The Purpose of Private Property

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig distinguishes two basic approaches to measuring whether or not the institution of private property is functioning correctly.

First, there is the property rights approach, “in which property ownership is an intrinsic good, that is, a good unto itself, because each person (or some persons, as it usually goes) has a discrete right to property ownership.”

The second approach, which is incompatible with the first, is to measure the institution in terms of social function. In this approach, “property ownership is an extrinsic good, which means that it is good only insofar as it affects goods outside itself.”

In the States we’re brought up to think about private property in terms of the first approach. I say that something is mine if I acquired it by way of the right procedure: if I bought it or received it as a gift, for example. I also justify my ownership of things by pointing to the procedure by which I obtained them: if the procedure was just, then my ownership is just. Classical liberal property rights theories tend to use this approach, and these theories are today espoused by both liberals and conservatives. The property rights approach, however, is not the one taken by traditional Christianity. Bruenig summarizes the problem with it:

[T]he liberal property rights theories you hear in political discourse these days are not only bad because of what they produce materially (see: inequality), but also because of the ideology they factor so seamlessly into: namely, the idea that justice is merely a matter of individual procedural rights and protections, and that we have no need to factor the flourishing of our communities into the question of justice.

From the perspective of traditional Christianity, the goods of the earth are meant to benefit everyone. Catholics call this the universal destination of goods. Pope Francis put it this way in Evangelii Gaudium: “the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property. The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good.” Ordered society, the common good, universal human flourishing–these justify the ownership of property. These are the ends to which the institution of private property should be ordered and the ends by which it should be regularly judged.

If private ownership works against these ends or is indifferent to them, say by increasing inequality, then it isn’t justified and it isn’t good–no matter how “just” the procedures in which the transactions take place are. This is why, according to Catholic political theology, “political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good.” Catholicism, you see, understands and judges the ownership of private property with respect to its social function, and this means that the Church is not on the side of American-style capitalism and its ethics of private property rights.

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