The Authority in Property

Abstract

Having personal authority over someone and having a property right over an object involve having a form of control over them. However, the distinctive form of control that both personal authority and property involve is not a physical one. True, property and some forms of personal authority will in many cases be accompanied by some sort of physical control or domination over objects and people, respectively. But the control that personal authority and property entail is a distinctively normative control. It is control over normative phenomena such as obligations and rights. A parent having authority over her child involves her having the normative power to impose obligations on the child. Her authority is distinctively a power to turn some of the actions and omissions of her child into wrongs. The case of property rights is not different. Having a property right usually involves having physical control over the object of the right. Yet valuable forms of physical control over an object are also present in cases of mere allocation of an object that do not amount to property (e.g. over a bus seat that got assigned to me).1 What is distinctive of property rights is that they, as relationships of personal authority, involve granting the property holder control over other individuals’ obligations and rights. Having a property right over my car gives me the power to control whether you wrong me if you undertake certain actions regarding my car (e.g. you wrong me if you use it, touch it, scratch it, etc. without my permission).2