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gnfargbl • today at 12:28 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.

I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.


Replies

b112 • today at 2:04 PM

The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.

However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.

So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.