>>>>We've seen that the political crisis in Athens in the 590s was really an economic
crisis, when the divisions between rich and poor threatened to tear apart the state. The
poor had become enslaved to the rich and they had a political rallying cry: redistribute
the land and cancel the debts. Solon cancelled the debts but didn't redistribute the land.
This is fundamentally a crisis about property, and it's a question of distributive justice.
Now think of what Solon did. He, in effect, cancelled certain contracts that had been
made under which poor peasants had securitized loans with their family farm or even their
selves and their family's bodies, but he also refused to redistribute land. In other words
he was willing to accept an inequitable, an unequal distribution of property in which
the wealthy would have greater estates. Now, this raises some fundamental questions about
the nature of property and the nature of distributive justice. One of the things that I would like
for us to do in this course is to parta—to pay particular attention to language, to pay
particular close attention to the moral language that we use when talking about justice. It's
a very powerful way to deepen our understanding by exploring what words mean, by carefully
analyzing the work that certain fundamental words in our political lexicon do. So, what
I'd like for us to do is to ask what is property? And what are property rights? In fact, what
are rights? Where do they come from? What justifies them, and what is their moral weight?
How much weight do rights have? Now these are an interrelated series of questions. Let's
start in this lesson by exploring what is property? A simple question, but one that
we need to clarify. Think about what this means. The Roman lawyers would distinguish
between possession and ownership and what we mean by property is very close to the Roman
conception of ownership. So imagine that you find my car keys laying on the ground and
you go and you find this key and you go out and you have a suspicion that it belongs to
my beat up four-door sedan, and you drive off with it. You are at that point in possession
of my car. But do you have my ownership? Do you have the property rights to this car?
The answer's no. In fact, this is an easy example and a telling example because we're
all familiar with the idea of a title. It's that annoying piece of paper you have to go
stand in line and have some bureaucrat stamp in our society to prove that you own your
car. But in fact that little piece of paper symbolizes your ownership. Now, ownership
is what we might consider a bundle of rights meaning that ownership is a set of rights
that are bundled together. And put quite simply we can say that ownership is the right to
use something, it's the right to enjoy something, and it's the right to transfer something.
So if you own something, you have the right to use it. That means that you can drive your
car, you can run your car into a ditch, you can do virtually anything you please with
it within the limits of the law. You have the right to enjoy it. That is, that you can
reap the benefits of it. And so say you own a field, you can own the wheat that's produced
on it, and you have the right to transfer it. If you want to sell your watch, if you
want to sell your computer, that's one of the bundle of rights that we consider fundamentally
part of ownership. And it's worth noticing a final quality about the nature of property
rights-- they are inherently exclusive. That is that my property right in an object is
by its very nature exclusive. The fact that a car is mine to use means that unless I grant
you the power or sell you the car, the car isn't yours to use. Property rights are inherently
exclusive. And so this helps us define what property rights actually are. They're this
type of claim to an exclusive right to use, to enjoy, or to transfer.