Humean Property Theory: A Defense

Abstract

Two rival approaches to property rights dominate contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy: Lockean natural rights and Rawlsian distributive justice. This paper defends a third approach, which can be traced to David Hume. Like Rawlsian rights and unlike Lockean rights, Humean property rights are not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. However, in contrast to the Rawlsian approach, which starts with highly abstract principles of distributive justice and analyzes particular property rules in light of these principles, Humean theory begins with simple property conventions and shows how more complex institutions can be justified against a background of settled property rights. Property rights allow people to coordinate their actions with respect to scarce resources. For property rules to serve this function effectively, certain questions must be considered settled so that people do not have to solve their coordination problem from scratch each time a new question arises. Treating existing property claims as having prima facie validity facilitates cooperation between people who disagree about distributive justice. Lockean and Rawlsian theories, by contrast, endorse moral claims that threaten to unsettle conventional property rights and thus undermine social cooperation. Hume’s theory of justice is often seen as too thin to justify strong moral entitlements as well as unduly conservative in its implications. In response to the former concern, I defend a Humean theory of social cooperation. In response to the latter objection, I demonstrate how Humean property theory is compatible with liberal as well as conservative policy preferences.