Ownership as privileged utility

Abstract

From early childhood, humans demonstrate an understanding of ownership and the rights it confers to owners. This understanding impacts how children reason about people’s actions, emotions, and internal mental states. The set of inferences and judgments children make in the context of ownership suggest that their concept of ownership is integrated with their intuitive theory of psychology. Here we try to explain that integration, proposing that children think of ownership as an exclusive assignment of a resource’s reward value to its owner. Such a concept can then factor into children’s psychological reasoning, based in an application of a naive utility calculus. This reasoning includes expectations about the choices and emotions of owners and non-owners, as well as their judgments of moral acceptability in the context of resources.