Start from the intermediate steps: “All interactions should be mutually consensual between all participants”, “Ownership of property consists of the right to consent or deny consent for it to be used for a particular purpose or by a particular person ”, and “Contracts, once entered, should not be broken”.
If three people discover a pie, then the only moral use of that pie is that which all three people agree to. No other solution is general: Perhaps one of them has expended significant value in the search for the pie, while the other two have not. Is it more fair to divide the results of the search evenly, when the costs of the search were not divided evenly? Suppose that they spent the same on the search, and are all starving to death, but one of them is allergic to apples used in the pie, and demands that his third be destroyed rather than divided among the other two- is that ‘fair’?
Until they reach a consensual decision, nobody may eat the pie. If they agree to decide by some other means, such as chance or violence, then the issue is resolved as agreed. If one party unilaterally resorts to violence or theft, then the immediate issue has been resolved in an extra-moral manner, and the other parties have no moral recourse (absent a government with laws operating under the principle of consent by the governed, which would have solved the problem by owning the pie to begin with.)
The question becomes thorny when applied to the resources for which the pie is a metaphor, but it remains an issue where it is difficult to determine who has property rights, rather than an issue of the moral distribution of property. The typical solution is to declare that the government or landowner has property rights in undeclared cases, and that assigning those rights is something done explicitly.
Start from the intermediate steps: “All interactions should be mutually consensual between all participants”, “Ownership of property consists of the right to consent or deny consent for it to be used for a particular purpose or by a particular person ”, and “Contracts, once entered, should not be broken”.
If three people discover a pie, then the only moral use of that pie is that which all three people agree to. No other solution is general: Perhaps one of them has expended significant value in the search for the pie, while the other two have not. Is it more fair to divide the results of the search evenly, when the costs of the search were not divided evenly? Suppose that they spent the same on the search, and are all starving to death, but one of them is allergic to apples used in the pie, and demands that his third be destroyed rather than divided among the other two- is that ‘fair’?
Until they reach a consensual decision, nobody may eat the pie. If they agree to decide by some other means, such as chance or violence, then the issue is resolved as agreed. If one party unilaterally resorts to violence or theft, then the immediate issue has been resolved in an extra-moral manner, and the other parties have no moral recourse (absent a government with laws operating under the principle of consent by the governed, which would have solved the problem by owning the pie to begin with.)
The question becomes thorny when applied to the resources for which the pie is a metaphor, but it remains an issue where it is difficult to determine who has property rights, rather than an issue of the moral distribution of property. The typical solution is to declare that the government or landowner has property rights in undeclared cases, and that assigning those rights is something done explicitly.