Taking, not stealing

Aquinas says that when a starving person takes food needed for survival from someone who has too much, the act is a case of taking but not stealing. Aquinas’ reasoning is that property rights subserve survival, and in case of conflict the property rights cease, and the food ceases to be the property of the one who has too much, and so it is not theft for the poor to take it.

I think what is going on may be a bit more subtle than that. Suppose Alice and Bob both have too much and Carl is starving. Both Alice and Bob refuse their surplus to feed Carl. According to Aquinas’ analysis, both Alice and Bob lose their ownership.

But I think things may be a bit more subtle than that. Suppose that shortly after Alice and Bob’s wrongful refusal, Carl suddenly wins the lottery. It does not seem right to say that Carl can now take Alice and Bob’s surplus. Yet if Alice and Bob lost their ownership upon refusal to feed Carl, then either the surplus now belongs to Carl or it belongs to nobody, and in either case it wouldn’t be stealing from Alice and Bob for Carl to take it. Similarly, if after Carl’s lottery win, Alice were to take Bob’s surplus food, Alice would be stealing from Bob.

We could say that Alice and Bob regain their property when Carl wins the lottery, but it is strange to think that something that belongs to nobody or to Carl suddenly becomes Alice’s, despite Alice having no deep need of it, just because Carl won the lottery.

Here is a different kind of case that I think may shed some light on the matter. As before, suppose Alice has a surplus. Suppose Eva the mobster has informed David that if David doesn’t take Alice’s surplus, then Eva will murder Alice. Any reasonable person in Alice’s place would agree to having her surplus taken by David, but Alice is not a reasonable person. David nonetheless takes Alice’s surplus, thereby saving her life.

I think David acts rightly, precisely because as Aquinas thinks one needs to resolve a conflict between property and life in favor of life. But I don’t think we can analyze using Aquinas’ loss of ownership account. For if David takes Alice’s stuff, then Eva who made David do it is a thief (by proxy). But if under the circumstances Alice loses her ownership, then Eva is not a thief. I think the right thing to say is that Alice retains her ownership, but it is not wrong for David to take her stuff in order to save her life.

What should we say, then? Is David a thief, but a rightly acting thief? That is indeed one option. But I prefer this one. When you own something, that gives you a set of rights over it and against others. I suggest that these rights do not include an unconditional right not to be deprived of the use of the item. Specifically, there is no right not to be deprived of the use of the item when deprivation of use is the only way for someone’s life to be saved. This applies both in Aquinas’s case of starvation and in my mobster case. It is not an infringement on Alice’s ownership over her surplus when Carl takes her stuff to survive or when David takes her stuff in order to save Alice’s life. But when Carl’s need terminates, he does not get to then take Alice’s stuff, as if Alice had lost ownership, and the mastermind behind David’s taking the stuff, who unlike David isn’t acting to save Alice’s life, is a thief.

In fact, if we think about it, it becomes obvious that there is no unconditional right not to be deprived of the use of an owned item. Suppose I have my car on a plot of land that I own, and I foolishly sell you all the land surrounding the small rectangle that the car is physically on top of. By buying the land, you deprive me of the use of my car, barring your good will—I cannot drive the car off the rectangle without trespass. But you don’t steal my car by thus depriving me of its use.

Thus, neither Carl (when in need) nor David is stealing, even though both take something owned by someone else.

Aquinas quotes St. Ambrose with approval: “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.” While St. Ambrose’s sentiment is very plausibly correct, on my account above it is not correct to take it literally. When Alice wrongfully withholds her surplus from starving Carl, the surplus is not literally owned by Carl. It is still owned by Alice, who has a duty to pass ownership to Carl, and Carl in turn is permitted to use Alice’s surplus—but it remains Alice’s, even if wrongfully so.

Indeed, here is an argument against the hypothesis that ownership literally passes to the needy. Suppose Carl is starving, and Alice and Bob refuse their surplus. Now, shortly after Carl coming to be starving, so does Fred. On an account on which ownership literally passes to the needy, Alice’s and Bob’s surplus belongs to Carl, and if Carl comes to claim it and at the same times so does Fred, Carl gets to defend that surplus, violently if necessary, from Fred, as long as that surplus is all needed for Carl’s survival. But it seems plausible that as long as Carl’s and Fred’s need is now equal, they have equal rights, even if Carl came to be needy slightly earlier. Furthermore, suppose Alice has ten loaves of bread and Carl needs one to survive. Which loaf of bread becomes Carl’s possession? Surely not all of them, and surely no specific one. It seems better to say: while Carl is in dire need, Alice has no right to withhold surplus from her. As soon as Carl and any other needy person has taken enough not to be in dire need, Alice may defend the rest of her surplus.

Ownership and ontology

We can own dogs, trees, forests, cars, chairs, computers and cupcakes, but of these examples, only dogs and trees really exist. Many of the things we own do not really exist. This makes me sceptical of the idea that there are strong property rights independent of positive law.

You might stop me by saying that my ontology is simply too restrictive. Maybe forests, cars, chairs, computers and cupcakes all really exist. I doubt it, but the examples of non-existent things we can in principle own can be multiplied. It is just as reasonable to talk of owning the vacuum inside a flask as it is to talk of owning the cocoa inside a cup. In both cases, labor was needed to generate the “thing” owned, and there is a reasonable moral expectation of non-interference with respect to it. (I would be destroying your property if I beamed a gas into your vacuum flask.)

What does this have to do with scepticism of strong property rights independent of positive law? First, it becomes very difficult to draw a principled line between ownables and non-ownables. Second, once we recognize that we can own things that don’t exist, such as vacua, it becomes difficult to distinguish “things” we have created and own from other kinds of outcomes of our activity. It then becomes plausible that the relevant right is one that should apply to outcomes of activity without much regard for whether that outcome is a thing that exists, a “thing” that doesn’t exist, or some other kind of outcome, such as a mountain’s being enchanted. There seems to be some kind of a right not to have the intended outcome of one’s virtuous activity destroyed without good reason. But how good the reason has to be will vary widely from case to case, so it is unlikely that this kind of a right will ground a strong view of property rights independent of positive law.

But the difficult is not the impossible. For it may be that although it would be difficult to make the needed distinctions, these distinctions could be grounded in highly detailed facts encoded in our natures.

Repairs

I've been having fun over the past couple of days fixing a lot of things around the home.

1. Apple Powerbook 190 laptop. My previously home-fixed power adapter gave way. In a box with scrap wall-warts, I found one with a similar diameter plug, cut away some plastic to make the length right, and soldered it onto the Powerbook's cord.
2. Multimeter. While I was working on the laptop, my cheap Harbor Freight multimeter's probe's contact came out. A bit of soldering, drilling (to make the handle wide enough so I could thread it through) and gluing and it works again, but I wouldn't use it for high-voltage applications.
3. Swim goggles. One of the retaining clips had broken. I made a new one out of some 1/16" acrylic sheet I had in my scrap collection.
4. Tambourine. It was a gift for our baby, but the jingles were cut badly and had sharp edges. A bunch of filing and sanding and they're fine.
5. Board book. Baby is good at destroying them, even though they're supposed to be indestructable. Some packing tape and it works agai (though there are safety issues I guess).
6. Roomba. We love the succession of Roombas that has come through our home, but they fail periodically (hence: succession). In this case, the infrared LED in one of the bump sensors had failed. Fortunately (!) this happened before with the other bump sensor, and at the time I had the foresight to buy two repair sets, so I had an LED to solder in place of it. It's always a big nuisance taking a Roomba apart, though.
7. Dishwasher. Upper shelf never washed well. Turns out that the spray arm for the upper shelf wasn't properly attached. Not sure if that's the only problem—it's an old dishwasher—but at least this problem is fixed.

And my big failure:

8. Pleo dinosaur robot. Some time ago, I had soldered in a 6AA battery pack to avoid the super-expensive and poorly functioning OEM batteries. The battery pack eventually broke off (I didn't think through enough how I attached it). I re-soldered it. But now it doesn't start. Connecting to the UART port, I see that the firmware claims too high a battery temperature at bootup and zero battery charge. Disabling battery temperature and charge checks doesn't help. I wonder if I damaged something when soldering at too high a temperature. I may try a few more things, since the fact that I can talk to it through the UART opens possibilities.

Trite as it is to say it, the above does highlight the amount of bondage one is in to one's possessions.

On the other hand, there is something quite satisfying in fixing something oneself, particularly if it's with parts that one has lying around the home. I suppose it's a feeling of good stewardship plus accomplishment. A kind of neat thing is that more and more the things one is repairing can "say" what's broken in them. I was getting reports both from Pleo and the Roomba through their UART ports, and in the past I've ended up replacing the spark plugs in a car on the strength of the data from the OBD-II reader paired to my phone.

Self-ownership and organ sale

1. Things owned can be permissibly traded, barring special circumstances.
2. Trade in persons is never permissible.
3. Thus, no one owns a person. (By 1-3)
4. Thus, no person owns herself. (By 4)

(By the same argument, God doesn't own us, either. We belong to God, of course, but not by way of ownership.)

Let's continue thinking about self-ownership:

5. If x is not simple and I own every proper part of x, I own x.
6. I don't own myself. (By 4 and as I am a person)
7. I am not simple.
8. So, there is a proper part of me that I don't own. (By 5-7)
9. All my proper parts are on par with respect to my ownership of them.
10. So, I don't own any of my proper parts. (By 8-9)

While I think the conclusion of this argument is true, I am less convinced by it than by the earlier argument. I think 9 is not completely convincing given dualism: spiritual parts perhaps aren't on par with physical. I am far from sure about 7. And I could see ways of questioning 5. Still, it's an argument worth thinking about.

Suppose the argument is correct. Then we have a further interesting argument:

11. My organs are proper parts of me.
12. It's wrong or impossible for me to sell what I don't own.
13. So it's wrong or impossible for me to sell my organs. (By 10-12)

While I am sympathetic to the conclusion, I worry that this argument may equivocate on "organs". Aristotle says that a severed finger is a finger in name alone. Perhaps 11 is true of a kidney as it is found in me, but once the kidney is removed from me, the kidney perishes and a new kidney-like object—a kidney only in name—comes into existence. The kidney-like object is not a part of me, and it is this kidney-like object that is being sold, not the kidney that was a part of me. Still, this isn't clear: maybe the kidney that was a part of me is what is sold, since it is for the loss of it that I am being compensated if "I sell my kidney."

More worryingly, if the above argument were sound, it seems it would be sound with "organs" replaced by "hair". But it doesn't seem wrong or impossible for me to sell my hair. Perhaps, though, we should modify 9 to read:

9*. If I own any one of my living proper parts, I own all my living proper parts and a fortiori all my non-living proper parts.

Then the conclusion is weaker than 10:

10*. I don't own any of my living parts.

This could allow me to sell my hair and some gold atoms in my body, but not my kidney.

Property entailment as the ground of modality

Consider a view on which all modality is grounded in property entailment: the relation between properties F and G expressed by "having F entails having G". Jubien has defended a view that might sound like this (though see comments at the end). One way to make this precise is to say that the theory of necessity is generated by the axiom schema

1. (x₁)...(x_n)(A(x₁,...,x_n)→B(x₁,...,x_n)),

where A expresses a relation that entails the relation expressed by B (I take relations and properties to be the same thing here, just that we use different words depending on the adicity), and where → is material implication, together with the rule of inference that

2. from a subproof of p that reiterates no assumptions other than instances of (1), we can derive Necessarily(p).

Here is one quick problem. This fits best with a Platonic metaphysics of properties (Jubien certainly does that). On a Platonic metaphysics of properties:

3. Necessarily(a is a circle → circularity exists).

Actually, standard Platonists will say that the consequent holds necessarily, independently of the antecedent, but we don't need this for the argument. But (3) cannot be proved via (1) and (2), unless the system is inconsistent. Why? Here is a simple way to see this. The axioms make no reference to circularity. There are instances of (1) that use the predicate "is a circle", but that's not good enough.[note 1] But then take any proof of (3) and replace "circularity" with a non-referring singular term. We will then get a proof that the referrent of the non-referring singular term exists, and given that the axioms are all true (this is uncontroversial), the only way we can get a proof of a falsehood is if the system is incoherent.

One might think that something could be done if existence is a property and there are entailment relations like that being a property entails existence. But that won't help unless we add to the axioms that circularity is a property. But the axioms are automatically necessary by (2), so now we are no longer just giving a property entailment account. We are adding axioms that directly force cerain essentialist claims, like that any property is essentially a property.

Alright, maybe that's unfair. Maybe any Platonist who has a property entailment view of modality will also have among the axioms the schema:

4. exists(P)

for every property P. But what about other very plausible necessities, like:

5. Necessarily(circle(a) → circularity is a property).

We had better not make existence entail propertyhood, as then Obama becomes a property.

Of course, we can add things like (5) to our axiom scheme. But the theory is now really swelling, and it is no longer true that it grounds modality in property entailment. It grounds modality in provability from a whole bunch of axiom schemata, one of which is the property entailment one.

My fairly quick glance at Jubien doesn't show him discussing this. But it does show him discussing a related issue, Kripkean arguments that a certain particular table must be made of wood. Jubien says that the table has a "table-essence" being this table and being this table entails being made of wood. So he could handle (5) by saying that circularity has an "object-essence" (I think it had better be an obejct essence, in his terminology), being circularity, and that being circularity entails being a property. Fine so far, but what about the following necessities:

6. Necessarily(exists(circularity) → circularity has being circularity).

So what this shows is that on the proposed account we need additional necessity-generating axioms governing object essences. When Jubien introduces object essences, he explicitly says that they have modal properties, such as that an object necessarily has its object essence. So perhaps Jubien is not someone we should describe as giving an entailment view. For maybe he has an axiom schema that generates (6), as well as the Platonist schema that generates (5). Now as long as the theory of necessity was generated by (1) and (2), it was a pretty cool partial reduction. But once we had to add the schemata (4) and something generating (6), we start to wonder: what guarantees that no further schemata need to be added? All the axioms are automatically necessary, after all, and once we have a plurality of schemata, we have failed to explain what they all have in common—what makes them all be necessary. The account becomes in effect disjunctive.

Here is a different kind of problem. Consider this claim:

7. Necessarily(wrongs(x,y) → agent(x)).

Only agents can wrong. But (7) isn't an instance of (1). Now, maybe, "wrongs(x,y)" is an abbreviation for something one of whose conjuncts ascribes to x a monadic property that entails being an agent. But what if it's not like that? And is it really plausible that all relations that entail a monadic property in one of the relata are abbreviations for stuff that includes a monadic property attribution? (Here is an example every Platonist should accept: Instantiates(a,circularity) entails circle(a).)

So, it seems, the system needs to be extended to include entailments between relations of different adicities. Moreover, it needs to be extended to include entailments between relations of the same adicity but with the relata reorganized:

8. Necessarily(wrongs(x,y) → iswrongedby(y,x)).

We no longer have just entailment between relations, then, at the base of the system. We have what one might call "twisted entailment". Specifically, if f is a function from {1,...,m} to {1,...,n}, we can say that the n-adic property P f-twistedly-entails the m-adic property Q provided that:

9. Necessarily(A(x₁,...,x_n) → B(x_f(1),...,x_f(m))),

where A and B express P and Q respectively.

The view is still non-trivial. But it is messy, and it is difficult to see what motive one has for believing it rather than just giving up on the grounding project altogether—or going for my view. :-) After all, f-twisted-entailment is not such a natural property as entailment.

[Fixed definition of twisted entailment.]

Truth is a property

We play a game. There are ten outwardly identical boxes, containing pieces of paper with ink marks on them that are unambiguous inscriptions of non-indexical sentences in the predominant local language. Five of these sentences are true, and five are false. You get to pick out a box. If it's one of the ones containing a true sentence, you get $100, and if it's one of the ones containing a false sentence, you pay $100. Then, there is a fact of the matter whether a given box is such that were you to pick it, it would be correct to declare you the winner. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some sense—perhaps not the ontologically beefiest if one is a sparse property theorist—five of the boxes have the property of being winning boxes and five of them have the property of being losing boxes. Moreover, these properties are not ontologically rock bottom. They plainly depend on geometrical properties of the ink marks within the boxes, and, further, on the truth of the sentence determined by these geometrical properties. It seems that if truth is not a property, then neither is being a winning box a property. But being a winning box is a property, and so is truth.

Anything that is a basis for objective classification is a property, and truth, plainly, is a basis for objective classification of boxes into ones that under the rules are winners and ones that under the rules are not winners.

Moreover, this example shows that truth is explanatory. That a given sentence is true can explain why you owe me $100. In fact, this case shows that just about any fact is explanatory, since one can center a game on just about any fact. This won't impress non-realists about normative states of affairs.

Artefacts

There are no artefacts, at least not in any metaphysically serious way. To see this, consider some puzzles that face those who believe in artefacts.

You come across a stump in the woods. You sit down. Has the stump become a seat? It seems so. Even though you haven't actually changed the stump, you have given it the function of a seat. An artefact does not, after all, need multiple pieces. I could manufacture wooden seats by taking logs and carving them into seats, or by spending a lot of time in the woods and finding pieces of wood that already have the right shape and bringing them back. Or perhaps it's not enough just to sit on a stump to have a seat.

But actually, if I manufacture seats, the stuff I make does not become a seat when someone sits on it—it is a seat when the manufacturing process is complete. Likewise, then, it seems that the stump has already become a seat when I intend to sit on it. Or if giving something the function of being sat on once is not enough to make it a seat, maybe it becomes a seat as soon as I intend to take it home and put it in my living room. But this is really spooky: by simply intending to treat a stump a certain way, I have made a new object—a seat—with new persistence conditions. Very strange, that.

You buy a chair. Dust settles on it. The dust is not part of the chair. But you then make a tag: "Dusty Chair II". You put the tag in front of the chair. Oh, I "forgot" to say—your home is an art gallery. When you put the tag in front of the chair, with the right intentions, you created a work of art, an artefact with certain complex persistence conditions. One of the persistence conditions is that while the dust is not a part of the chair, it is essentially a part of Dusty Chair II. So, simply by putting a tag in front of the chair, I have brought it about that a new artistic artefact comes to exist. The token tag is not, however, a part of the work of art. (The signs in a gallery are printed by the gallery, and need not travel with the works of art.) So I created a new entity, without in any way causally interacting with it—just by putting a tag in front of it. And of course the tag is unnecessary. If I just stand in front of the chair telling all the visitors to my home that this is Dusty Chair II, that's just as good.

The case of the stump-seat and Dusty Chair II violate the principle that one cannot bring about the existence of a new object without a relevant[note 1] causal interaction with the object. Artefacts are simply too easy to make.

The above arguments assumed that what defined the identities of artefacts were maker's intentions. The alternative is social practices. But it is no less weird to suppose that a bunch of people by getting together can create an object without relevantly causally interacting with it.

It is clear that the persistence conditions for artefacts are defined by the makers and/or users and/or the community. But let us say that a careful study of our language shows that half of the users of English understand "chair" as an essentially four-legged artefact, and the other half think of a "chair" as surviving the loss of one of its four legs. Does that mean that my dining room chairs are coincident objects, colocated chair(1)s and chair(2)s, where a chair(1) cannot survive loss of a leg and a chair(2) can? Or is the question whether I have chair(1)s or chair(2)s settled by figuring out what the majority of the folks in the chair factory thought (suppose my chairs were made in an English speaking country)? Or is it settled by what the bosses thought? Or by what I thought? But I have no opinion on the question. So is there no fact of the matter whether one of the things in my dining room would survive loss of a leg? These questions seem insuperable.

Now one way to get out of all of these puzzles is to be enough of a compositional universalist: any bunch of parts with coherent persistence conditions and interworld identity conditions defines an object.[note 2] Thus, when I come upon the stump, whatever my intentions towards the stump, there is an object there with the persistence conditions of a stump, and an object there with the persistence conditions of a seat. Perhaps, then, I do not bring about the existence of the latter object with my intention, but I simply bring it about that it is appropriate to call the object a "seat". Likewise, while artistic intention is needed to transform the dusty chair into Dusty Chair II, even if I didn't have this intention, there would be a nameless object there with the persistence conditions that Dusty Chair II has.

But the main reason to save the existence of artefacts is to save common sense. And this kind of universalism departs far from common sense. It posits that there is an object sitting in the same chair as me, with the same shape and physical properties as me, but with the counterfactual property that were I to yell "Abracadabra!", it would instantly (faster than light!) move to the Amazon rain forest, where it would be wholly composed of a poison-dart frog. To embrace this kind of compositional universalism to save artefacts seems too costly.

Of course, this denial of the existence of artefacts needs come along with some kind of a paraphrase story that allows ordinary sentences like "She sat on a chair" to be at least approximately true. Presumably, the story will involve particles or fields having chair-wise arrangements, and so on. Moreover, I think we are going to have give such a story even if we admit tables and chairs into our ontology—just not for tables and chairs.

For there are always going to be artefact-like cases where almost nobody—not even the compositional universalist—will want to posit an object. The person whose home is a museum can make a work of art "composed" of shadows, by simply placing a tag on a blank wall with an interesting shadow pattern. But shadows don't exist. Or one could have an earring that is made entirely of the concentration in some kind of a field (maybe a magnetic one—the earring then could be seen by aliens who have a magnetic sense). But while fields might exist, it seems unlikely that concentrations of them do. Just as one can use a nail, it seems one can use a hole (one can put something in it, or one can sell it to an art gallery), but holes don't seem to exist.

Authors write books, and programmers write software. And it seems that, more and more, the most valuable artefacts are of this sort, artefacts that are the subject matter of intellectual property law rather than of tangible property law. These books and pieces of software seem type-like, abstract, rather than object-like. It is the book-type that we care about the author's writing. But what is odd is that if we take these type-like creations seriously, we have to depart from the common-sensical idea that the author causes them to exist. For surely we don't cause type-like things, abstracta, to come into existence.

But suppose we insist that the book the author writes is the manuscript. Where is this manuscript, these days? On a CD sent to the publisher, let us say. The CD is not the manuscript, though. There might be several manuscripts on a CD. The manuscript, it then seems, is made of colored pieces of dye on the CD (assuming a consumer CD-R). Maybe that can be counted an object. But suppose that instead of using a CD, we use some medium where all the data is encoded as the state of some field. Unless we reify states of fields, the data won't be an entity. Or, more simply, let suppose that I put several manuscripts on a CD, and then archive, compress and encrypt them in such a way that it is impossible to single out the bits of one manuscript from the bits of another, but it is possible to decrypt and decompress the archive, and extract the manuscripts. (For instance, the compression may ensure that words and phrases that appear in multiple manuscripts get listed only once in full. The encryption might end up shuffling the bits of all the manuscripts together before applying the encryption function.) Then perhaps there is no plausible way to identify the manuscript with a bunch of colored patches on the CD, but the manuscript is still "there", on the CD.

In other words, unless we are going to have a really bloated ontology, we are anyway going to end up with artefacts that we don't admit in our ontology, artefacts such that we will need some kind of a paraphrase for sentences that treat them as if they were substances. So the kind of story the person who denies the existence of artefacts will need to give about tables and chairs is one that needs to be given anyway about shadows, holes, books and manuscripts. The cost of the story is, therefore, low.