an automobile; and even with regard to one and the same resource, the rights (and duties) of a landlord who owes nothing on his property might be quite different from those of a mortgagor.

The eliminative proposal makes sense to this extent: the position of a private owner is best understood not as a single right to the exclusive use and control of the object in question, but as a bundle of rights, which may vary from case to case (Honore 1961). Even ‘exclusive use’ is a complex idea. It implies, first, that the owner is at liberty to us the object as he pleases (within a range of generally acceptable uses). Secondly, it implies that others have an obligation to refrain from using the object without the owner’s permission. The point about permission implies in turn that the owner has the power to license others to use her property. She may lend her automobile, rent her house, or grant a right of way over her land. The effect of this may be to create other property interests in the object, so that the various liberties, rights and powers of ownership are divided among several individuals.

More strikingly, the owner is legally empowered to transfer the whole bundle of rights in the object she owns to somebody else-as a gift or by sale or as a legacy after death. With this power, a private property system becomes self-perpetuating. After an initial assignment of objects to owners, there is no further need for the community or the state to concern itself with distributive questions. Objects will circulate as the whims and decisions of individual owners and their successive transferees dictate. The result may be that wealth is widely distributed or it may be that wealth is concentrated in a very few hands. It is part of the logic of private property that no-one has the responsibility to concern themselves with the big picture, so far as the distribution of resources is concerned. Society simply pledges itself to enforce the rights of exclusion that ownership involves wherever those rights happen to be. Any concern about the balance between rich and poor must be brought in as a separate matter of public policy (as tax and welfare policy or in extremis large scale redistribution). As we shall see, philosophers disagree as to whether this is an advantage or an indictment of private property systems.

At the furthest reaches of analysis, the concept of private property becomes quite contestable. Many people believe that ownership implies inheritance. But Mill once observed (Mill 1994 [1848], p. 28) that the private property idea implied only ‘the right of each to his (or her) own faculties, to what he can produce by them, and to whatever he can get for them in a fair market; together with his right to give this to any other person if he chooses.’ He said that passing the property of individuals who made no disposition of it during their lifetime to their children ‘may be a proper arrangement or not, but it is no consequence of the principle of private property’ (ibid.). Definitive resolution of such controversies is probably impossible. Some philosophers have suggested that certain concepts should be regarded as ‘essentially contested concepts’ (see Gallie 1956); if there is anything to this suggestion, private property might be one of them (see Waldron 1988, pp. 51-2).

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Mentioned in these Entries

Genealogies of Property, Historical Overview of Property.