>>>>The great Athenian lawgiver Solon was willing to cancel the debts that had effectively
enslaved poor Athenians to rich Athenians, but he was unwilling to redistribute property.
That is, to redistribute land in a way that would make land allocation equal. Solon was
willing to live with differences in wealth, that is, that he believed that he could institute
a system of justice, a constitution that would be just that would not follow a principle
of distributive justice that demanded complete equality of distribution. Solon was willing
to protect some of the property rights of wealthy Athenians. Now this raises a perennial
question of justice. What justifies property rights? We've talked about rights as certain
kinds of privileges or claims or powers or immunities, and property rights are particular
kind of right claim. A property right is a bundle of rights that allow an individual,
that protect an individual's exclusive right to use, enjoy and transfer something, and
Solon was unwilling to transfer, to redistribute the ownership by state force of the land of
the wealthy. Why would this be? It asks us to wonder what is the foundation of property
rights? And it's a permanent question of human justice, and there're different ways to answer
the question what justifies property rights. And so let's quickly just to get our conversation
started look at some of the different ways that property rights have been justified before
turning to the unique defense of property rights that Aristotle offers. First, some
of the earliest explorations of property rights say that property is justified by occupation.
That is, that there was some state in time in which land above all was unoccupied and
individual settlers went and occupied it and laid a claim to their title to the land. In
fact this isn't a very satisfying explanation of property rights, but it nevertheless is
one that has existed in many different societies. Two, a different justification of property
rights, one that does carry some weight is the idea of free exchange. And so if you look
at an individual, in particular in our society and ask how they accumulated their property,
the answer would be (at least to a certain distance back in time) that their property
had been acquired through a series of voluntary exchanges. So think about for instance, Kevin
Durant. He's enormously wealthy. He makes sixteen, seventeen million a year from his
basketball contract alone, and then some enormous amount from Nike and, and his illustrious
film career and other methods. So why is it just that Kevin Durant has this enormous amount
of property, you might ask? What, what justifies it, what are the grounds for his enormous
wealth? Well one way of answering this is to say its based on a series of voluntary
exchanges. That is, Kevin Durant didn't come to your house and steal your money. He didn't
come to your house even and make you buy tickets to the Thunder games. In fact, people every
day voluntarily pay to go see Thunder games, to buy his Nike tennis shoes, to watch his,
his movies. There's no coercion anywhere in the system. Now this does a tremendous amount
of work, it's a very powerful way of arguing about property rights: that it's based on
a series of voluntary exchanges. There's some problems in this theory too that we can talk
about in a later lesson. A third justification for property rights, one that's very important
in the modern world, is what can be called the labor theory of property. And it's easy
to associate this theory with the great English philosopher John Locke. The labor theory of
property says: well, what is property except nature mixed with labor? That is, your property
is what you have created. Your property is yours because you earned it, and think of
the moral work that that word earned does in our language. You deserve your property
because you turned it into your property, that you mixed it with your labor. And if
you dig deeper into this conception of property rights, in fact it's based on an idea that's
been called possessive individuals. And Locke outlines this idea by saying that you own
yourself that is, in a primary state, you own yourself, you own your labor and therefore
you must own the products of your labor. It's a powerful theory, but it too has its limitations.
A fourth justification of property rights we might consider a utilitarian consideration.
Utilitarianism, similar to consequentialism, says that that state of rules or affairs is
just which results in the greatest good. And so whatever arrangement of property results
in the greatest good, which can be measured in different ways, is inherently just. And
so let me give you an example of how this justification works. We use it every day in
the way that our society thinks about patent rights especially, say, to pharmaceuticals.
We give drug companies that develop pharmaceuticals a certain kind of property right in the production
of new drugs. Why do we do this? It's not because we feel that pharmaceutical companies
are inherently moral or worthy, it's simply because we want to create a system whose incentives
produce the greatest good. And so in fact we usually set a time horizon on drug patents.
So there's a certain number of years that they can have an exclusive right to produce
a certain kind of drug. Well why is that? Because we ultimately want drugs to be cheap
and available on a broad scale, but we know that if we don't let drug companies make big
amounts of money, and you can argue whether or not they're getting enough or too much
money, that nevertheless they won't have the right incentives to invest in research and
development. And so the way that we think about these patents is fundamentally utilitarian.
We say, "We're not in this to protect the natural or exclusive property rights of drug
companies, we want a society that optimizes, that creates the greatest system for all."
And so this kind of property right is grounded in a utilitarian justification. Now those
are the ways that we tend to think about property rights, and in fact when we begin to justify
differences in wealth, we'll often turn to ideas of free exchange, to labor theories
of property, or to utilitarian justifications. That is, incentives that produce the greatest
results, but Aristotle thinks of property in a very fundamentally different way.