Doctrine of Discovery Renounced
The concept of property even for indigenous peoples is legally and morally dubious
Proudhon deplored property as “theft.”
Rousseau wrote in On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
It was altogether fitting and laudable for the Vatican last March to have renounced the papal “Doctrine of Discovery” unsheathed by European powers to kill, plunder, and take the lands of indigenous peoples. The Doctrine of Discovery blessed sheer thievery notwithstanding the Eight Commandment, “You shall not steal.”
But the theft requires us to ask what entitled indigenous peoples to the lands they occupied? Neither the heavens nor horoscopes nor putative supreme beings are empowered to confer property rights. Only sovereign powers with limited authority to protect and promote justice possess any moral claim to recognize and enforce property rights and only for those who exhibit an exacting threshold of virtue, wisdom, and benevolence. One searches in vain to discover such a sovereignty.
Property rights, however, are not grounded in moral law, but in prudence. The alternative of not recognizing such rights is a cure vastly worse than the disease. It inflicts more injustice than it alleviates. It is preferable that some be unjustly enriched than that everyone starve to death from idleness and a war of all against all.