Three Arguments for Thinking Hard About Property Rights In Space

An after-dinner talk I gave at the Canterbury Institute

You’re on the boat and things have gone badly wrong. I can’t remember how exactly, but you know well enough. It’s a decent boat; it got you that far. But now you’ve been stuck for over a week. Something to do with the rudder; something to do with the sails. Let’s add in some treacherous rocks. Nothing you couldn’t fix — between the group of you — if only you had some of the right resources. But you don’t.

What’s more, you’ve come to accept that the perfect island — over there in the distance — is of no use. Sure, it’s full of trees for a rudder, and those big old expanses of greenery that could be fashioned into excellent sails, and just look at those apples! So many different kinds of fruit! And nuts. Even some chickens, or at least some kind of chicken-like bird you’d be really wanting to eat if you weren’t a vegetarian. And, to be honest, even though you are. You can also see — when it’s your turn to look through the binoculars — what you’re sure is the mouth of an inland stream or lake. Beautiful, safe, drinking and swimming water! And no people.

At first, this last fact destroys you. The lot of you, on board the ship, had set up watch, passing the binoculars round, waiting — waiting and waiting — to see someone. Someone who’d come to get you, who’d be there to help you, to tell the world you still exist and where! Nobody. Nobody at all. At least, you’d finally acknowledged, this means you wouldn’t have to worry about being attacked by anyone on the island, if you ever were to get there. You wouldn’t have to worry about protecting yourself from hostile parties. And at least, you reason, there’d be nobody to compete with for the island’s resources. Those apples. Those nuts. Those chickens!

None of it’s any good, though. Because of the sharks. There are so many sharks between the boat and the island that, if the laws of gravity were different, and you weren’t so scared of their shiny teeth, you could almost use them as a bridge. Step on a shark, step on a shark, step on another hundred sharks, and you’re there: the island! But you’re not. You’re on the boat, with all these people you don’t even really know, and, whilst the weather is great, and somehow the boat’s not leaking, the supplies aren’t going to last forever. Another few weeks, maybe just over a month, if there aren’t any more riots, and the night-time food thief is finally caught.

You’ve taken to waking early. Before anyone else — not that time holds much sway on the boat, anymore. And, one morning, you find an unexpected payoff for your early rising! You spy a box — a biggish box — floating in the water. The sharks practically help you tow it in; they make it easy, so easy. And this is pretty apt, you soon discover, because the contents of the box is something you’ve been wanting above pretty much all else: a shark suit! Standard order, single use, no added buoyancy or wings, but total protection from the sharks. No bites, nothing. You know the game; I don’t have to explain a shark suit to you! So, there you go. You’re on the deck, first thing, sun coming up, and you’re in receipt of this astonishing thing.

But quickly, before you can even think of using it — of using it to get to the island, all by yourself, and eating those fruits! Those nuts! Those chickens! Of sleeping in peace, and swimming in the inland lake! Before you can even think about those things, never mind before you can pull the shark suit on — they have to be tight, you know, to ensure full protection — before any of that, your fellow passengers have begun to awake, begun to wander, begun to surround you, all eyes on the suit.

And then the deliberation begins. Of course, the group of passengers on the boat is neatly diverse, in many ways. Different ages, backgrounds, skills; different levels of merit of various kinds, different levels of desert of various kinds, of need, capability. Basically, all those things are covered that would need to be covered, if you were a philosopher trying to think of a set of people who’d meet the basic requirements for a set of people featuring in a thought experiment focused on determining matters of economic justice. You’re all there! Including you — and you’re distinct in an extra way, of course, because you’re the one who found the box. Not that that took too much skill or effort — thanks, sharks! But it’s something you might think the others shouldn’t forget, nonetheless.

We’ll skip over the next few days, because you remember them all too well. Those long hours of complex deliberation! The theories, the competing theories. The premises, the arguments, the objections, the responses. What a nightmare. What a joy! You covered the basics, of course, accepting early on that the person who wore the shark suit would, minimally, have to be able to swim to the island, and want to swim to the island. And that ruled out quite a few of your fellow passengers. Some of them literally couldn’t swim — imagine it: what a societal failing! Then, some of them just didn’t have the courage, or the physical strength — or the other necessary capabilities — to be able to use the island’s resources in the ways you needed them to. The chosen person, after all, not only had to be trusted to act in the interests of the group, by spending their time on the island building tools, a new rudder, a new sail, and so on: hard work, but not impossible, for many of you on the boat, however much each of you just happened to lack in directly relevant experience. But yes, the chosen one would not only need to be trusted to do all that, rather than simply basking peacefully in the sun, and eating the delicious apples and the even more delicious chickens. They’d also have to be able to complete these necessary jobs, sufficiently well, and then fashion a way back to the ship, in the limited time available before the supplies ran out.

There were many other considerations you discussed, too. Remember that precocious young girl who kept telling everyone about the need to treat the island’s resources with respect — to conserve the resources, to value them for their own sake, even though there was nobody else there to use or abuse them? And there was that funny guy (I think he was from Oxford) with his complex calculations directed at determining the particular allocation of the island’s future resources that the chosen one — the swimmer — should be entitled to, if the whole lot of you ended up living on the island, having given up on the possibility of leaving the area entirely, but having managed to switch your environs from the boat to the island. “Of course, we’d be grateful to the swimmer!” the guy extolled, “But the swimmer would also have had the first pick of the apples!” he reminded you. “Sure, the swimmer might have left a couple of chickens to breed for the future, but the swimmer also probably ate the rest of them, including that nice big fat one!”

Time passed. Too much time, considering your dwindling supplies. But finally, an answer was reached. Finally, you all knew who the swimmer would be. There were several good answers, you thought, to various parts of the problem. After all, don’t forget that — as well as picking someone — you had to determine, as a group, your mode of deliberation, your threshold for agreement, your expectations for the swimmer, your expectations for the rest of you. The risks, the wider costs, the possibility of an enforcement mechanism (yes, there were some lawyers there). You came up with many valuable ideas — individually, and as a group. You should all be commended! Then, finally, you settled. And, of course, it was you: you were picked to be the swimmer. You like to think that the relative randomness of having been the one who found the box played a minimal part in this. Sure, you were up at a time when everyone else was lazing in bed. Sure, you spotted the box. Sure, you brought it in — with the help of the sharks. But, really, you like to think, there was much more than that, which lay in your favour.

You enjoyed the swim. The sharks showed you no ill will; if anything, they seemed to perceive you as one of them: a fellow shark, gliding through the water, enjoying the sun on your shark-suit fins. Your escape was ahead of you, the apples and chickens ahead of you, the fresh water to swim in and to drink, the beautiful beach to run on, peace and quiet from the frustrations and arguments of your shipmates, the chance to sleep without fear of your rations being stolen. The chance to be a hero! And then it happened. You were getting close. Your neat swimming-club front crawl had made for a swift journey, but the island had remained a bit of a blur — a constant, directed, blur — because your focus had been on progress, and your eyes had suffered from the salt of the sea. Finally, you slowed down, and switched to a leisurely breast-stroke for the last 25 meters, blinking the water away, seeking to look more clearly at the paradise awaiting.

And that was when you saw them. Or, at least, that was when you saw what you would soon realise was them. The people. The tiny, tiny people. The tiny people who covered the sand of the beach ahead of you: hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions, of tiny, tiny people. That’s right. This perfect island — the uninhabited island of your dreams — was Lilliput. And it had clearly experienced something of a baby boom since Gulliver had left. Straight away, you knew the game was up. There was no possible way you could even step foot on the island, never mind set about building things from its trees! A single step on the island would mean death for many of these tiny people, crushed under your relatively-elephantine feet. In fact, you soon began to realise that you were already killing the people of Lilliput. The gills on your shark suit were open to the sea water: sea water that you quickly realised was being used for pleasurable purposes by tiny people, all around you. Tiny people on water skis, tiny people on tiny boats, tiny people relaxing in the sunny waves, tiny people being sucked into the shark-suit’s gills.

I’m sorry to remind you of all this, because I know how hard it was for you: accepting what you’d done; accepting that you’d have to make your way back to the boat in defeat. And I won’t talk about what happened next, and how you came to be here today, because I know you’re not proud of that either. Instead, I want you to imagine an island that is not Lilliput. A place where — unlike every piece of land on our Earth — there is nobody with any real prior claim, moral or legal, strong or weak. A place where no human being has ever lived, or mapped, or built, or subsisted. In that context, I want to make three very brief arguments, in favour of recognising the urgent need to think hard about property rights in space.

First, I want to make a philosophical argument, focused on the intellectual and moral value of this one-off opportunity. Your deliberation on the boat, after all, was a valuable deliberation, even though it turned out to have little practical use, in the end. Of course, that deliberation didn’t cover the whole matter of property as a moral domain. But a key problem within the many problems of property is the ‘first-come-first-served’ problem: when and why the person who first reaches an important unowned asset should gain lasting exclusive and exclusionary advantages in relation to that asset, over and above the advantage of first access.

There are plenty of strong empirical arguments showing that the existence of clear and secure property-rights regimes benefit people even external to those regimes. Broadly, this helps to underpin the orthodox idea that most, perhaps all, people alive today benefit, individually and on aggregate, from the existence of private property, even those who own little themselves, or live in societies that are not capitalist. But those empirical approaches cannot begin to answer deep-down moral questions about what exactly a justified property claim consists in, and particularly, about the conditions that are required for justified initial, and therefore also fully justified consequent acquisition. Idealised thinking about these matters is often dismissed as irrelevant or impossible — because determining the moral status of the ownership of any external thing or place on the Earth must surely take into account impossibly complex chains of prior ownership: chains with lost links, with bad links. Many people, unlike you, did not turn away from Lilliput. Whether it’s a canyon inhabited by wolves, or the toy train you made from a tree on an empty allotment, there are relevant prior claims to consider, even if you don’t know about them, even if you can’t know about them.

Space frees us from that particular problem. To this end, it represents a real-world thought experiment, for isolating important questions about justified initial acquisition and the justness of consequent holdings. Even if we were to justifiedly decide that it would be wrong to set in place property-rights regimes in space, there would nonetheless be vast value of many kinds in having come to that conclusion from the ground up. Not least in terms of helping us to adjudicate better the problems of property on Earth. In other words, if we can think about the problem on the boat, outside of the constraints of Lilliput, then we can begin to get further on this.

Second, I want to make a pragmatic argument, acknowledging the astonishing technological advancements of our time, including those advancements that will soon make space travel much cheaper, safer, and more frequent. Weigh this against the fact that once people make claims to things, justified or not, those claims gain relevance. This is undeniable, even if it’s wrong. In this context, the billionaires and autocrats with their first-mover advantages are not going to be stopped from making property claims in space just because international law currently forbids it, or because humankind as a whole has relevant moral reservations. They’ll go up there, they’ll get there first, and they’ll make their claims. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that therefore we should be effectively forced into determining that some of these kinds of claims are justifiable. Rather, it’s to argue that we need to get there first. Not physically! But in terms of addressing the truths of the matter, in terms of working out what a justified approach would be, if there is such a thing. This must be done before these claims begin to be made, or we’ll land back where we currently are. Or near enough, anyway. I can’t overstate enough that there is such a small window of opportunity — such a short time in which we, as humankind, can think about how these things should work, before claims are made, norms are changed, and the hard work of setting justified rules becomes even more complicated.

Finally, I want to make a positive argument. A few moments ago, I implied that, perhaps, it might not be possible to create and instantiate a justified property-rights regime in space. But, if I’m being honest, that was just for the sake of my argument. Rather, if we can set aside the Lilliput problem, then I believe we should accept the intuitive, yet increasingly controversial, idea that owning things — non-living, external, natural, things — is neither inherently bad nor wrong. After all, ownership relations can bring about many good things, not only for owners but also for the objects of ownership, and for other people and living things. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the space-junk problem — the issue of the increasing amounts of detritus from satellites and other objects that humans have sent into space, which are hazardously cluttering up near-Earth orbit — this problem seems unlikely to be solved without the introduction of some kind of ownership regime. Now, this isn’t to suggest that good effects can make bad things good: plenty of bad things have good effects, and that isn’t sufficient to justify them, on my account anyway. But there is so much possible good to be considered, here: not only in terms of tidying up our current space activities, but also in terms of opportunities for new scientific discovery, for democratised space exploration, and for the accumulation of vast financial wealth that could be directed at many worthwhile causes.

The people who deny these opportunities out right, because, for instance, they understandably look to the damage caused by the imposition of property-rights regimes on Earth, are, I fear, choosing to remain stuck on the boat, silent and alone, denying the opportunity of valuable deliberation, rather than even considering the possibility of the island ahead. Property rights regimes do not have to play out the way they often currently play out on Earth; they do not have to be imposed, from on high, on the weak, for exploitative ends. And whether we like it or not, property is an inherent part of human life: it enables us to meet our needs, and to expand our horizons. It is impossible, I firmly believe, even to justifiably eat an apple — to consume it and destroy it, in an exclusive way that excludes everyone else — without owning it in some basic, moral sense. Ownership is a necessary fact of human life. We must accept this, and commit to going about it in a morally justified manner.

I conclude, therefore, that space offers us a once-in-modern-humankind opportunity to consider the truths of acquisition without the risks of stepping on the people of Lilliput.* And to begin, for once, to derive multitudinous value from the natural resources around us in a fully justified manner. We need to think about this hard, and now, because: 1) it’s interesting and important; because 2) if we don’t, bad actors will steamroller ahead regardless; and because 3) we and other will miss out if we don’t.

*In the case that aliens exist, please ignore everything I’ve just said.