Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'll treat you today, dear reader, to another blog post inspired by shenanigans over at Yahoo!Answers. Someone asked, "Can anyone philosophically justify the existence of private property?" Some further explanation indicated that he had titles to land especially in mind. For the record, my answer was what regular readers of this blog would likely expect.   The pragmatic answer is surely best: those social institutions are right which work, over time and on the whole. Private title to land is justified, if at all, only on that basis. Whether it IS justified by practical consequences is a fascinating empirical question. Consider Richard Pipes' book on this question, for example. That is much more interesting than trying to parse the differences between Locke and Rousseau on some primordial appropriation. But I'm bring this into Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed today because of another commenter. He ignored the specific matter of land and gave us a little lect...

  Sometimes the debris or throwaway of one year is precisely the material that needs to be preserved or conserved in another. Trash becomes a nesting place, or the familiar terrain of wildlife. That was an insight neighbors of a vacant lot brought to the table at a public hearing of a certain Massachusetts' town's Conservation Commission on a recent Thursday. When the Commission came to the matter of a notice of intent on a certain property I'll call Fordham Place, it heard from an environmental consultant for the landowner, who made a  speaking of the landowner’s intent to put a single-family home on what is now a vacant lot within a buffer zone just outside a designated wetland. Consultant also said, as if to allay concerns, that this intent comes with a “detailed plan for restoring and re-vegetating the area.” Commission members agreed that the notice of intent didn’t apply to the actual wetland, rather, to a discretionary buffer zone outlying...