I negate
Definitions
●Appropriate:the act of getting or saving money for a specific use or
purpose (Merriam Webster)
●outer space:a zone that occurs about 100 kilometers above the planet
(space.com)
My standard is Lockean Ethics
Locke’s philosophy is centered on the positives of resource appropriation and legitimacy
of private property rights
Kyle Swan (associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento state university) and Jacob Vargas. Sacramento State College
https://www.csus.edu/faculty/s/kyle.swan/docs/lockean%20property%20rights-revised.pd
Locke’s theory is a justificatory account about the legitimacy of private property rights. Locke’s natural law justification is
distinct from other accounts circulating in the 17th and early 18th centuries. For example, Thomas Hobbes argued that rules protecting private property
must be the design of the political authority. Alternatively, somewhat later, David Hume argued that property rules are evolved pre-legal conventions
that acquire legitimacy by the mutual acknowledgment of a people. Locke’s account has sometimes figured into contemporary political theory as a
basis for libertarianism. However, establishing a basis for control rights over things is different than establishing the strength of those rights. Therefore,
Lockean theories of property rights have two parts. The first part grounds the legitimacy of original
appropriation and exclusion. The second part conditions the legitimacy of original appropriation and
exclusion. Contemporary libertarianism is separated into right and left varieties based on the strength of the conditioning factors. Right-libertarians adhere to a relatively permissive conditioning factor: the
appropriator must merely refrain from violating anyone’s right of self-ownership. Left-libertarians impose more restrictive conditioning factors, usually with the aim of preserving equality. According to Locke, Divine
Providence has been equally generous to human beings, providing natural goods in creation for our common use. But, he writes, “there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other
before they can be of any use.” This is what generates the puzzle about legitimacy. If the natural bounty has been given to us in common, how can any individual legitimately claim ownership and control rights
over it? How does a resource, like an area of land, change from one day something that Brody can use to meet his needs to the next day something that Dorothy is permitted to exclude Brody from using, even to
the point of using coercive force to exclude him? How can it be legitimate to change from a system of common use, where everyone is equal, to one that leads to the “disproportionate and unequal Possession of
the Earth”? Locke's answer, and the first part of his theory grounding the legitimacy of original appropriation, is labor. He is proposing a unilateral account since it does not
depend on the imprimatur of a political authority or the consent or acknowledgment of a community. Instead it depends simply upon Dorothy’s decision to “mix” her labor with the land, say, by sowing it. This is
because, first, it is evident by the light of nature that individuals, subject to God’s prior claim to everything as its Creator, are self-owners. Individuals also, therefore, own their labor. To mix that
labor with unowned things in the world distinctively connects those items to the
individual laborer. One’s labor infuses them with the same rights one has with respect to one’s body, including the rights to control, use
and exclude others from it. It is as if by some moral power they have become an extension of the self. Among everyone who exists and who might
have used these items, no one else has a relationship as normatively close and significant, and that difference solves the problem of who enjoys all the
relevant control rights. The account up to this point is incomplete as a justificatory account. For consider Brody. Why should any of this satisfy him?
After all, Dorothy’s claim still dispossesses him of something he presumably valued highly. Does he have a legitimate complaint? The second part of
Locke’s account argues that those whose freedom of action is now limited by private property rights
have no such complaint because permissible appropriation is restricted by the condition,
or proviso, that enough and as good be left available for them. When this proviso is met, no one is
harmed by the appropriations of others. Such is roughly the view of the right-libertarian theorist Robert Nozick. Private
property rights are not legitimate if they worsen, relative to some baseline, the position of those who are no longer at liberty to use the resource. Some
critics allege that this is too permissive because, in our example above, it allows Dorothy, the first possessor, to capture all the excess value associated
with the resource above Brody’s baseline indifference point. Since natural resources initially belong to everyone to use equally, perhaps any changes to
the institution of property should still preserve the equal value of everyone’s initial share. Left-libertarian Hillel Steiner argues that this can be achieved
by redistributing the excess value from people who have “over-appropriated” natural resources to the rest of us through a global fund.
David Schmidtz has argued that some ways of interpreting Locke’s proviso treat appropriation, for no good reason, as a zero-sum
game. It may appear logically necessary that appropriating a resource from a common pool will leave fewer resources for others, but
that is false. In fact, in many cases, appropriating a resource from the common pool will mean that
the resource is preserved rather than destroyed. In other words, private property can prevent what Garrett
Hardin calls a “tragedy of the commons.” Specifically, Hardin argued that common pool resources, when there is no way to prevent others from
accessing and using them, have a tendency to succumb to a tragedy of overuse. So Schmidtz argues that the control rights that are
