I think you’re conflating multiple things here. As far as I know, Chesterton’s fence is not about anything like property rights. We’re not talking about justifying entering your neighbor’s land and tearing down their fence without permission. Presumably the analogy is a fence on some land you’ve just acquired, or a fence on public lands. The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.
> The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.
And the point is that no individual person can figure out, just by using their own reason, whether it's a good idea for the fence to be removed. The only way to know that is for the long-winded social process of people interacting with each other to either eventually convince them that the fence should be removed, or not.
