Choices that Matter: Three Propositions on the Individual, Private Property, and Anthropogenic Climate Change

Abstract

This essay argues that the interaction of the concept of private property with anthropogenic climate change offers an opportunity for individuals to re-think the way they relate to the world in which they live. To do so, it offers three “propositions” concerning private property and its role in human caused climate change. The first proposition suggests that climate change reveals private property as two relationships: “social-legal” and “physical-spatial-temporal.” The consequences and outcomes of choices permitted by the social-legal relationship that constitutes private property affect other people, producing a connection between those who make the choices about goods and resources and those others who suffer the consequences. This essay calls this resulting physical-spatial-temporal relationship the “climate change relationship.” The second proposition posits that the real enemy in the climate change relationship is not so much the concept of private property but its “idea.” The regulation typically associated with private property can have little effect so long as people continue to have the choice conferred by private property, which is predicated upon an “idea” of property which gives little regard to the consequences of one’s actions for others. The idea therefore differs from the theory of property, which matters because private property is in fact the state’s conferral of “sovereignty” on the individual. Given the global reach of the consequences that flow from human caused climate change, this in turn means that private property allows individuals to be eco-colonialists, both spatially and temporally. The final proposition is offered in the form of a question: Assuming the existence of a moral imperative to act in the absence of governmental action to address anthropogenic climate change, could the idea of private property change, and, if it did, what might it look like? In response, the essay argues that it is possible for climate change to act as the catalyst for such a change in the idea of private property and offers some thoughts on what a changed idea might look like.