Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [116]
Hardin claims that a labor-mixing system of property rights that assumes a “commons” provided by nature will eventually lead to injustice. Locke had difficulty in realizing this, for in his day there seemed to be plenty of resources to go around. Back then there was plenty of land available in the so-called New World. He says, “[L]et him plant in some inland, vacant places of America, we shall find that the possessions he could make himself, upon the measures we have given, would not be very large, nor, even to this day, prejudice the rest of mankind, or give them reason to complain.”7 Yet these once “vacant places” weren’t truly vacant; they were simply occupied by natives whose system of property rights did not include the concept of individual ownership of land. This view opened them up to easy exploitation by settlers from the so-called Old World who did think of land as individual property.
But even if we did consider such “vacant places of America” to be “commons,” they are filling up fast—so fast that one country in the Americas has already recognized that unrestricted use of nature’s commons may lead to disaster. In September of 2008, Ecuador became the first nation on earth to spell out in its Constitution that nature itself has inalienable rights, including the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”8 Perhaps there is no “commons” provided for us by nature, after all. Later in Hardin’s paper he admits that “our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust—but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”9
So the labor-mixing theory seems to be the best we have because we have to have some way of making something ours. Locke points out that otherwise we couldn’t even survive because we couldn’t even eat without violating someone’s (or something’s) rights: “The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, . . . must be his, and so his, i.e., a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life.”10 So when Peter T. Hooper yanks an egg out from under the Moth-Watching Sneth in order to scramble up supper, though he might be violating nature’s rights, we allow him to do it in order that he (and we) may survive. But remember: after the very last Truffula Tree fell and the Once-ler’s business went belly-up he was forced to scrape a living telling stories on the Street of the Lifted Lorax for the measly sum of “15 cents and a nail and the shell of a great-great-great-grandfather snail” (Lorax). Thus, even a farsighted self-interest should tell us that we must be careful not to overexploit nature’s commons.
A bird who bites off any more than she chews is
Taking too much, ’cause it’s more than she uses.
So we are back to the labor-mixing theory. Mayzie, in fact, had to undergo labor—in something very close to the child-birthing sense—to lay the egg in the first place, and she also did some work of her own in incubating it at the beginning. Indeed, at the beginning of the story, before Horton appears on the scene, she is complaining that “It’s work!” (Hatches). No amount of labor that Horton adds can take away the labor Mayzie has already contributed. So how could the egg be his?
Locke noted one other limit to labor mixing. If someone takes more than he or she can use, that’s also too much. “It will perhaps be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, &c. makes a right to them, then any one may ingross as much as he will. To which I answer, Not so. . . . As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so