Locke, Hegel, Kant, Nozick and others see property rights as founded in the natural world. As Hegel claims, property is a right that is dictates by the nature of things and can first be justified because we have ownership over our bodies. It is obvious, after all, that people need to use property and the things in nature to survive at all. That said, even if it is established that people have a right to use property, does that further imply that people have a right to own property and exclude others from this ownership? In general, for property rights to exist at all, there must be, at some point, an embodiment of a person in external things through an action done with an intention to claim property rights that are recognized by others. The question then follows, what are those procedures that others will and should recognize as legitimate? In our society, individuals can acquire property through labor, investment, inheritance, and welfare. Are these procedures merely convention, or do they reflect a deeper sense of legitimacy? What is, after all, a legitimate acquisition of ownership?

At the most basic level, in the state of nature, an individual can come to own property by being the first one there. According to Rousseau, this is called the “right of first claimant.” His argument, though, is more of a statement of fact about the way property came about than a theory about the right of first claimant as a legitimate procedure.

One such theory of legitimate procedure is the labor theory. The crux of the labor theory, first argued by Locke. Is that individuals have a right to own that with which they mix their labor, or in other words, that which they create by their own initiative, capability, and work: “The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his.” (1) Locke justifies this claim by conceding that an individual’s right to own the fruits of his labor are derived from prior property rights of his own body, and that the rights are required as just return for his efforts.

This argument does seem to outline the most intuitive and obvious reason for asserting the rightful ownership of property. It seems that if an individual would labor for an object and it would cost him a lot of effort, he should have the right to own it. This argument, then seems to imply that the higher the cost of an object or the more labor an individual mixes with it, the more of a right the individual has to won it. That is to say, if Person A builds a chair from a log he found in the woods, and Person B comes along and scrapes a bit of wood off of the side, Person A still has more of an entitlement to the chair than Person B because he has invested more labor in the chair. However, Locke does not intend to address how one individual can have more of a right to a piece of property than another. He instead tried to build an argument of how an individual can claim property rights to something that is held in the common store. Therefore, he does not attempt to answer how one person might have more of a right of appropriation than another based on the labor theory.

Becker points out, and it should be noted, that labor is distinguished from mere intent, declaration, occupation, or accidental improvement. It should also be noted that this theory implies that the individual’s intention – exclusive or inclusive – in mixing his labor with an object is to gain property rights to it. After all, a graffiti artist might mix his labor with a wall by drawing on it, but he does not have the intention of owning the wall. Therefore, because he is not seeking property right s to the wall, even so he has drawn on it and mixed his labor with it, he does not own it.

Some of Hegel’s arguments are also similar to Locke’s labor theory. Hegel sees that all things are subject to private use and consumption: “in relations to external things, the rational aspect is that I possess property.” (2) Hegel argues that when an individual forms something (or when he mixes his labor with it), it is a manifestation of his will: “A person has as his substantive end the right of putting his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in itself and derives its destiny and soul from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which man has over all things.” (3) Hegel argues that because our will determines our projects, aims, and goals, and property helps us to actualize these goals, we have a right to won property.

This argument, though, does not necessarily prove how humans have a right to own things, or even more so, that they have an ABSOLUTE right of appropriation. It only shows that unowned objects differ from humans in that they do not have a will or a personality. Therefore, Hegel has not shown how a person has a right to won an object, but instead has merely shown that a person has a right to USE an object by mixing his labor with it. Becker, too, argues that the labor theory ultimately fails to prove how it is that property rights to one’s body can transfer or extend to the products of one’s labor. He argues that the claim “we own our bodies, and therefore we own our labor” is warranted, but that ownership of one’s labor does not necessarily mean the ownership of the products of one’s labor.

The critical counter argument, however, is given by Nozick who points out “why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I own rather than gaining what I don’t? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules mingle evenly throughout the sea, so I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?” (4) Nozick argues that an individual does not come to own something merely by exerting any amount of labor on it.

Locke, however, did not only argue that an individual must merely mix his labor with something to gain property rights to it, but that an individual must also add value to the object in order to legitimately own it. In other words, the difference labor makes is in value. The argument follows that if an individual owns a piece of land and tills it and harvests crops on the land because of his expertise, intelligence and capabilities, he comes to own that land not only because he has mixed his labor with it, but also because he has improved the value of it.

This argument, however, seems only to imply that we have a right to the value that we have added, but not to the object itself. As Nozick argues, “Why shouldn’t entitlement extend to the whole object rather than just to the added value one’s labor has produced?” (5) To put more tangibly, if an individual tills an acre of land and produces a crop, he might have a right to the crops he harvests, but not to the land itself.

Furthermore, how can it be determined what are the more valuable and less valuable fruits of one’s labor? It cannot be argued that what one individual might consider a valuable pursuit, another could regard as meaningless. For example, Person A might wish to paint the grass on the land blue because he likes the color. Person A might consider that Person B’s labor on the land is meaningless, and in fact, he has not added any value to the land whatsoever. Person A might even consider that Person B has in fact devalued the land!! Person B, on the other had, might regard his efforts as fruitful and would consider himself the rightful owner of the land. Here, an important problem arises. If property ownership is to be a relevant idea, individuals most recognize each other’s property rights. This implies that there must be some consensus between the individuals involved on what is valuable and what is not valuable. Clearly, there is not always that consensus. After all, can the value added to the object ever measured qualitatively?

Locke seeks to answer a question that is not applicable in the modern world where there is no unowned land, territory and materials. Locke aimed to build an account of a just society from a state of nature in which all things are held in common. In today's world, there is not much, if anything at all, which is unclaimed and that we must distinguish as individual property instead of common property. Nozick, unlike Locke, does not seek to answer how to divide up the common store. He instead attempts to answer what it is that entitles one person to exclude others from what essentially belongs to none of them. Locke includes a proviso in his labor and added-value theory that maintains that there must be “enough, and as good left in common for others” (6) and that an individual should not take any more than he can use. Nozick contends, though, that Locke’s proviso is too strong and that it no longer holds true today because the world’s goods are scarce and in demand. (7)

Nozick argues that “the crucial point is whether appropriation of an … object worsens the situation of others.” (8) He argues that one has a right to appropriation of property as long as one does not reduce the condition of another to one worse than the state of nature. But, it is true that if an individual’s options are limited because he is not able to use other people’s owned objects, then his situation is worsened. After all, Nozick does define property ownership as an exclusive interest that is generally unlimited in duration. Nozick maintains that an important advantage of private property is that it is a more efficient way of cultivating land and sustaining human life in general, and therefore outweighs the subsequent disparity in property. He considers the preservation of private ownership as a more essential goal in a just state than the resultant, often vastly unequal, distribution of goods.

The welfare-state – the state that reallocated property and goods to those in need – sees redistribution of property as a just and legitimate procedure of property acquisition. The justification for the reallocation of goods incorporates the utilitarian argument that people need property to use, consume, and posses to achieve a reasonable degree of happiness. This argument tried to give a justification of why, for the benefit of all society, a system of redistribution is most desirable. Utilitarian argue that the principle of utility is the ultimate standard of what is right and wrong, justifiable and unjustifiable. The principle of utility holds that justifiable or right actions are those that maximize utility for all. Because people always have property needs and wants, and denying people these needs and wants without showing that this denial is for some countervailing good is unjustifiable (and might even lead to social disorder) because it does not maximize utility. Hume argues that goods are all necessary as means to happiness and “as the improvement, therefore, of these goods is the chief advantage of society, so the instability f their possession, along with their scarcity, is the chief impediment.” (9) Therefore, it would be in the best interest for society as a whole if people’s property needs and wants are met, so as to prevent social disorder. As utilitarians maintain that there can usually be no reason why one should not do what is best for society as a whole, they can also conclude that an individual’s property needs and wants should be met. This argument points to the need for social institutions to govern and manage the distribution of property. It is intended to justify a set of practices and principles for that social institution to define rights of ownership, as well as the specific conditions under which an individual may obtain those rights, and the properties which may be owned.

This argument is aggressively refuted by Nozick. Nozick claims that any transfer of property is legitimate if and only if it is voluntary. He argues that the state cannot justify taxing a citizen for the purposes of redistributing his wealth because it infringes on his natural property rights and that any state transfers of property (i.e. money, goods) are illegitimate. He maintains that to enforce a pattern – a pattern of taxation, for example – is to restrict liberty. Nozick considers taxation for these purposes to be forced labor, and he maintains that the tax money an individual is forced to give the state corresponds to unpaid work-time. Nozick’s implicit claim that “voluntariness suffices for justice” is the basis for his argument.

In conclusion, the theories that I have outlined here – the labor theory, the value-added theory, and the utilitarian theory – are all arguments on how to acquire property legitimately. Because resources have become scarce in the modern world, it is no longer relevant to justify initial acquisition of property from the common store; therefore, the labor theory and the added value theory are not quite as pertinent as they once might have been. As for the modern world, the argument is mainly fought between the libertarians and the utilitarians as to the most just way of handling property acquisition. Intuitively, it seems rather severe to proceed by any libertarian framework, and after all, our society is modeled as a welfare state.