"Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
To illustrate the basic principles of their discipline, economists sometimes conduct intuitive thought-experiments, designed to pare issues down to their essentials. These thought-experients often take place on an idealized desert island, where a small number of stranded individuals engage in simplified forms of production, consumption, and exchange. Hence, the name applied to this form of imaginative illustration: Crusoe economics. As a contemporary example, extended to book length, I warmly recommend Peter Schiff's "How an economy grows and why it crashes". Gently humorous, as well as painlessly instructive, it contains such characters as Ben Barnacle, who in a dastardly scheme contrives to circulate more and more fish as a medium of exchange, with predictable results.
Now, I have recently been reflecting upon the ethics of property rights and wealth redistribution. It struck me that one might equally conduct thought-experiments under the heading of Crusoe ethics. Such thought-experiments would illustrate the basic principles of right and wrong applying in these elementary island communities, as their members strive to turn the hostile natural world to their advantage.
Accordingly, here is a simple scenario. And to make things interesting, it doesn't just illustrate an ethical principle: instead, it arouses conflicting moral intuitions. One intuition is more typical of the left-wing thought, the other mere typical of right-wing thought. I'd be interested to hear your feedback.
In this scenario, the desert island dwellers currently survive only by eating fish. Alas, these fish, being hard to catch, are in short supply. Then one day, an entrepreneur, who adores fish, saves up his meager rations, and still goes hungry for days, in order to fashion a technical innovation: a net. This net enables him to catch more fish more efficiently in future. As a result, he can now dine heartily.
In addition, he loves fish so much that he is unwilling share any of them with his fellow island dwellers, who are currently starving. These other islanders offer him what they can in exchange. But as I said, he loves his fish. So he refuses all their offers, and keeps all he catches for himself.
The other islanders are understandably aggrieved. They claim that it is intolerably unfair that he should have many more fish than they do. They also argue that the fish will benefit them more than they will benefit him. After all, whereas they need to fish simply to survive, he only wants them to pleasure his palate. Accordingly, he should share at last some of his fish with them.
In response, while munching on a mullet, he argues that they have no right to the fish. By dint of his own industry and intelligence, he has designed and created the net. He now uses that same net to catch all the fish. No one else was involved, or is involved. So the fish he catches are indisputably his: only his labour is here getting mixed with the natural world, no one else's. Hence, no one else but him is entitled to the fish. This means that, no matter how much other people want the fish, or need the fish, they cannot have the fish, unless he voluntarily decides to share them, which, sadly for them, he will not currently do. Nonetheless, no one has the right to take any fish from him by force: that would be a violation of his inalienable right to the specific fruit of his prsonal labour. Even God has decreed as much, some say.
You--on behalf of your starving self, family, or clan--now have the possibility of stealing fish from his bountiful private stash. Is it right or wrong to steal his fish? And if it is right to steal them, what is wrong in principle with a welfare state supported via taxation? Where and now do you draw the line for when it is right to steal what is indisputably the property of others for the greater benefit of the many?
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Jan '11
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
JM Hanes
The problem with Crusoe ethics, or perhaps the inescapable truth thus revealed, is that there are innumerable ethical questions which simply cannot be pruned down to a choice between black and white, much as we wish -- or pretend -- that they can. Notwithstanding the specifics of this particular island scenario, it seems to me that there is an irreducible ethical tension when one feels compelled to say:
I will steal food for my starving family and it is morally wrong to do so. · Feb 6 at 12:58pm
The rules of morality are not a conclusion of our reason.
-David Hume
Dec '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
JM Hanes: They'll steal his fish, take his net, and push him out to sea alone in a boat as punishment for his anti-social behavior, thereby setting a cautionary precedent for future island entrepreneurs...
Notwithstanding the specifics of this... scenario, it seems to me that there is an irreducible ethical tension when one feels compelled to say:
I will steal food for my starving family and it is morally wrong to do so.
Other considerations in this scenario...
Before he makes his net everyone is able to catch enough fish to survive.
Afterward they cannot and when they state their grievance he decides to catch ALL of the fish.
Aodhan:... the desert island dwellers currently survive only by eating fish... these fish, being hard to catch, are in short supply..
[entrepreneur makes net, catches lots of fish]
.... he is unwilling share any of them with his fellow island dwellers, who are currently starving.... [they] offer him what they can in exchange... he refuses all their offers, and keeps all he catches for himself.
The other islanders are understandably aggrieved...
In response,..He now uses that same net to catch all the fish.
May '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
But the scenario sketched only creates a problem because it incorporates a "tragedy of the commons". The net-owner has been successful in over-harvesting a resource held in common (he may have property rights in the fish caught, but he has no such rights to the fish in the sea). That is why the scenario would have worked better had all the people been engaged in catching freshwater fish in an inland pond. Of course, once the selfish oik had caught all the freshwater fish, the rod-owners could, on the brink of starvation, have hit upon the smart idea of casting out to sea. And our selfish entrepreneur would have a longer period of self-denial while he worked out how to build a boat.
Oct '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
I can't get past the idea that if the man really wanted more fish, and that is what made him happy, he would say to the others on the island, "You can't have my fish and you can't have my net, but I'll tell you what. I need some time to sleep and rest and eat my fish. When I am not using my net, you can use my net, and whatever you catch, we will split 50/50."
He would end with many more fish, as would the other islanders. Everyone would be better off.
Under the scenario you describe, he is not so so much a self-interested profit maximizer; he is a sociopath. His utility gains come in the form of seeing other people suffer, not from getting more fish.
Edited on Feb 7, 2011 at 6:13amOct '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
And then someone might say, we need government to protect us from sociopaths. But we don't. We need competition to protect us. Under this scenario, ultimately someone would copy his idea and make him irrelevant.
Oct '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
Another thought...the other islanders are no worse off then they were before the net was made (assuming the fish are plentiful enough). So if they are starving to death now, they were starving to death before. I don't see how they have any moral right to the guy's fish.
Edited on Feb 7, 2011 at 6:40amOct '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
Ok, so let's say the net-maker gives up some of his fish, or a third party makes the net-maker give up some fish, then what? Now you are dependent on the net-maker or the third party. Forget the moral implications of not sharing the fish. Instead, what are the moral implications of dependence (serfdom)? What are the moral implications of people who want to be dependent? My instinct was that I would beat the net-maker at his game in any way I can. I don't want to be dependent on him and I don't want my kids to be dependent on him.
I don't think the West is suffering from epidemic starvation; it is suffering from an epidemic of obesity. The West is not suffering from too little government intervention; it is suffering from a populous too willing to make itself dependents.
What parent would want their kids to become dependents on government or a third person? Notwithstanding the mutual dependence of a marriage, I don't want my kids dependent on others. I want them to experience the freedom and self-respect that comes from self-reliance.
Feb '11
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
Bravo! Free competition cannot save us from economically irrational behavior. The island is economically dysfunctional: the net maker is unwilling to trade for clear economic advantage; the others are unwilling to make their own nets. The tragedy would be creating a moral code the supported either behavior.
If the island adopted the U.S. constitution, it would solve the problem through eminent domain. It appears that our "Platonic" idea of property does not consist of an inviolate right of exclusion. It is qualified by the need to use the property for a public purpose, in which case the owner must be compensated for its value. Facing starvation, it would be less wrong to steal the net and give him a share of the catch than it would be to just steal his fish.
Nov '10
Re: "Crusoe Ethics": Property Rights vs. Wealth Distribution
I think these hit on the most important distinction. Pretty much anyone short of a fundamentalist Randian agrees on the need for a safety net for otherwise good people who happen to fall on bad times; even Frederic Bastiat conceded as much. The issue is when welfare stops benefiting the starving and starts benefiting the merely hungry.