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> I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. You're blindly assuming that in owning a thing now, you must naturally own it forever; that you can live forever in an eternal "now," like a child or an animal. But that's not how the natural world works, nor is it how the human world works. Supposing you own a particular tree; if you let the fruit from that tree fall to the ground and rot, you mustn't complain if someone else, picking up that fruit, saves it from rot. Compare Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," IV.62: > Take the case of an object that has been worked on, improved, or guarded and protected from mishap through someone’s efforts, however small, even if they amounted to no more than plucking or picking up some wild fruit from the ground: someone who seizes this object clearly deprives the other of the results of the energy he has expended on it; he is making the other’s body serve his will instead of its own [...] i.e. he is doing wrong. — On the other hand, simply enjoying something without doing any work on it or safeguarding it against destruction gives us as little right to the thing as the declaration of our will to be its sole owner. Thus, when a family has hunted by itself in a district for even a hundred years without having done anything towards its improvement, then this family cannot keep out a newcomer who wants to hunt there too without morally doing wrong. There is absolutely no moral ground for the so-called right of preoccupation, which holds that simply by virtue of having enjoyed a thing you can demand the exclusive right to its further enjoyment as an additional reward. The newcomer would have much more of a right to tell anyone whose claim rests merely on this right (the right of preoccupation): ‘the very fact that you have been enjoying it for so long makes it right that others should enjoy it now.’ Compare also Aesop: > A Dog asleep in a manger filled with hay, was awakened by the Cattle, which came in tired and hungry from working in the field. But the Dog would not let them get near the manger, and snarled and snapped as if it were filled with the best of meat and bones, all for himself. The Cattle looked at the Dog in disgust. "How selfish he is!" said one. "He cannot eat the hay and yet he will not let us eat it who are so hungry for it!" |