Maybe nobody on this thread is claiming the moral high ground based on property, but that “property rights trump all” has been claimed elsewhere including in other threads on FR. When I inquire as to the basis of that position (not that I always bother to) I seldom get anything close to a satisfactory answer. You’re right that we can’t look at these things in exclusion and the background has to be considered, but in my experience too few people bother.
I’ll grant you that what you laid out is the logic chain the Castle Doctrine is built around and that it is more or less suitable for the present time and place. But if we talk about fundamental rights, I don’t believe we can limit the discussion to the present time and place. In my opinion, the scope of fundamental rights is broader than that. If we’re talking about legal rights or fundamental rights as altered by legal processes we can’t always limit the discussion to the present time and place either. Sometimes we have to go through the legal history.
The natural right to life ought to be the same for a man living thousands of years ago in the forest absent an organized large scale society as it is for a man living in the modern United States with the caveat that the same natural right may have been altered by legal processes as society developed.
The natural right to property ought to be the same for a man living thousands of years ago in the forest absent an organized large scale society as it is for a man living in the modern United States with the caveat that the same natural right may have been altered by legal processes as society developed.
And the natural rights may have been altered differently by legal processes in societies other than the one we have in the United States.
(I know, you don’t really alter a natural right through a legal process, but I’m not going to straighten out the wording right now. I expect you get the idea.)
I can agree with those who say that absent an organized society a man uses his labor to make something his personal property—he carves a tree branch into a spear or picks some fruit. And I can agree that in a more organized society a man uses his labor to obtain a medium of exchange (like money) and uses the medium of exchange to obtain personal property from someone else, thus making that personal property his.
But when it comes to real property, I can see how the same thing sort of applies and cultivating a piece of land where vegetables grow to increase the vegetable production is putting labor into the land to make it yours, but by what right other than force did the first person to do so stake off that piece of land that everybody had access to and could take wild vegetables from, and deny it to those others? And if done by force, are others wrong to regain access by force? Force is the way land changed hands at the national level for a long time.
Based on all that, how do you get some grand set of fundamental property rights out of ownership of real property? I don’t see that you do, which means property rights are more legal rights than natural rights, (legal rights having been established to avoid the use of force in conflicting claims to real property because that gets messy and detrimental to society) and legal rights are whatever you can convince the legal establishment they should be.
It’s the same way a person has a right to freedom. We could just as easily say by what right other than the fact that no one has put him in chains does a person have his own free will.
Human beings have needs, the basic needs of humanity include shelter and food. If we have a fundamental right to life then we have a fundamental right to secure the basic needs to stay alive. If we have a fundamental right to secure the basic needs to stay alive then we have a fundamental right to have a chunk of land to grow food and build shelter.
Force is the way a lot of things have changed hands at the national level for a long time. Wars have been fought to acquire slaves, food, money, and just plain to get rid of those people. Plenty of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been exchanged at the point of a sword, if acquisition by force invalidates the right to property then it invalidates all rights. I suppose there is an argument that a species as violent as ours doesn’t deserve these things, but I got rid of my hippy hair a long time ago.