I love this question – thank you, Kate Messenger, for asking it. There are a couple of ways we might look at it, which I will go through before saying my piece.
Let’s focus on the fact that you bought the toy. Robert Nozick famously argued that private property is something we get rights to as long as our possessing it has the right history. If the toymaker appropriated the materials and made the toy in acceptable ways, and you paid for it with money you justly earned, then the toy is your property, presumably to do with what you want. There’s nothing unethical here, as long as we believe in property rights. I have been told, however, that what I am willing to grant does not add up to a property right. I will explain.
It is important to remember that these are rights, in the plural. Your right to your toy is a right to use it, but also a right to prevent others from using it (called exclusion), and a right to put it to spoil, so that it can never be used. I am very sceptical that we have a right to spoil. Imagine that I own lots of food and would prefer that it was inedible, not because I want to make fertiliser or strange art out of it (which is another sort of use), but just because I am either spiteful or eccentric. It doesn’t seem plausible to me that my preference carries much moral weight. I don’t have the right to continue practicing exclusion under these conditions. Whether someone is starving at my door, or my flatmate is just peckish, it seems they should be able to use the food. I don’t grant a right to spoil, and I only grant a very qualified right to exclude. Some people just don’t think this amounts to genuine property rights. Keeping a toy in the box looks like practicing exclusion, so on my sort of view it might not be justified. It depends on why the exclusion is being practiced.
Let’s think about two reasons we might be practicing exclusion. We might be speculating, that is, artificially driving up the price of rare toys so that we can sell them in the future to other people who believe that rare toys will always make money. Given that the rising price doesn’t reflect any greater good or utility in the world, we might think this lacks honesty of purpose, and so doubt that it’s legitimate grounds for exclusion. On the other hand, your collection might be a historical record. We know so little of the Minoan culture because we can’t read their writing, but we do know that they enjoyed jumping over bulls and had bold fashion sense because artefacts of their material culture have survived. Ensuring that some picture of what our culture saw fit to produce always survives might be a legitimate reason to practice exclusion. I think this kind of collecting can be ethical, but we should still think about why we are doing it.
What do you think? Is it wrong to keep toys locked away in their packaging? Let us know in the comments.
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I started studying philosophy at the University of Glasgow back in 2011. I was officially a psychology student back then, but I jumped ship almost immediately, and now I'm working on my PhD at the University of Kent. My interests sit mostly in moral and political philosophy, but I have that magpie-like tendency to dip into all the areas of philosophy I know less about as soon as I see a shiny idea. My research focuses on autonomy in mood disorders, pulling together moral psychology, some phenomenology, and moral philosophy. I've also been getting more and more interested in Epistemic Injustices recently (which ties in nicely with my core research), so for now that might be my new favourite area in philosophy.