yes, there is private property in utopia!

the first in a series of long-reads about freedom in utopia

TLDR:

• Without individual ownership, the Utopians couldn’t permissibly eat, even though there’s plenty of food in Utopia.

• We shouldn’t discount the productive and distributive benefits of private-property systems to Utopia, even if it’s ‘abundant’.

• If a private-property system is a justifiable and effective means for meeting needs and permissible wants, then the Utopians have the right to opt for it.

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Today, I’m going to argue against the standard trope that there’s no private property in Utopia. But let me backtrack a moment. As I might have mentioned, I’m writing a book called Freedom in Utopia. It’s a philosophy book about how free we’d be in the best possible society. Anyway, I thought I’d try out a few of its ideas here, so this is the first in an occasional series of pieces based on chapters I’ve been drafting, and philosophy papers I’ve been giving, on these topics, at various cool places.

As it happens, the chapter on private property will appear around halfway through Freedom in Utopia, but I decided to begin with it here for two reasons. First, because my thoughts on this topic touch on the concept of 'abundance’, which is a pretty popular concept at the moment. Second, because I find the standard view about Utopian property frustratingly constrained. And this reflects my more general view that discussions about Utopia tend to overly discount the value of freedom. Anyway, here we go. I hope you’re ready for some hardcore philosophising!

Three arguments against the status quo

I’m going to make three separate arguments in favour of the existence of private property in Utopia, at least when Utopia is defined as the ‘best possible society’. One reason for conceiving of Utopia in this way is that, as I’ll discuss below, I believe the constraints of ‘best’, ‘possible’, and ‘society’ can help us to isolate the value and disvalue of real-world institutions and practices. Beyond the practical relevance of this particular kind of Utopian thinking, however, I find it interestingly annoying that Utopia, more generally, has become strongly associated with a lack of private property. So I’ll start by outlining three versions of that standard view, before arguing against it.

First, Thomas More tells us that in Utopia, “where everything belongs to everybody, no one need fear that, so long as the public warehouses are filled, anyone will ever lack for anything for his own use”.¹ He then goes on to argue that Utopia’s communal property model is not only distributionally preferable to private property in that it enables more equal, fair, and just access to goods, but that it also brings about more happiness and peace and public-mindedness.

Meanwhile, Marxists describe a Utopian post-capitalist ‘time of abundance’. The great G.A. Cohen claims that, in such a time, “even limited inequality would disappear, because everyone could have everything that they might want to have”.² So here, it’s not just that, in an abundant Utopia, everyone could access all the goods they have “use” for, as More puts it. Rather, it’s “everything they might want”.

Finally, even Robert Nozick, on his libertarian multiple-possible-utopias model, includes optional collective-ownership economies. For Nozick, a utopia is any possible world deemed ‘best’ to live in by all its rational inhabitants, in that none would prefer to live in any other world that they can both: 1) imagine, and 2) have the option to live in.³ So, whilst Nozick is probably best known for his hardcore commitment to private property, the examples he offers of the preferences that could tie together the inhabitants of different utopias include support for communism as well as support for capitalism. On even Nozick’s view, therefore, private property doesn’t count as a necessary feature of Utopia. And it seems there must be some Nozickian utopias where private property isn’t possible — except, perhaps, if every inhabitant of such a utopia suddenly came to desire private property, all at the same time.

Some clarifications

Before advancing my three separate arguments opposing the Utopian lack of private property, I’ll make a few clarifications about my approach. First, I do acknowledge that taking ‘Utopia’ to refer to the ‘best possible society’ excludes certain well-known depictions of Utopia, including Nozick’s! Nonetheless, thinking about the ‘best possible society’ — a society that’s both morally optimal and feasible — sets constructive constraints, which enable us not only to interrogate contested concepts like freedom, but also to assess real-world standards.

First, this approach helpfully narrows down classic liberal enquiry by entailing that we think specifically about freedom, and other matters, within society. Indeed, I go a step further, and take ‘society’ here to mean ‘political society’, in the sense of a society with man-made laws, and other ‘political’ institutions. And this means that I can’t dodge to the side, and conclude that the Utopians — qua members of the best possible society — would be most free by disbanding and deciding to live off the grid. Even if that is how, without my ‘political society’ constraint, they would be the most free!

Second, I’m taking ‘best’ to refer to ‘best for’ rather than ‘best to’. So, the goodness of Utopia, on my account, reflects its optimal tracking of the objective human good, rather than (as per Nozick) its inhabitants’ subjective preferences. And for the purposes of today’s piece, I’m taking ‘the objective human good’ to refer minimally to what’s good for humans in terms of: 1) goods required to lead a flourishing life (minimally, subsistence goods); and 2) behaviours required to live in accordance with the good, particularly regarding interactions with other living things (minimally, respecting moral rights).

Finally, I’m taking ‘possible’ to refer not just to whether Utopia is conceivable, but whether such a society could also actually come about, now or in the nearby future. Therefore, Utopia faces feasibility constraints regarding matters ranging from the demands of physics to the demands of human need. Some of these constraints will change over time, as we learn (or forget!) more about what it is to be human and the world around us, and as technologies develop in response. But I accept that, for the closely ‘foreseeable’ future, humans will minimally continue to need to eat food. Perhaps we’ll move beyond that one day, but I don’t take such a scenario to be ‘nearby possible’, for now.

That said, it’s important to note that accepting this ‘need-to-eat-food’ constraint doesn’t entail that we remain similarly subject to current constraints regarding the meeting of this need. Rather, I’m happy to accept that Cohen’s ‘time of abundance’ is a current possibility, when understood as a time in which, owing presumably to rapid technological advancement (hey there, AI!), there’s effectively no scarcity of goods, including foodstuffs. Accepting this possibility will allow me to respond to the obvious claim that because much of the value of private-property systems is typically taken to lie in their comparative productive and distributional benefits, then private property would become disvalued, or even irrelevant, in a time of abundance.

An argument about apples

I’ll start with my most ambitious argument, which is aimed at showing that at least some private property is necessary in Utopia. Now, I’m not referring here to private-property systems. Rather, I’m talking about the kind of relation that I take to obtain only between an individual owner and their owned thing: a relation that’s essential to, but not exhaustive of, the broader sense of private property as a societal institution.

So what exactly does this relation consist in? Well, that’s a famously contested question, but my argument depends on ownership being primarily a matter of moral-rights-protected exclusive and exclusionary ‘bilateral’ relations between owners and owned-things. So, if you own X, by yourself or as part of a group, then everybody aside from you, or the rest of the group, is necessarily excluded from the exclusive relation you have with X, as a matter of perfect obligation.

This isn’t to suggest that every ownership relation is exclusive and exclusionary in all ways! Perhaps you’re up for sharing some of X’s features with people outside the ownership relation. Or perhaps X has some features that you can’t exclude those people from. But on my view, there’s at least something about your relationship with X that’s exclusive to you, in this exclusionary sense, or I’m afraid you simply don’t own X. I’m not saying this is sufficient to ownership, but that it is necessary. Of course, I’m very aware that this Lockean-type ‘bilateral’ approach to ownership might seem too narrow for some people. Perhaps you’re some kind of Kantian who thinks that every ownership relation involves pretty much everyone! Well, I’m happy to disagree for now, and press on.

In this context, my first argument for private property in Utopia goes as follows: if something is ownable and permissibly eatable, then if you permissibly eat it, you are its sole owner, at least whilst you’re eating it. So, if this apple is ownable, and it can be permissibly eaten, then if you’re permissibly eating this apple, you and you alone own it. Now, this might seem like an odd thing to claim, but I think it’s uncontroversial.

It’s uncontroversial because if there’s plenty of food (as there is in Utopia, whether Utopia reflects current resource levels, or whether it’s abundant), then surely it cannot be the case that there’s absolutely nothing that’s permissibly eatable. Of course, this isn’t to deny that there are many things that it’s wrong to eat! Perhaps even many, many more things than most of us realise. But if subsistence is a basic human good, and if we have foodstuffs ranging from nuts to vegetables to synthetic products, then surely it must be permissible to eat some things.

After all, if it’s not permissible, then there’s no point in thinking about property systems, or in thinking about anything much else! This is because if it’s not permissible to eat anything, then we all must do wrong, or we all must all die. And even if it were the case that we shouldn’t eat any of the possibly-eatable things available to us now, it can’t be so in the best possible society. This is because there being some permissibly-eatable things is surely a necessary condition of such a place.

All that said, my first argument doesn’t depend on making predictions about what would be eaten in Utopia. Rather, it depends on the relation between something being permissibly eatable and something being owned. So, for the sake of my argument, I’ll accept that apples are a permissibly-eatable thing. But please feel free to substitute some other type of eatable thing, whenever I refer to ‘apples’ from now on, if you’d rather!

I should also add that, of course, there’s a further crucial (and massive) question about how any particular person becomes a permissible eater of any particular apple. As it happens, I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I’ll probably tell you my thoughts about it sometime. But for now, it being possible to be a permissible eater of apples is enough for my current argument, which, if you remember, goes as follows: if this apple is ownable, and it can be permissibly eaten, then if you’re permissibly eating this apple, you and you alone own it.

Now, perhaps you’re wanting to object to the ‘jump’ I’m making from you permissibly eating the apple, to you owning the apple? In that case, please assume that you already owned the apple before you began to eat it, but that — right up to the moment you started eating it — you owned it equally with some other people, as part of a group. I’ll be upfront and admit that I’m adding this amendment not only to address the ‘jumping’ objection. I’m also adding it because I want my argument to convince people who embrace permissible collective ownership whilst denying permissible individual ownership.

After all, what does it mean to say that a group of people owns an apple, if one of them is currently eating it, and thereby excluding the rest of the group not only from the eating of it, but from all other possible relations with it? Remember, an apple isn’t a thing like a tractor or a rake, which various people can individually ‘consume’, on some ‘taking turns’ model! Neither is it a supply of things that can be replenished, like an apple tree. And if your response here is to say, “Cut the apple into slices and share them out!”, then please apply my argument to each slice, or bite, or teeny-tiny sliver of the apple.

In other words, the central point I’m making here is that, while some thing is being eaten, there’s no possible way that anyone else, apart from the eater, can have any kind of exclusive and exclusionary relationship with that thing. And this means that if something is being eaten permissibly, then the person who’s eating it, and nobody else, can have an ownership claim over that thing. And finally, if you don’t believe that this kind of exclusive and exclusionary relationship counts as ‘ownership’, then how do you continue believing that the group relationship with the apple does count in that way? What is the group’s standing in relation to the apple that looks more like ownership than permissibly consuming it? The only more exclusive and exclusionary relationship I can think of is the relationship that a person has with their own body. But an apple is much less problematically ‘ownable’ than a body!

I should add now that I’m not suggesting any of this is elucidatory of all the powers or facets of ownership. My argument doesn’t help us to ascertain whether, for instance, if you own a house, then you can permissibly paint it pink. Rather, I’m simply suggesting that unless my admittedly odd but uncontroversial idea about apple-eating is wrong, then at least some minimal kind of private property is necessary to all good societies, because without individual-ownership relations, subsistence needs could never be met in a morally-permissible way. And we’d all do wrong, or we’d all die!

This problem doesn’t disappear if there are infinite apples. And neither does it disappear if we conceive of apple-eaters as ‘trustees’ or ‘usufructuaries’, as opposed to ‘individual owners’. This is because the same kind of exclusive and exclusionary relation obtains, regardless of what we call it, or the locus of its normative power. So on this argument, regardless of whether Utopia is abundant, it must contain at least some private property, or it cannot be the best possible society. Therefore, this is an ambitious argument that private property must exist in Utopia.

An argument about abundance

My second, separate, argument for the existence of private property in Utopia depends on the following idea: that an abundance of goods doesn’t necessarily amount to everyone getting what they need or want, or even that what they do get is more equally (or otherwise ‘better’) distributed, than in non-abundant times. This argument depends on accepting empirical evidence in favour of the comparative productive benefits, and certain distributional benefits, of private-property systems.

As I mentioned above, G.A. Cohen claims that, in the time of abundance, everyone’s wants could be met, and inequality would be eliminated. But even if all actual and possible goods were replicated infinitely, then I might still not get what I want, if what I wanted were that particular chocolate cake, which my friend made me. I wouldn’t get it, for instance, if you ate it before I had the chance! Therefore, the entirety of my possible wants could not be met in the time of abundance, qua it being the time of abundance, because the issue of ‘particularity’ — the quality of being ‘that particular chocolate cake’ — goes beyond scarcity concerns.

So does the issue of equality, I contend. That is, it seems correct that, if Utopia were non-scarce, then its inhabitants would have equal potential access to goods. But it still might be the case — for many reasons, ranging from the impact of selfish actions, to the impact of justified self-defence — that its inhabitants might not attain even basic economic equality relating to their receipt of goods, never mind other forms of valuable societal equality. This must be so if Utopia’s inhabitants are free to act on their own decision-making, including the making of bad decisions.

Therefore, accepting that Utopia could be non-scarce doesn’t mean accepting that matters of property allocation and adjudication become irrelevant in such a situation. And we cannot discount any distributional advantages of private property, particularly regarding the enabling of permissible competition over desirable particular goods. So yes, this brings us back to that second-order question (which I side-stepped earlier!) about how you become the one who gets to eat that particular apple, over everyone else.

Moreover, just because it’s possible for Utopia to be non-scarce doesn’t mean it’s possible for Utopia to become and remain non-scarce without private property’s comparative productive value (hey there, Marx!). Indeed, returning to Thomas More, note that his claim that where “everything belongs to everybody”, then “nobody will ever lack for anything for his own use”, is explicitly conditional on it being “so long as the public warehouses are filled”! My second argument, therefore, leaves open the possibility for private property in Utopia, on the grounds of its distributional and productive value.

An argument about moral rights

Finally, I’m going to argue that if a private-property system can meet the needs and permissible wants of the Utopians in a justifiable manner, then the Utopians should have the option of instituting such a system, even if it wouldn’t be comparatively efficient. So this argument doesn’t depend on private property’s comparative distributional and productive value.

Moreover, I’m not suggesting that the Utopians should have the option to institute such a system because I believe that the organisation of Utopia must reflect the Utopians’ subjective preferences, as per Nozick. Rather, I contend that members of the ‘best possible society’ have the moral right — as per members of all political societies — to determine certain crucial matters for themselves, in permissible ways.

That is, I’m arguing that a society could not be the best possible society, at least on the kind of rights-based liberal account I hold, if its inhabitants were unfree to act as agents with the moral rights to determine their own ends, including how to live as a group, in various important ways. Of course, there are many further details to address, here. Not least, how to ensure the recognition of other equally-held moral rights, beyond the right to determine one’s own ends. But the human capacity to deliberate — on one’s own, and in groups — is morally significant to the extent that it’s reflected in, and protected by, various fundamental and societal moral rights — at least on any account that takes individual freedom seriously.

Therefore, Utopia’s inhabitants should be free to respond to the crucial societal matter of the meeting of needs and permissible wants, by choosing to institute, via justified decision-making processes, property systems that are both effective and justified. And if a private-property system meets these conditions, then it should be an option for Utopian deliberation and institution, even if its good ends could be achieved in other more efficient ways. This final argument, therefore, is in favour of the possible, albeit conditional, existence of private property in Utopia.

A quick summary

Finally, I’m going to conclude by summarising my three arguments. First, I argued that if there’s no individual ownership, then the Utopians cannot permissibly eat, even though there’s plenty of food. Second, I argued that we shouldn’t discount the productive and distributive benefits of private-property systems to Utopia, even if it’s ‘abundant’. Third, I argued that since the meeting of needs and permissible wants is every Utopian’s business as a matter of justice, then if a private-property system is a justifiable and effective means for this, they should be able to institute such a system.

These are three separate arguments. Therefore, the overall case I’m advancing here — that, contrary to the standard view, there is indeed private property in Utopia — is furthered by the success of any of them.

1. Utopia, p.109.

2. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p.7.

3. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Chapter 10.