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No matter one's views around lockdowns, surely we can all agree that a world in which states are more comfortable to exercise their coercive power to impose house arrest on whole populations, than to exercise this same power over IP rights, is one with deeply skewed priorities. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1387435408196317190
THREAD:
What is so extraordinary about this is that our treatment of these IP rights lacks any foundation in modern property theory. Not just Marx, for whom property must be allocated on the basis of need, but everyone of significance recognised a minimal right of necessity. /1
What is so extraordinary about this is that our treatment of these IP rights lacks any foundation in modern property theory. Not just Marx, for whom property must be allocated on the basis of need, but everyone of significance recognised a minimal right of necessity. /1
Let us start with Locke: the founder of everything from liberalism to libertarianism, who in his Two Treatises is explicit that useful property exists above all for the sake of preserving human life: first mine, then my family's, then everyone else's. /2
For Kant, only by uniting our wills in the state, and from there allocating property so as to avoid individuals becoming dependent on the powerful, can we have dignity and freedom. To watch nations like India or my own approach others palms raised, illustrates his insight. /3
And Bentham, the greatest defender of securing property from interference by others or the state, who in his design of laws privileged security over subsistence, abundance and equality, admitted that when altering rights is the only way to avoid death, this must be done. /4
Even Hegel, who came close to saying that he knew it all, admitted that he did not have the answer for society's tendency to produce absolute poverty, so granted that there exists a 'right of necessity' in 'extreme danger', lest individuals suffer 'infinite injury'. /5
Best of all, Hayek, neoliberalism's big daddy, who thought state interference leads to gulags, said that the state has a duty to provide basic necessities – like medicine – to those left without. When markets do not work, he said, they must be 'swept away'. /6
Maybe Nozick has a theory to justify our global attitude to these IP rights? But he doesn't. His 'principle of justice in acquisition' may bar expropriation, but as he famously admitted, he offers no 'theory of the moral basis of individual rights'. I think we can guess why. /7
Finally, Walzer, who is the best and only original property theorist since Marx, explicitly said that whatever our community conceives of as 'need' must, as a matter of logic, be provided by the community to its members. Surely vaccines meet this standard. /8
In 'the West', our actual property systems are an amalgam of these theorists. Or so I thought. But the silence around vaccine IP rights suggests that we have drifted into a territory where rights are not grounded in any theory - good or bad - but purely in money and power. /End
Hi @TimFish42, on vaccines, this thread is not especially practical, but there are worse sins.
