Property rights give the owner or rights holder the opportunity to do whatever they want with the property. This includes holding, selling or leasing it in order to sell or transfer it profitably. In classical Roman law (circa 1-250 AD), the sum of the rights, privileges and powers that a legal person could have over a thing was called dominium or proprietas (property). Classical Roman jurists do not claim that their system tends to attribute property to the current owner of the thing, but that he did so is quite clear. Once the Roman system had identified the owner (the owner), it was reluctant to let him arbitrate anything other than all the rights, privileges and powers he had in the matter. If the rights-based justification for the protection of species is to make a certain, albeit limited, assessment of the consequences in practice, the assessment procedure will be decisive. Accepting that all animals are morally substantial is insufficient. A debate here revolves around the effectiveness of using scientific experts to identify the interests of animals. If, as in the case of humans, these interests lack a specific and “correct” form and, above all, sympathy for the lifestyle of animals is required, then the judgment of experts would be unnecessarily privileged over that of laymen.
Despite the adoption of animal-centered ethics, the rationale for wildlife protection can still be linked to human preferences. The danger is that this preference information is too poor or unreliable to capture some aspects of our concern for wildlife. Therefore, for nature conservation policy in practice, the relevance of information on preferences and the means by which consequences are measured more generally may be more important than whether the underlying conservation ethic is rights-based or consequentialist. Over the past 30 years, an important Neo-Weberian literature on closure processes has emerged. Frank Parkin (1979) drew on Weber to examine the struggle for the distribution of resources within and between classes. He emphasized property rights and diplomas, i.e. the use of educational certificates to monopolize positions in the labour market. Also inspired by Durkheim, Collins (1998) expanded his earlier work on accreditation and rituals of interaction to analyze how intellectuals compete to maximize their access to important network positions, cultural capital, and emotional energy, thereby generating intellectual creativity. These contributions coincide with those of Pierre Bourdieu and his collaborators. Although more comprehensive property rights are preferable to more comprehensive rights, any system of property rights entails considerable complexity and many problems that are difficult to solve. If I run a plant that emits smoke, foul odours or airborne acids on your property, am I using your land without your permission? This is a difficult question to answer.
The cost of establishing private property rights – so I can pay you a mutually acceptable price for polluting your air – might be too high. Air, groundwater and electromagnetic radiation, for example, are expensive to monitor and control. As a result, a person has unenforceable private property rights over the quality and condition of an air package. The inability to monitor and monitor the use of your resources profitably means that “your” property rights to “your” land are not as extensive and robust as for other resources such as furniture, shoes, or cars. Where private property rights are not available or too costly to establish and enforce, substitutes for control are sought. Government authority, expressed by government agents, is a very common means of this type. Hence the creation of environmental laws. What do these results mean for economic growth? The historical results do not support either of the two dominant views in the growth literature on the relationship between economic growth and the security of private property rights, whether defined in terms of ownership, use or transfer.