Topics Ethics

Question Concerning Public Property: Am I morally allowed to do whatever I want so long as it is on public property (and not harming others?) or since it's on public property, can I not do anything unless the public approves? For example, if I wanted to sing a song in public train would I be morally permitted to do so or must I request the 'permission' of everyone else in the train in case they find it annoying or etc? My question is basically how do we reason about public property?

Accepted:
May 24, 2012

Comments

My first thought is that "public property" doesn't mean "property not subject to the rule of law." The National Mall in Washington is "public property" but there are all sorts of thing I'm forbidden by law to do there, whether they harm anyone or not. Public property usually means property that's not privately owned but is under governmental jurisdiction. If we discovered some no-man's land that somehow fell between the cracks of all national boundaries, this wouldn't be public property and might fall outside all legal jurisdiction. (And if ordinary international law would apply, we could fancifully imagine making our way to some otherwise uninhabited planet.)

As for the train, it's almost certainly either public property, i.e., falls under some governmental jurisdiction (say, a subway train in New York) or else it's private property, owned by whomever owns the railroad. In the former case, any relevant laws apply; in the latter, the owners get to set the rules, within the bounds of federal/state/local laws. But even if none of those laws or rules say anything about singing on the train, it wouldn't be okay to do that if you're annoying other passengers. Things don't need to rise to the level of real harm to count as things we shouldn't do. You presumably don't lie to be annoyed for no good reason, and that's reason enough not to do it to other people.