Most cases are clear - if I cleaned a piece of land, fenced it, and built a house on it and planted a garden, there's no ambiguity, because I can clearly provide evidence to any reasonable person where are the borders of the land where I was first. If I walked across a forest once, or found a continent, and shouted into the wind "it's al…
Most cases are clear - if I cleaned a piece of land, fenced it, and built a house on it and planted a garden, there's no ambiguity, because I can clearly provide evidence to any reasonable person where are the borders of the land where I was first. If I walked across a forest once, or found a continent, and shouted into the wind "it's all mine", there's no ambiguity either - I don't have any link to the land on the other side of the continent, while someone who actually came there later and started using it does. While edge cases in between have to be resolved by negotiation irrespective of what rule one uses to determine legitimate ownership.
The problem with Locke's approach is that mixing resources with your labor isn't necessary, nor sufficient to establish ownership. This Locke's mistake applied correctly and consistently led to creation of Marxist labor theory of value, their idea of stolen value by employers from employees, and to flawed justification of intellectual property (I own the idea, because I created it).
In order for the product of my work to be owned by me, I have to own the raw materials in the first place before the work even starts. If I don't own the raw materials and work at a Ford factory for example, Ford owns what I create (even if Marxists disagree) because Ford owned the raw materials I was working with. If I create a sculpture from a rock someone else owns without his consent, I'm not only not the owner of it, I owe damages to the owner. So one has to have some theory of property to determine who and why is an owner of raw rivalrous things that more than one person wants to use in incompatible ways before the mixing of labor even starts. If A wants to use the same stick to make a spear, and B wants to use it to make a bow, in order to avoid fighting they have to come up with a rule how to decide who has the right to exclude the other. And the only universalizable rule I can think of - the rule that can become a universal norm - is "whoever got it first has the right to exclude the one who got it later".
Most cases are clear - if I cleaned a piece of land, fenced it, and built a house on it and planted a garden, there's no ambiguity, because I can clearly provide evidence to any reasonable person where are the borders of the land where I was first. If I walked across a forest once, or found a continent, and shouted into the wind "it's all mine", there's no ambiguity either - I don't have any link to the land on the other side of the continent, while someone who actually came there later and started using it does. While edge cases in between have to be resolved by negotiation irrespective of what rule one uses to determine legitimate ownership.
The problem with Locke's approach is that mixing resources with your labor isn't necessary, nor sufficient to establish ownership. This Locke's mistake applied correctly and consistently led to creation of Marxist labor theory of value, their idea of stolen value by employers from employees, and to flawed justification of intellectual property (I own the idea, because I created it).
In order for the product of my work to be owned by me, I have to own the raw materials in the first place before the work even starts. If I don't own the raw materials and work at a Ford factory for example, Ford owns what I create (even if Marxists disagree) because Ford owned the raw materials I was working with. If I create a sculpture from a rock someone else owns without his consent, I'm not only not the owner of it, I owe damages to the owner. So one has to have some theory of property to determine who and why is an owner of raw rivalrous things that more than one person wants to use in incompatible ways before the mixing of labor even starts. If A wants to use the same stick to make a spear, and B wants to use it to make a bow, in order to avoid fighting they have to come up with a rule how to decide who has the right to exclude the other. And the only universalizable rule I can think of - the rule that can become a universal norm - is "whoever got it first has the right to exclude the one who got it later".