Freethought and Freedom: Private Property and Natural Law

As we have seen in my last several essays, private property was the third part of this trinity. If not for original sin, only common property would have been consistent with natural law, but with the Fall came the corruption of human nature with evil tendencies (primarily avarice, or greed), so God mandated private property to deal with this new condition. Private property, by distinguishing mine from thine, established boundaries, specified and enforced by government, designed to keep avarice in check and to punish violators. This is essentially what Augustine meant in saying that private property was decreed by God as a remedy and punishment for sin. As A.J. Carlyle explained in “The Theory of Property in Medieval Theology” (an article in Property: Its Duties and Rights, 1913), the Christian position led to the conclusion that private property is conventional, that it exists only in virtue of governmental laws and decisions:

The natural-​law theory of private property, as defended by John Locke and many other classical liberals, took many centuries to emerge. Some changes began to appear in the later Middle Ages. The intense interest in Roman Law—the so-​called “reception” that began to take off in the eleventh century—and the largely spontaneous development of Feudal Law played important roles, as did the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, beginning in the mid-​twelfth century. Some church authorities reacted negatively to any effort to Christianize Aristotle, given how his naturalistic viewpoint conflicted with Christian beliefs. Among the dangers were Aristotle’s teachings that the universe has existed eternally, his denial of the personal immortality of the soul, and his implicit rejection of miracles, which followed from the Aristotelian doctrine that natural causation is everywhere operative.

Nevertheless, these obstacles were eventually overcome, thanks primarily to Thomas Aquinas and his grand synthesis, the Summa Theologica, which adroitly combined Christianity and the general perspective of “the Philosopher.” This was a significant innovation for the time, but as the Christian version of Aristotle became a pillar of orthodoxy it retarded some aspects of scientific progress. (This negative influence should not be exaggerated. The primary problem with Aristotle was in the field of physics; in biology and botany his influence was largely beneficial.)

There was nothing resembling original sin in the writings of Aristotle, and his conception of the “natural” differed from the traditional Christian conception. The “natural,” for Aristotle, did not signify an original, or primitive, condition, as we find in the theory of a Golden Age defended by Stoics and Christians; rather the “natural” signified the goal-​directed development of an entity or social state into a more perfect, fully developed condition, as when an acorn grows into an oak tree. As Walter Ullmann noted in Medieval Political Thought (1975), this was a dramatic shift from the traditional Christian view:

The upshot of Aristotle’s social doctrines was that the state, private property, and slavery were natural institutions that developed over time to serve the rational purposes of human beings. In adopting similar positions about those institutions, Aquinas typically cited Aristotle (especially the Politics) as his source. Consider Aquinas’s defense of slavery in his Summa Theologica: “Slavery among men is natural, for some men are naturally slaves, as the Philosopher proves at Politics I.” And again:

Likewise, when reviewing the nature and justification of the state (conceived in this context as an organized political community governed by laws, not merely as a ruling body, or “government” in the narrow sense), Aquinas again embraced the perspective of Aristotle, in part if not in total. The state is not a deviation from the original natural law, as earlier theologians had claimed. Although Aquinas agreed with the traditional view that a coercive government would have been unnecessary in man’s innocent, prelapsarian condition, he nevertheless maintained that the state is “natural” in the sense that it is based on human nature, is justified by human reason, and is essential for men to achieve their full potential as human beings.

Lastly, as we would expect, private property was justified by Aquinas along the same lines, with Aristotle again cited as his chief authority. Consider Aquinas’s reply to the argument that Christians should reject private property as contrary to natural law because common property was the original condition of mankind before Adam’s Fall into sin:

Although we are still a long way from Locke’s argument that private property is a natural right originally based on labor, Aquinas moved closer to the modern liberal view that private property advances a positive social good and is not merely a remedial and punitive institution mandated by God for sinful human beings. The essential role played by private property in maintaining peaceful social cooperation is a discovery of human reason, so private property is “natural” in that sense. Reason has supplemented the original natural law, not contradicted it.

Before concluding this essay, I wish to make an important observation about the status of private property in emergency situations, as when a man would starve if he did not steal food from another person. From the early Church Fathers through the Middle Ages and well into the modern era, it was argued that a man in dire need has a right to the property of those people who possess more property than they reasonably need. It must be understood that this was seen as a positive, enforceable right, not merely as a moral mandate for voluntary charity. Strictly speaking, if a starving man absconds with food that belongs to a wealthy man, he is not “stealing” at all; he is simply taking that which belongs to him by right.

Although this right found in emergency scenarios was justified in various ways, it was closely linked to the premise that God originally gave the earth and its resources to mankind in common for the benefit of all. Christian theologians, early and late, unanimously argued that a surplus of private property (i.e., more property than is needed to satisfy one’s basic needs) is justifiable only if such property is used for the common good. As Aquinas put it, “man ought to hold external things not as his own, but as common: that is, in such a way that he is ready to share them with others in the event of need.” Human need trumps private property rights in emergency situations; so, as Aquinas explained, for a starving man to take food from a rich man, even without the permission of the latter, does not qualify as an unjust act at all.

This doctrine survived even in the writings of leading Protestant natural-​law philosophers during the seventeenth century, whose overall approach tended to be more secular than that of their Catholic counterparts. For example, when Hugo Grotius defended this emergency right, he added that when necessity compels me to take the property of another person, “I certainly ought to make that Man Restitution as soon as I am able to do it.” This position on restitution was later criticized by Samuel Pufendorf, who correctly pointed out that one cannot legitimately demand restitution from a person in need if that person is merely exercising his natural right to appropriate and use the property of others. Where no injustice had been committed, no restitution is required.

Oddly perhaps, the same emergency right was defended by John Locke in his First Treatise of Government: “Charity gives every man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as well keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.” In using the word “Title,” Locke made it clear that he was speaking not merely of a moral obligation to be charitable but of a positive right enforceable by government. Although early defenders of this right almost always applied it narrowly to life-​or-​death situations, later defenders of the welfare state easily adapted the same premise to justify their schemes for the extensive redistribution of private property by governments.