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Dee, following Nozick, has claimed that people can have very strong, nearly absolute, rights to property in the state of nature and that those rights continue to exist in societies with governments.

That claim has to be seriously qualified in a way that should have been included previously in our discussion. The property rights of owners have to be limited because the actions of owners have to be limited. And the actions of owners have to be limited because of the consequences that they have for others.

At the very least we have to say that the actions of owners are limited by the fact that they cannot violate the rights of others. If I use my property in such a way that it pollutes the air or the water, have I violated the rights of others? I think most of us would agree that I have.

This means at the very least that property rights cannot be understood without a complete scheme of rights. They cannot be separated and talked about in such absolute terms. We need a full theory of rights in order to see how other rights limit what anyone can do with their property.

This may end up imposing some very strict limits on what people can do with their property.

And this is true if we stay entirely within a rights analysis of property. If we broaden our analysis and begin to consider the consequences in general of using property in various ways, we may have to agree to even more stringent limitations on property rights.