Property rights

TY - CHAP

T1 - Property rights

AU - Stanton, Tim

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - A central premise of Christian natural law understandings of human claims to own and use the goods of the world was the presumption that God had given the world to mankind in common to the end of his glory. This premise, suitably interpreted, was used to justify European settlement of the Americas and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of their land. Interpretation was needed because, taken literally, the premise raised pointed questions about how far and why private ownership, of goods or of land, could be a genuine entitlement. The answers given to these questions in our period varied. One answer suggested that as populations grew, people naturally laid hold on goods and made use of them for themselves. As conflicts increased, they agreed to divide up the goods among themselves, and each was assigned their proper portion. Thus private property in things was introduced into the world by convention and enforced by government. A rival answer doubted that there had or could have been any collective agreement to divide up the goods of the world and queried why, in any event, such an agreement would bind posterity. It denied that God had given the world to everyone and referred all possessions in goods and land to the right of the particular persons who now ruled over the earth. In so doing, it too conjoined private property to government. A third answer vindicated the premise that God had given the world to everyone while arguing that private property was natural, not conventional, and logically preceded government. Its arch-proponent, John Locke, believed that property rights had been explained more clearly by no-one else. This chapter assesses the validity of that belief, by examining in closer detail the two centuries of answers, from the later scholastics to Grotius, Hobbes, Filmer, and others, that Locke was dismissing as deficient.

AB - A central premise of Christian natural law understandings of human claims to own and use the goods of the world was the presumption that God had given the world to mankind in common to the end of his glory. This premise, suitably interpreted, was used to justify European settlement of the Americas and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of their land. Interpretation was needed because, taken literally, the premise raised pointed questions about how far and why private ownership, of goods or of land, could be a genuine entitlement. The answers given to these questions in our period varied. One answer suggested that as populations grew, people naturally laid hold on goods and made use of them for themselves. As conflicts increased, they agreed to divide up the goods among themselves, and each was assigned their proper portion. Thus private property in things was introduced into the world by convention and enforced by government. A rival answer doubted that there had or could have been any collective agreement to divide up the goods of the world and queried why, in any event, such an agreement would bind posterity. It denied that God had given the world to everyone and referred all possessions in goods and land to the right of the particular persons who now ruled over the earth. In so doing, it too conjoined private property to government. A third answer vindicated the premise that God had given the world to everyone while arguing that private property was natural, not conventional, and logically preceded government. Its arch-proponent, John Locke, believed that property rights had been explained more clearly by no-one else. This chapter assesses the validity of that belief, by examining in closer detail the two centuries of answers, from the later scholastics to Grotius, Hobbes, Filmer, and others, that Locke was dismissing as deficient.

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

BT - The Cambridge History of Rights, volume III

A2 - Fitzmaurice, Andrew

A2 - Hammersley, Rachel

PB - Cambridge University Press

ER -