Forthcoming philosophy talk on the magic of ‘my’

At the end of this month I’ll be giving a short talk at our departmental seminar, the Edinburgh Ethics Fest. My talk will be about comparing ownership with stewardship, and I hope to show that stewardship can be a better way of linking people with objects. It’s been a fun talk to work on, since it represents some of the territory I plan to cover in my PhD next year. On the other hand, it has been hard to whittle my material down to something I can present in 20 minutes! But I’m looking forward to sharing it and getting some feedback. In case you are interested, here is the abstract:

What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’?
I propose a new normative analysis of the pronoun ‘my’. We currently think of ‘my’ as marking an ownership claim to an external object or resource. Designed to solve contingent sources of conflict, the idea of ownership and property rights remains resolutely problematic: no argument for basic property rights stands up to close scrutiny. I suggest that this is because many have mistakenly accorded property rights a fundamental status, when they are in fact merely instrumental or derivative rights.

 

Given the difficulties presented by the concept of ownership and property rights, how do we go about recognising the special normative relationship we can come to have with certain external objects? I propose replacing an absolutist concept of ownership with the more flexible and appropriate concept of stewardship. I shall show how a well-developed concept of stewardship can do all the normative work we have tried (and failed) to do with ownership, and that the concept of stewardship offers promising ways of meeting concerns about global distributive justice and environmental ethics.

[I got the idea for the title from William Godwin, who was famously sceptical about the ‘my’ pronoun where it marked the value of close interpersonal relationships. My project is less controversial: I’m only talking about property rights.]