Harm to Opportunity

There is a notion that it is possibly to do harm to others by undertaking actions that obstruct their opportunity to act – that is, because you have done something, another person no longer has the opportunity to act in a way that he intended: your action has prevented his action. While this seems plausible, it is extremely tenuous.

It is reasonable to conclude that one action may prevent another, whether by means of physical obstruction or by altering the environment in a way that the prerequisites of the second action are no longer possible. For a solitary individual in an environment devoid of others, it is an objective fact that the choice to perform one action prevents the performance of others, even if the only prerequisite is the time required to perform the task. In a social setting, it becomes more problematic.

My sense is that the notion of property settles most of the disputes about obstruction of opportunity. One cannot rightly claim that another person has obstructed his action if he had not the material prerequisites to undertake that action. That is to say, the person must own the property necessary to the action, or have the permission of the owner to use it.

In the latter instance, where the owner of property has granted permission to multiple parties for the use of property (such as “public” property that the state proposes to be available to all citizens), such conflicts can arise, and it is generally accepted that the owner is responsible for resolving these conflicts by being more specific in the conditions of the permission granted other parties. In the context of politics, this is the basis of a considerable amount of law.

With this in mind, I am unable to conceive of an instance in which the notion of doing harm by obstructing another party could be said to exist where no property is involved. And so, if one considers harm to opportunity, it is most often a consequence of harm to property – though the logic seems to become circular when harm to property is grounded in the harm to opportunity. As such, I can conclude that the two are related, but the cause-and-effect nature of this relationship remains a bit muddled (specifically, in terms of which derives from the other).