Factores psicolingüísticos clave del aprendiente que favorecen el desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa intercultural de la adaptabilidad

Perhaps the most widely discussed theory of property is John Locke’s labour-mixing theory.

According to this theory if R is unowned and X labours on it, X thereby owns R and may rightfully exclude another person or being Y, from the resource. In John Locke’s own words,

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Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.….

[I]t hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men:

for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can hath a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, for others (Locke, 1967: II, 27).

If someone uses their intellectual or physical capacities to remove from nature or transform a resource to make usable what was not (so) usable prior to the labour, then they have a right to exclude others from the resource. Locke’s labour-mixing justification for initial acquisition has received support from contemporary writers. One such a supporter is Edward Feser.

Edward Feser (2005) presents the labouring condition as being Sorites-like. Below a certain level of mixing or control, one does not own a resource, but one does own a resource if one has mixed one’s labour with it, or exerted control over it, beyond a certain threshold. To begin to own something requires “significantly altering a resource, at least by coming to control that resource” (Feser, 2005: 65). To stake a legitimate claim to a resource to warrant excluding others, according to Feser, one must either “drastically” do something to it or take adequate control of the thing. For example, if a man finds an unowned water hole and only uses it occasionally, he does not own it. However, “if instead, he builds a fence around it, posts guard dogs, and so forth, he has acquired full ownership” (Feser, 2005: 69). Hence, for Feser, mixing one’s labour to an unowned resource through significantly altering it or controlling it is a sufficient condition to begin legitimately to exclude others from the resource.

The labour-mixing condition as a condition for first legitimate acquisition has an intuitive appeal and everywhere around us we see instances of it legally upheld. But not everything that glitters is gold. On closer inspection, labour-mixing seems flawed; it is not a necessary or sufficient condition for excluding others from a resource.

The labour-mixing condition is too narrow. It is too narrow because it does not provide justification for untransformed property, one that no one has added any labour to. Imagine an unfenced, unguarded clear piece of land that some families’ children go to play in at the weekend. It is morally their play field although none of them or their parents altered it in any way or have dogs guarding it. If we follow Locke and Feser, the field is unowned—it is still, in principle, appropriable—and hence the families have no claim-right to prevent an individual who wishes to mix her labour with it in a way that will make it unusable as a playfield, say, through cultivation.

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The narrowness of ownership by labour-mixing has serious ramifications for humans and wild animals alike. There are many people or animals that do not labour in the conventional transformative sense as such but, by all intents and purposes, are morally eligible to own some

‘unmixed’ goods. For example, some wait only for fruits to ripen, pick them, and put them in their mouths or in the mouths of their young ones. Migratory wild animals travel seasonally for hundreds of miles simply to go and eat seasonal foods which are available for a few weeks in this place before moving to another location conducive for breeding purposes.

The same for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribal peoples. Under labour-mixing, they would not be owners of the fruit-bearing plants they depend on for their subsistence. Some tribal peoples and some wildlife would be doomed if the very thing which grounds their right to self-preservation could be morally appropriated by someone else. Feser is particularly misguided in requiring that one is able to protect some resource. His condition has the implication that those without the ability to build a fence, to stand with a spear by the water hole, or do not have guard dogs to protect it can never own the naturally occurring source of water upon which their very lives depend. Why should a fence or a guard dog make such a huge difference?

We must resist this repugnant implication of the restricted labour-mixing requirement. A plausible theory of ownership should give the children the right to exclude others from their playfield; grant the disabled dog-less man ownership of the water hole; and recognise the nomads and wildlife rights to fruit-bearing forests that excludes transformative users such as loggers or miners from exploiting, degrading, or damaging the resources. In short, a sound theory of initial acquisition should allow for ownership of untransformed resources by individuals or collectives.

Another problem with the mixing condition is that of ritualistic or pointless labour-mixing.

Consider the case of Eddie, digging a hole on an unowned parcel of land. Eddie digs and digs.

Before long, he is in the hole over his head, doggedly determined to keep digging down. He is not laying pipes or putting in a pool, but simply digging for the enjoyment of it, say, the exertion releases a neurochemical that gives rise to a pleasant feeling (Hadley, 2015: 43).

Let us assume Eddie’s pleasure-giving exertion instantiates a case of labour-mixing. The case seems to render the right to exclude unintelligible or redundant since, although Eddie has transformed an unowned resource, he has no use whatsoever for it. Perhaps Locke’s ‘spoilage’

proviso already prevents Eddie from owning the hole since—having already attained the sort after pleasure of digging—he no longer wants or needs it.

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Hadley, however, has a different problem with the case. He thinks that Eddie’s labour would count as an appropriation-legitimating condition only if he were sacrificing some other activity he could be doing instead of digging the hole. Extrapolating to wild animals Hadley asks:

“More pertinently, when animals expend energy in the process of labouring, are they making a sacrifice in the sense of bearing some cost to themselves?” (Hadley, 2015: 43). By Hadley’s lights, if our answer is negative, then labour-mixing does not qualify Eddie or wild animals to own the products of their labour.

Hadley’s conclusion, however, has no bearing on whether labour-mixing is a sufficient condition for ownership. Consider the following: On Monday Jim cultivates a portion of unowned land and in so doing, foregoes collecting compost for his vegetables. On Tuesday Jim cultivates the same amount of land as yesterday but he had nothing else to do. By Hadley’s logic, Jim appropriates the piece he cultivated on Monday but not the one he cultivated on Tuesday. In my view, having an opportunity cost or not does nothing to change our intuition that Jim, prima facie, owns what he cultivated on both days. If Jim loved gardening and had virtually nothing to forego, according to Hadley, he would have no right against his neighbour helping herself to the vegetables on Jim’s garden. This is an absurd implication of making sacrifice matter for legitimate appropriation.

Let me end with a potential eliminator of wild animals from being possible owners. This is the argument that one needs to engage in labour as a result of one’s rational choice for him or her to be eligible to owning the product of their labour. The argument, reports Hadley (2015: 41), posits that “would-be property owners are autonomous enough to be industrious and creative, and responsible for their own choices in life.” This requirement reflects more the moral narcissism of humans than it offers a real condition to qualify labouring as ownership-producing. One problem is how the autonomy condition comports with our ontogenic and phylogenetic development. In both our development from infancy and our evolutionary development, it does not seem unreasonable to assume the notion of ownership precedes the emergence of full-blown rational autonomy.

Moreover, it seems human labouring is rooted in the survival instinct. True, humans have widened their labouring options and their superior intellect allows them to carry out more deliberative, creative labouring. Granted the beavers cannot choose to not build their labour-intensive complex dams, human beings cannot choose not to labour in the generic sense of the term either. That we can labour in a wider variety of ways is not sufficient to put a moral wedge

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between our labouring and beavers’ labouring. Moreover, there are some human beings whose labouring is an uninterrupted routine that the beaver-human line becomes very blurred.

Supposing hunter-gatherer tribal peoples could not choose not to do what they do, we have nevertheless no reason not to affirm that they own what they collect and whatever temporary shelters they build.

In conclusion, with or without the Lockean proviso, labour-mixing is not a sufficient or necessary condition for the moral right to exclude others from a resource. It is potentially part of the story, but not the whole story to ownership. It is conceivable that one labours on a resource and leaves enough and as good of it for others, and yet he does not need it (anymore, for example). Perhaps, then, a needs-base account will yield a sound justification for appropriation. I will now therefore turn to a need-based account of ownership.