The Property Species Quotes

“The stumbling block to overcome is to accept that property is not just an external restraint imposed upon the individual, but that property socializes the individual's conduct to fit with the external world, to fit with what is right. Moreover, we have to be open to the possibility that commerce may be an integral part of that socializing and ethicizing process (178).”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“When the benefits change relative to the costs, property rights emerge to constrain the individual. But over the last fifty years, economists have not really done much more with Alchian and Demsetz's groundbreaking lead than report how different patterns of property rights lead to different patterns of behavior. We continue to frame the persistent problems and the property rights solutions in terms of the external world imposing itself on the individual (175)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Property is but another characteristic of the very thing itself. The custom is contained in the thing (100)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“[A] rule of property arises out of our background knowledge of what is right, which includes protecting us from real and positive hurt (87)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“The everyday practice of what is right is not derived from a rule, not only because the custom is inarticulable /in toto/, but also because a rule not summoned from custom cannot anticipate the unknowable local circumstances under which it might conflict with another rule subsumed within the larger community practice of what is right (69).”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“The first implication of not being able to explicitly know or specifically state the rules that govern how we act is that only /in their totality/ does a whole system of rules, the custom, form the sense of how to conduct ourselves rightly...The second implication is that the rules that govern our actions also govern our perceptions of actions, and it is rule-guided perception that poses the fundamental problem for the emergence of property as a moral custom (66-67).”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Property is not just about me feeling, thinking, and saying "This is mine." /Property is jointly reciprocal./ We jointly attend to mine and yours, mine and thine, /meum/ and /tuum/. There is no abstract concept of YOURS in Klugh's squirrels or any other animal because there is no abstract concept of MINE in any other animal.”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Property consists in a claim imbued with meaning, particularly in the case of disagreement or good faith misunderstanding. The custom entails doing something with words. We speak with the aim of doing work in the physical world. We speak with the aim of changing how people perceive the physical world. (49)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Property rights are the expectations defined by property, not the content of property. In other words, property effects property rights. The micro- and meso-foundations of property make the macro-level of property rights possible. Such a view challenges the felicitousness of the bundle-of-sticks metaphor, which inverts how humans cognize property. It also means legal realists are wrong on the facts to claim that there is no prior normative conception of property. (21)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“What is right regarding things is not derived from the rules of property, but a rule of property arises from our background knowledge of what is right regarding people and things. (19)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Whereas the custom of property is ancient, moral, and universal to all people, property rights are modern, amoral, and majoritarian. Property unites communities and makes civil society, the open society, the great society, possible. The justice and temperance of /mine/ and /thine/ are necessary conditions for prosperity and human flourishing. (19)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“In virtue ethical terms, if the micro-level of property is about justice for the individual and the meso-level about temperance from the community regarding justice for the individual, the macro-level is about prudence, the society-wide promotion of economic betterment. The competing institutions that emerge to unite the day-to-day interactions of strangers from different communities are the ones that are comparatively less costly. (18)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

“Our human minds perceive the world of people and things through a socially transmitted custom of knowing when to say, "This thing is mine," and reciprocally, "That thing is yours." Property is a custom. Property is a custom because it is a practice socially taught and socially learned. Property is a custom because it is a moral practice. And property is a human custom because it is a scheduling pattern of the species. Property resides in our environment - well, partly. (pg 12)”
― Bart J. Wilson, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind