Also, note that I didn't say that private property is "nothing more" than a social construct. I said it is a social construct, and as a social construct it's a lot, because that's all there is for most if not all our values, and that's plenty. But, being a social construct, it cannot apriori take precedence over other social constructs (like the value of fairness).

Now, in general, the question of "rights" is a hard one, because obviously there is nothing to give anything a right. A right is a common (perhaps universal) shared value, sometimes with extrinsic justifications but most of the time without (in the end, it's hard to ascribe a truly objective value to anything in the universe, as you quickly get to circular dependencies of values). But, it is not a bad starting point to assume that all rights originate in social convention, and those conventions, in turn, are based on human psychology and circumstance. This too is an incomplete description, because we haven't established the boundaries of the fixed/universal portion of human psychology, and much of it is well known to be a product (through a feedback loop) of social convention...

Oh, I simply meant that most or all values are built around social constructs, so they all have similar validity.

> If you are going to distribute that property there is only one way to accomplish that: by force.

And my point was that preserving that private property is also accomplished by force. The question is, what do you mean when you say "force". If you mean coercion, then many things in society are achieved through coercion. That is pretty much the essence of civilization (see Freud's Civilization and its Discontents). Coercion and freedom will always live side by side. Most values conflict with one another at some point and need to be prioritized, but freedom is rather unique in that it conflicts with itself. If you have a society (i.e. two people or more interacting), then an individual is either free to restrict the freedom of another or she is not. In either case, someone's freedom is restricted -- through coercion. And it turns out that surprisingly many of the things we do in our interactions can restrict the freedom of others, which is why freedom (without qualification) is a self-conflicting value and therefore not a well-defined one, as different kinds of freedom then need to be prioritized and balanced; that also means that coercion, or "force" (without qualification) is not a negative value by itself. So the question is, what kind of force? So when you say that distribution of property is done coercively, then there's nothing really special about it.

It sounds like you're perfectly fine with my original reductio ad absurdum that it would be ok to force everyone in a wheelchair, or force everyone to shave their head, etc.

>And my point was that preserving that private property is also accomplished by force.

No it's not. When you or I own something we are not using force at all. Now it is possible that there are those who possess things which they obtained by force, but discussing those individuals in relation to private property is only an example of the violation of such ownership.

How do you figure? I don't follow.

> No it's not. When you or I own something we are not using force at all.

Of course we are! We've just internalized it[1] are so we don't notice it (which is why we need to learn about power in order to see it), but it's there:

Suppose you have a lot of money and I want some. So I hack your bank account and take it, except you don't let me because you call the police who arrest me, or maybe just the threat of arrest deters me. Either way, you are using force to restrict my freedom to take the money lying there in the bank. Now, if you say that you didn't give your consent to my taking the money, and it was I that used force when taking it, then we will get into a very long discussion about what consent means, and I will say that consent or coercion are not binary but a spectrum and a person is almost never at either extreme (as various psychological experiments have shown).

For ownership to be effective it must be enforced by violence or the threat of violence towards those who want to violate it, hence -- it requires force, and is therefore a restriction on freedom.

[1]: Internalized mores and self-supervision are in themselves very powerful forces that have been studied extensively, but I'm not going to discuss them here. For a beautiful demonstration of how we've gradually internalized things over history to the level where they seem "natural" to us, see Norbert Elias's seminal work, The Civilizing Process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process)

You dismissed the idea that forceful redistribution of capital is a problem at all because force already exists throughout society. By extension you must be perfectly fine with the other forms of force enumerated.

>Suppose you have a lot of money and I want some. So I hack your bank account and take it, except you don't let me because you call the police who arrest me, or maybe just the threat of arrest deters me. Either way, you are using force to restrict my freedom to take the money lying there in the bank. Now, if you say that you didn't give your consent to my taking the money, and it was I that used force when taking it, then we will get into a very long discussion about what consent means, and I will say that consent or coercion are not binary but a spectrum and a person is almost never at either extreme (as various psychological experiments have shown).

In other words you've perverted the definitions of otherwise very clear words as to make this discussion entirely worthless.

>For ownership to be effective it must be enforced by violence or the threat of violence towards those who want to violate it, hence -- it requires force, and is therefore a restriction on freedom.

I think I understand what you're getting at but I still fail to see how it's relevant. Yes, if I own something and I protect it from theft, I will use violence. But when I previously mentioned force, it was not the reactionary use of violence I was referring to. In theory, I have no problem with the use of violence in reaction to an offense on person or property.

I'm not sure what your comments on restrictions of freedom have to do with the conversation as I have not called for unbridled "freedom."

First of all, I'm not "fine" with force, but humans interactions are very often forceful (like I said, freedom is self-contradictory, and implies some force). It's like saying that I'm "fine" with gravity; or hydrogen. Also, not all kinds and measures of force are the same. I don't see why accepting the fact of gravity implies that I'm OK with dropping pianos on people. Maybe I've accepted that a little force is unavoidable or perhaps necessary, but a lot is excessive and bad.

> In other words you've perverted the definitions of otherwise very clear words as to make this discussion entirely worthless.

One of the problems when discussing such things is that we sometimes make arbitrary definitions, which then determine the outcome we want, without taking into account the actual dynamics. So, if we start with "force is bad", and believe that it is bad because, say, it restrict freedom, we can't then arbitrarily define force to be particular uses of it, but we must define it to be all forms of restricting freedom. And how do we know what restricts freedom, i.e. what constitutes force? We need to study human psychology and sociology as it exists in practice. Otherwise, you have to explain why your definition of force is bad while mine isn't.

> it was not the reactionary use of violence I was referring to. In theory, I have no problem with the use of violence in reaction to an offense on person or property

But whether you view it as reactionary or not depends entirely on your pre-conditioning. If you thought all property was shared to begin with, you'd view forcefully holding on to some property as your own as very aggressive and very much non-reactionary.

Imagine that your son decides to stop letting you into his room. He thinks that his room is actually his, while you know that the room is his only in a limited sense. I don't think you'd view his use of force as a reaction, or your incursion as an offense at all.

Similarly, private property could just be a limited form of ownership granted to you by society.

> I'm not sure what your comments on restrictions of freedom have to do with the conversation as I have not called for unbridled "freedom."

Well, when discussing values you have to define them. You implied that you view the use of force as bad, but "no force" isn't a value. I assumed you believe it is bad because it restricts freedom. If you have other reasons to exclude force, please state them and explain why they only apply to your definition of force.