Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing about rights in relation to property and ownership. I wrote my PhD thesis on moral property rights.
In February 2022, a paper was published that I wrote for the Adam Smith Institute on the topic of property rights in space. This paper generated a surprising amount of press coverage and social media activity (partly owing to the exaggerated assumption that it called for ‘privatising the moon’). The paper featured on the front page of the Daily Star, and articles about it were published in the FT, the Independent, the Guardian, on the Hill website, and many other places. You can read my paper here, and see that, actually, at the end of what is a 20,000-word, theory-heavy discussion, the practical proposal I set out takes the form of a Georgist-type framework to enable the temporary and highly-conditional rental of plots of moonland. Here’s an article I wrote for IAITV about my thoughts on the matter, followed by a response to my paper by philosopher Tony Milligan. And here’s an op-ed I wrote about the paper for CapX.
Moving away from space, here’s an article I wrote for Bright Blue on the interrelation of human rights and conservatism. And here’s something I wrote for ConHome on rights and responsibilities.
(In case you were wondering, the photo I’ve used for this section is one I took of the place where Eleanor Roosevelt lived while she was working on the UDHR.)