Peter (aka Freeborn John) and Tim have both responded to my recent post about the moral basis of property rights. Peter misunderstands the point of that post. Though I have some (tentative) opinions on the issues it raises, I wasn't positively arguing for any firm conclusion there. I was posing a number of questions, starting from the intuition that, on certain assumptions at least (to do with the ownership status of the things you make use of), if you create something it's rightly yours. This is an intuition I share with many others. Should you take an essay I wrote, present it as yours and charge a fee for printing it, I'd be put out. Nonetheless, I don't think it's obvious why we think like this, those of us who do. So I explored a couple of possibilities - 'mixing' one's labour with something; desert (as in reward for effort) - and the further questions they raise. Peter takes me to be saying more than I intended to in that post: to be commending desert as a criterion of ownership, and overlooking the benefits of private property, ignoring the horrors of totalitarianism - and possibly other things besides.
One element of his argument that I'm not sure I've understood relates to human artifacts being the consequence of what people have done. Is Peter saying you're entitled to own what your actions have brought about as a consequence (always assuming you didn't filch the materials you were operating on)? I'm not sure if he is or not. But if he is, then why this should be so is no more obvious to me as a criterion for justified appropriation than Locke's labour-mixing argument is.
[C]reators have rights over their creations because we want to encourage the next creator to create. Nobody gives a damn how much effort goes into creating something, the labour used or indeed any other resource used. All we actually care about is encouraging more people to create more things: and to do so we reward those who have created.
The argument surely needs supplementary support. It's one from beneficial consequences - and, this being the case, at least in principle we should be able to look at other criteria of ownership, and whether they might have beneficial consequences of their own, albeit different ones. And do we want to encourage people to create things regardless? Useless things, too? OK, if they're useless, no one will pay for them (may come the reply). However, Tim's point is that we give the creator the right over the thing to encourage her to create it. Does this mean I should have no right to what I've created if everyone else regards it as useless? In which case you could make off with it. Right?