Mark Shiffman, The Human Meaning of Property

His reference to Simone Weil was surprising; I don't know what to make of her, since I don't know much about her, but in the past the wrong sort of philosophical crowd has associated themselves with her, so I didn't consider looking into her work. But it's time for a re-assessment. He cites her “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations” -- an honest 'pagan' trying to express our obligations to the divine? How familiar was she with Christian philosophy? Did she ever meet Edith Stein? (I don't think she did. What might have happened if she had?) Schiffman writes:

Weil is clear that rights are a product of legal recognition, not its foundation. (See her extraordinary essay “Human Personality,” available in Two Moral Essays from Pendle Hill.) But the shaping of these rights ought to be guided by the natural needs of the soul. She recognizes the psychological fact on which Locke bases his rhetorical argument for natural rights: we feel violated if others do not respect the claim that we feel results from our investment of our labor and love in things. But she does not attempt to parley it into a theory of rights-claims.

On the contrary, Weil is attempting to recapture an older intuition at the heart of the language of rights as it developed in the middle ages, an intuition that we often speak of in terms of “respect for human dignity,” but that she more adequately analyzes in terms of respecting the human aspiration for the good. The notion of rights ought to be, and implicitly always is, founded on the recognition of the obligation to such respect. (See the other extraordinary essay in the same pair, “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations.”) Our labor, love and sense of ownership ultimately revolve around and embody our efforts to attain the good in our lives, and our social institutions should be shaped so as to respect that central aspect of our souls and its outward means. Agrarian family ownership is the complete model for these efforts, because it embodies the fullest integration of the varied goods that nourish a human life. (See Wendell Berry’s lovely novel Hannah Coulter.)

He contrast Weil's understanding of the right of property with that of Richard Weaver:

Weaver’s statement differs in two crucial respects from Weil’s. He does speak of a “metaphysical right” of property, and he sees the moral significance of responsibility for property in terms of cultivating the human person rather than in terms of psychic and social need. These two features are both grounded in what one might call Weaver’s Aristotelian vision of the human person as a being whose nature finds fulfillment in the attainment and exercise of virtues. The responsibility for property that is intimately connected to our life as a person (and this is the meaning of proprietas: what is one’s own and characteristic of oneself) calls upon virtues that render us more complete human beings. Foremost among these virtues is practical judgment, informed by long-term views of our life as a whole and our relationship to our community. Thus only property that satisfies this criterion falls under “metaphysical right,” i.e. must be recognized as rightly belonging to our very being and its fulfillment as what it most truly is. This recognition rests on grounds independent of law, and needs to be appropriately embodied in law.

Mr. Shiffman seems to be putting the foundation of the right to property in a form of personalism which emphasizes the respect for the dignity of the human being. Is that respect first an act of charity? Or an act of justice? Protecting the right to property is necessary for human beings to develop virtue.

In so far as he contrasts this account of rights with that offered by liberal political and economic theories, it serves as a critique of those theories. It may seem to some that there are some affinities with a Marxist theory of labor and value, but this is probably more with regards to what is to be done in the real world than with the premises. And even then, the conclusions may be starkly different [promoting an economic order in which the just price is respected vs. some sort of inevitable revolution and overthrowing of an existing order].

I would add that our sovereignty over things and what we produce is ordered towards God and the common good, and any right to property is subordinate to the obligations we have to God, our communities, and one another. Is the right to property both a limit on [positive] law and a limit imposed by [natural] law, and derived from the naturally just? It would seems so, but I will have to work out a fuller explanation.




More on Simone Weil:
wiki
Welcome to the Simone Weil home page
A bilingual Simone Weil Reader
An Interview with Simone Weil
HERMENAUT: Simone Weil: 1909-1943
Simone Weil on Plato's Allegory of the Cave - 1 of 2
Encounter - 7/05/00: Simone Weil
Simone Weil , philosopher, teacher. woman of controversey
The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil

Google Books: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind
(the title itself is interesting)
Lectures on Philosophy

Books about her--Simone Weil: "the just balance"
Simone Weil: the way of justice as compassion
Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention
Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-exiled Jew
Simone Weil: an introduction to her thought


Teresa Benedict of the Cross Edith Stein (1891-1942) - biography
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein
EDITH STEIN - Life - Discalced Carmelite Order
ocarm - Teresa Benedict of the Cross
Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Edith Stein
ICS Publications
Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein // Hesburgh