ABSTRACT
Justice assigns claim-rights to engage in certain kinds of activities with regard to spatio-temporally defined objects. These rights are original or innate as opposed to those acquired through action or by a convention or agreement with others. They are not the result of contractarian procedures of construction or bargaining, nor are they created by political or social institutions. We have them purely in virtue of our humanity; they are facts about how it is ethical to treat us grounded in the kind of beings we are. This chapter will now argue more specifically that the particular activities we have rights against interference in are those non-interfering activities that we in fact initiate. I believe that this right is co-extensional, in spirit at least, with the Grotian natural right to use extra-personal resources, the Lockean notion of original self-ownership, and the Kantian innate right to freedom. It involves rights beyond the physiological limits of our bodies and gives us a right to whatever specific external resources prove to be necessary for our survival. In this chapter, I will show how it forms the ground of an account of the original acquisition of property.
