Some philosophers have argued that personal desert is a basis of ownership. Thus, a person's effort in producing an item may make him or her deserving of significant property rights in it. In this essay we support desert as an important basis of ownership.
I. Ownership
Ownership involves various property rights, powers, liabilities, and duties. If Jones owns a book, in the full sense of ownership, he or she has the claim-rights to possess it (exclude others), use it, and manage it (decide how others may use it and collect income from that use). Jones also has the power to transfer, consume, waste, modify, or destroy the book, as well as the immunity of expropriation, and the duty not to use the book in a way harmful to others, l These elements are sufficient for full ownership, but subsets also may yield ownership. Justifying ownership involves justifying a significant set of these elements.
Various forms of ownership can be distinguished in terms of the associated cluster of rights and liabilities and to whom this cluster attaches. In the case of private property, the cluster is held by an individual or set of individuals such as a husband and wife, partners, or a corporation, as distinguished from some larger group. Under collective ownership, the state is viewed as the "owner," but the property must be used for the collective interests of society. In the case of common property, the resource is available for use by each person, but the interests of the collective have no special status. An open grazing field in feudal England might have been common property. According to John Locke, this was how natural resources were held in the state of nature. Since the elements of ownership are separable, they may be distributed in various ways, giving rise to a host of different property interests and forms of ownership.