Someone

Property is, as is fashionable to explain nowadays, a bundle of rights. Moreover, an awful lot of these rights can be invented: the more complex the legal relations in society, the more of these rights there are, the harder they are to distinguish, and the more they intertwine. For example, I can visit a friend and sit down to work at a computer that he rents along with the apartment using his parents’ money, where I pay for access to the computer with a kiss. I use a pirated operating system and type the text of an article promised to a client, for which I have received an advance payment. In this regard, can the friend’s parents, the owner of the apartment with the computer, and the employees of the operating system manufacturer also demand a kiss from me, and exactly what share of the kiss? Can I, instead of a kiss, send the guy to my client so that the client can kiss him himself, since he has such an urgency that I have to work anywhere at an odd hour? The answers to these questions seem obvious only if we have some roughly similar notions of what is proper in our minds.

But notions of what is proper depend quite heavily on context. If I kill an opponent in a computer game, and the game implies the possibility of looting the corpse, then the transfer of the deceased’s property to me causes no particular dispute. If the same rules apply in a live-action role-playing game, then my ownership of the killed person’s property can also be quite legal. Finally, if I participate in such an unpleasant variety of role-playing games as a real war, then the appropriation of weapons, ammunition, and various souvenirs from the body of the killed person there also does not cause misunderstanding among those around.

Moreover, military booty may not be limited to things from a corpse. If tomorrow Navalny kills Putin, he could well claim to inherit the presidential post in Russia, and show me that strange person who would dispute this. Prescribe him a triple dose of fantasy.

But as soon as we move into a context where murder is not considered a way of resolving conflict, it ceases to be a legitimate way of acquiring the property of the killed. After that, the entire bundle of rights for the killer will shrink to the factual possession of what he managed to take from the killed, and only for as long as it is not taken away.