Can we consider life as property?

Axel Tiesen, writing in a journal article in 1914, lamented the fact that although ‘we have reached the point where products of your mind, whether literary, musical, artistic or inventive have been invested with the legal quality of property’, life, being the source from which ‘all other values spring’, has no property value. This essay wants to take a step back from Tiesen’s article and ask the more fundamental question of whether life can be considered as property. Tiesen’s lamentation that life, despite being the source from which ‘all other values spring’, has, by itself, no property value is true insofar as he is thinking about life as being private property. In a by-gone religious age, life was a divine property and in a post-religious age, life is best conceived of as a communal property. In either case, it is of no private value