‘What makes property possible?’: Kant against the tradition

The legitimate appropriation and use of property can be thought in many ways. A traditional way of approaching these issues proceeds by asking two fundamental questions: (i) how much is enough when it comes to property, and (ii) what is the purpose of having such property? These questions are grounded in a series of premises, more prominently on the idea of a commonly owned right to the possession of the earth, and the thought that property has an instrumental value to the extent that it allows us to fashion our life plans, to achieve our goals, and to autonomously exercise our agency. From this point of view, a theory of property is expected to deliver substantive principle of justice, capable of answering the questions of ‘how much’ and ‘to what purpose’, and thereby to offer a legitimate justification for the use of a right to what would otherwise remain commonly owned. In sharp contrast to this traditional approach, Kant’s starting point for a theory of property is not based on the ‘how much’ and ‘to what purpose’ worries, but rather on the question (iii) ‘how is property possible?’ In this paper I argue that this particularly Kantian appropriation of the problem of property is distinct in at least three ways: (1) Kant’s justification of a right to acquire and to use external objects will not depend on substantive or material principles of justice, but on a formal principle reflecting the a priori nature of human reciprocity in a bounded earth. (2) The idea of common ownership of the earth is presented as a critical rather than a normative idea inherited from a natural law framework. (3) This critical idea is put to work to inquire into the conditions that make property possible, in the light of each individual’s free agency to choice and action. I conclude by showing how some contemporary interpretations of Kant’s distinctively critical theory of property, have nonetheless missed the mark, by identifying his theory with more egalitarian, and for that reason, substantive concerns regarding welfare, fairness, and social rights. Although these are legitimate concerns, present in parts of the Doctrine of Right, they do not bear the justificatory burden in Kant’s argument for legitimate property. As I defend in this paper, Kant’s formal and a priori method of justification does not start from questions about the ‘how much’ and ‘to what purpose’ motivating some theories of distributive justice, but rather offers us an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of having something as one’s own, in light of everybody else’s freedom to do the same.