Related Ideas

There are many questions related to property in addition to those that John has listed.

Many 20th-century writers think of property as a collection or bundle of rights rather than a single right. For example, the list might include the right to use an item in various ways, but not in others. It may include the right to manage, to earn income from, to sell, to bequeath, to give away, to destroy, to waste, to modify, to consume, to exclude others from use, and more. Intellectual property might include the right to monopolize, to patent, to duplicate, to incorporate as part of a new product, to use in publicity, to display, to perform, to keep secret, as well as other rights. Many of these rights might be had only for a specific period of time (such as patents on drugs or copyright on books). In some of the classic sources, such as Locke's essays on government, few of these rights are distinguished.

Most of these rights can be, and sometimes are, separated from the others. This is true within the United States and perhaps even more true if we look at property systems around the world. For example, in the 1930s a Maya peasant in the Mexican Yucatan often had the right to plant and harvest corn on a specific piece of land. On the other hand, he did not have the right to sell the land and pocket the money. Nor could he rent the land to a visitor from the city.

We can ask whether rights are absolute in some sense (for example, whether they always apply or only under certain conditions), whether they can be overridden (and when), and whether they must be weighed against other moral concerns that arise in complex situations. Perhaps most important of all, we can ask how such rights are justified and limited.

The task of sorting out the nature of property is therefore a complicated one.

Reference: For an introduction to property and many of the issues involved, See Lawrence C. Becker's book On Property.