I’m always trying to figure out how people think about things. Recently, while speaking to a respectable, knowledgeable libertarian friend about property philosophy, I realized that he comes to his understanding of property from a different perspective than mine. We were talking about property in the context of parent/child relationships. I was trying to make the point that parents may have to violate their children’s property in order to provide care and that, ultimately, the children will either forgive those violations or not. My argument has always been that property is an objective fact of humanity and that it is defined as those material objects to which no one has an equal or higher claim and, because children are human, they have property in their own bodies. My friend’s belief is that children themselves are the property of their parents and that parents have the right to do what they will in order to provide care. When I pushed back with the obvious objection of “but when do children become their own property?”, his response was, “they’ll just work it out”. Thinking about that now, it’s blown my mind that the libertarian movement may divided into two distinct camps based on their conceptualization of property: Subjective Propertarians and Objective Propertarians. This distinction hinges on whether property is defined by some level of social consensus or by immutable logical principles.

This post isn’t about who’s right or wrong, but that, being an objective propertarian, I never even considered that others think of property this way. When I dictated this to my Pocket, here’s how it framed the idea. I think it’s pretty good:

Taxonomy of Propertarianism

• Subjective Propertarians: Define property through mutual agreement. Property rights are not fixed by a universal standard but are determined by what two parties can agree belongs to one or the other.
• Objective Propertarians: Maintain that property has a strict, logical definition that exists independently of human belief or agreement.

Practical Application: Parental Rights

The tension between these views is exemplified by the status of children.

• The Insight: Children are not the property of their parents; rather, parents serve as caretakers.
• The Conflict: A caretaker may occasionally need to violate a child’s inherent property rights (bodily autonomy) to fulfill the obligations of care.
• Friction Point: This perspective often meets resistance from those who view the parent-child relationship through a more traditional ownership lens.

This subjective propertarianism, I assume, asserts that property is a fact of humanity, but has no strict, objective definition and that parties will simply work out what property is in the course of their interactions. I agree that people tend to work things out and that it may be possible to build a philosophical framework based on that idea. I also recognize that it may be that there’s no need for a philosophical framework to accommodate this line of thinking. Hell, maybe it even renders property philosophy obsolete!

Regardless, the most useful thing I took away from this interaction is that, in the past, while making arguments about property, I never considered that this perspective needed to be addressed when framing the argument (because I didn’t know this perspective existed).