My understanding of the justification for Natural Rights is that in a State of Nature (a condition with no government, which I understand to mean a condition in which nobody is under any contractual obligations) you would have uninhibited control of your Life, Liberty, and Property. Therefore, unless you enter into a contract in which you consent to having one or more of these rights be diminished (i.e. unless you consent to be governed, to leave a State of Nature and form/enter a society), it would be coercive for anybody to try to infringe upon these rights. (Similarly, it would be coercive for you to try to infringe upon anybody else’s analogous rights.)
I don’t have much of a beef with the Right to Life and the Right to Liberty – maybe a few philosophical nitpicks, but nothing worth worrying over (and certainly nothing worth starting a thread over). However, the Right to Property has always left me a bit confused, since I’ve never really understood what “property” would mean in a State of Nature – in a society I understand “property” to form as the result of implicit/explicit contractual obligations (“I own this property because I purchased it with cash money” or “I own this property because I hold the legal title for it” etc.), meaning that the whole concept of property has always struck me as being meaningless in a State of Nature devoid of any contractual obligations. (Another way to put it is that your Natural state is Alive, Free, and Buck Naked, i.e. that ownership of property is not “natural” but social.)
So, the question is, “what constitutes ownership of ‘property’ in a State of Nature?” Would I rightfully own something if I simply claim it to be mine (by planting a flag on it, or urinating on it, or whatever)? Would I rightfully own something so long as I was capable of defending it? Would I rightfully own something if I had somehow improved it from its raw state (e.g. if I smelted copper ore, would I then rightfully own the copper)? As a corollary to the last question, how would I establish rightful ownership of raw materials in the first place (e.g. copper ore, or a copper vein)?
I’ll provide one hypothetical by way of example: Bob is living in a mud hut that he constructed himself, surrounded by several acres of good hunting territory. Jack wanders into the area in search of new hunting territory. Is Jack initiating coercion by moving into the hunting territory? Would Bob be initiating coercion were he to drive Jack out of the territory? What if Jack moved into Bob’s hut without Bob’s consent, with/without forcing Bob out of the hut? Would it make a difference if the hunting territory were capable of easily supporting both Bob and Jack, or if it were capable of easily supporting only one of them? Would it make a difference if Bob had been living in the territory for two weeks or twenty years prior to Jack moving in? Or if he had not built the mud hut, but had simply found it abandoned? Or if the acreage were wheat fields sown by Bob (i.e. acreage that Bob improved upon), rather than unimproved hunting territory?
The primary question, “what constitutes ownership of ‘property’ in a State of Nature,” is the only one that really interests me – no need to address the entire hypothetical, or even any of the hypothetical. Hell, make up your own hypothetical, just keep it semi-plausible.
