Forums of the Libertarian Left

I find that claim rather odd. It made sense to me, but then I got confused (or unconfused). Ownership is simply the exclusive right to control something. Right? Follow me..so self-ownership simply means the exclusive right to control your body, right? How is that "dualistic", or whatever? It really isn't. So the individual has rights in their own body, so what? I'm pretty you all accept that . Even a cursory examination reveals it is not dualistic, I think. "How can you own yourself? You are yourself"... you can, think about it. Divorce yourself from the notion of external property (I wonder why ), and just think in terms of rights (similar to rights in external property). Anyone care to share their thoughts or correct me on this?

Well, dualism is just means some sort of ontological distinction between mind and body (thus dual). That seems to be implied in a statement like "their own body". Subject and object are implicitly distinct here given how our language works. It seems to me that a hardcore monist wouldn't find a statement like "right to control your body" to even be coherent. It would be a mistake of logical form to a monist.

That said, there is no prima facie reason to think dualism is necessarily a wrong position and it's still an open topic of debate in philosophy. If you think that the mind can't be reduced to the body and vice versa, then you are a mind-body dualist. There is a form of mind-body dualism call property dualism that doesn't require a theory of separate substance or even independence, but does reject total reductionism.

torque wrote:and just think in terms of rights (similar to rights in external property). Anyone care to share their thoughts or correct me on this?

Contrary to Rothbardian dogma, not all rights are property rights.

[neverfox] I see what you mean, but I was thinking of it mainly as a social construct. In this sense of ownership, I think dualism is avoided. Call it whatever you want. Use of the phrase "my body", and so forth is simply common language. At any rate, while you don't normally need to distinguish between a person and the body of that person, I do think you can make one. I think identity is preserved during (theoretical) whole-body transplants. Your brain could also arguably be considered as "hardware", while your mind as "software". It's still perfectly reductionist then. Though that isn't necessary for self-ownership, conceptually or legalistically. Just think in terms of rights and you avoid circularity.

Zanthorus wrote:

torque wrote:and just think in terms of rights (similar to rights in external property). Anyone care to share their thoughts or correct me on this?

Contrary to Rothbardian dogma, not all rights are property rights.

I never said that. I just meant self-ownership, as a right, is similar to the rights in external property.

One issue is that libertarians often switch back and forth between two different meanings for "self-ownership". On one hand, a rights claim, and on the other hand, a metaphysical fact. When people question it, they tend to act like a metaphysical fact, or the fact of physiological control, is being denied. Which is it? If it's just the fact that people purposefully act, then it isn't a rights claim, and hardly anyone really denies it. If it's a rights claim, then it questioning it shouldn't be treated as a performative contradiction of a metaphysical fact. What's more, as a rights claim, it isn't the same thing as a right to external property in that it is (supposed to be) inalienable - I.E. not something you can buy or sell or transfer ownership of.

Brainpolice wrote:One issue is that libertarians often switch back and forth between two different meanings for "self-ownership". On one hand, a rights claim, and on the other hand, a metaphysical fact. When people question it, they tend to act like a metaphysical fact, or the fact of physiological control, is being denied. Which is it? If it's just the fact that people purposefully act, then it isn't a rights claim, and hardly anyone really denies it. If it's a rights claim, then it questioning it shouldn't be treated as a performative contradiction of a metaphysical fact. What's more, as a rights claim, it isn't the same thing as a right to external property in that it is (supposed to be) inalienable - I.E. not something you can buy or sell or transfer ownership of.

Yes. Note that I didn't say that though. And I said similar to external property rights, not the same. Also, why not use the word self-ownership? Seems fair. Inalienability is only really an issue if you're extremely literal-minded (not unlike many libertarians ). Fair use of the word own anyway. Because even if ownership is inalienable, it isn't unreasonable to call it ownership.

One thing that confuses me about self-ownership is the nature of the claim. According to Stephen Kinsella the right to self-ownership is based on the Lockean notion of homesteading. But my understanding was that Lockean property rights were based on the principle of self-ownership, so when you mix your body which is also your property with the natural world via labour you come to own it. This argument seems entirely circular though - 'Self-ownership is true because it's based on the lockean theory of property rights which is true because it derives from the principle of self-ownership'. Maybe there's something I'm not getting here?

Zanthorus wrote:One thing that confuses me about self-ownership is the nature of the claim. According to Stephen Kinsella the right to self-ownership is based on the Lockean notion of homesteading. But my understanding was that Lockean property rights were based on the principle of self-ownership, so when you mix your body which is also your property with the natural world via labour you come to own it. This argument seems entirely circular though - 'Self-ownership is true because it's based on the lockean theory of property rights which is true because it derives from the principle of self-ownership'. Maybe there's something I'm not getting here?

No, you've identified the circularity of how many libertarians argue for self-ownership and property rights. The self-ownership concept is defined in terms of a pre-existing property norm, and then that same property norm is said to derive from self-ownership.

One thing that confuses me about self-ownership is the nature of the claim. According to Stephen Kinsella the right to self-ownership is based on the Lockean notion of homesteading. But my understanding was that Lockean property rights were based on the principle of self-ownership, so when you mix your body which is also your property with the natural world via labour you come to own it. This argument seems entirely circular though - 'Self-ownership is true because it's based on the lockean theory of property rights which is true because it derives from the principle of self-ownership'. Maybe there's something I'm not getting here?

I don't think that's quite the correct interpretation of Kinsella's argument. He thinks self-ownership (and ownership in general) is true not because it is based on LTP or each other (in a circle) but because of Hoppe's argumentation ethics (you'll see Kinsella use the "first use" terminology here as it predates his development of "objective link" below) along with other "rationalist" approaches to the concept. So there is no circle; but that doesn't mean there aren't issues with these rationalist methods (see here and here). As for the connection between self-ownership and ownership of external objects, he only says that one depends on the other, not that one derives from the other; that is that in order to have an objective link to external objects, one needs to be the owner of their body first. But that right of ownership is not (circularly) because there was the ability to homestead external objects.

[T]he "first use" rule is merely the result of the application of the more general principle of objective link to the case of objects that may be homesteaded from an unowned state. Recall that the purpose of property rights is to permit conflicts over scarce (rivalrous) resources to be avoided. To fulfill this purpose, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. The assignment must not, however, be random, arbitrary, or biased, if it is to actually be a property norm and possibly help conflict to be avoided. What this means is that title has to be assigned to one of the competing claimants based on "the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the" resource claimed....So for homesteaded things — previously unowned resources — the objective link is first use. It has to be by the nature of the situation....It is the unique relationship between a person and "his" body — his direct and immediate control over the body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa. This is what constitutes the objective link sufficient to give that person better title to his body than any third party claimant

Self-ownership theory can be dualistic because the property that one has in one's self -- which we might call "ownness," and which certainly need not be dualistic -- gets confused with the relationship we have with real or chattel property, which is presumably derived by extension from that "ownness." Dualism in ownness is not fatal to a coherent theory of property based in self-ownership. We can break down the person into an owning self and an owned self, assign roles to the "I am" and the "I own," and still come up with coherent theories about what seems naturally right and proper for individuals to claim as extensions of their own selves. But none of the existing systems of property rights seem to really fill the bill. Natural property rights modeled on self-ownership might not be primarily individual or exclusive -- or they might have a useful-but-absolutist character, as Proudhon claimed, that was objectionable outside of some system of balances or some explicitly mutual system. The Lockean intuition that property in land comes from mixing ourselves with it, and involving it in our personal projects only really leads us into the maze when we leap ahead to assume that all the forms of property involved -- ownness and its extensions -- must be like the "property" acknowledged by our legal and political systems, rather than trying to figure out how our relationship with ourselves might map out onto things that don't seem at first glance to be part of us.

I think the basic Lockean intuition is a very useful one, grounded in our experience of selfhood as essentially individual. But there is a lot of stuff regarding the interconnection and interdependence of selves, the role of collective force, the countervailing mixing of nature into us, etc., that needs to be incorporated into our thinking on the subject. All the pieces of a pretty comprehensive self-ownership-based property theory have been floating around since the beginnings of the anarchist movement, but we've failed to gather them up and work out what they might mean taken together.

I'll add that something like a non-Cartesian dualism might actually be a pretty successful theory of the mind/body problem, through such concepts as conditional forward causation (a modern spin on Swedenborg's 'spiritual influx'). That would bring new life to old takes on self-ownership that are very Lockean in feel, almost through a sort of production analogy.

*slams a John Searle book on the table*

There's a degree to which the experience of selfhood that makes property seem natural to us is a product of self-consciousness. The self seems proper to us in large part because we can reflect on our selfhood -- which is also the reason, on a different kind of reflection, that we know that selves aren't cleanly individual, persistently self-similar and "proper." The two reflections on selfhood correspond to the "property and community" that Proudhon, Claude Pelletier, etc., felt we needed to balance or synthesize.

Contrary to Rothbardian dogma, not all rights are property rights.

Contrary to Libertarian dogma, rights do not exist.

Vichy wrote:Contrary to Libertarian dogma, rights do not exist.

Exist in what sense? They certainly exist in a de facto sense.

As for normative it's difficult. Obviously from a completely objective standpoint there are no normative rights however by assuming something like Rawls veil of ignorance then we can come up with rules that are generally applicable and good rules for social interaction in the absence of any other information.

Zanthorus wrote:Obviously from a completely objective standpoint there are no normative rights however by assuming something like Rawls veil of ignorance then we can come up with rules that are generally applicable and good rules for social interaction in the absence of any other information.

Obviously?

Each time I've engaged with Rawls I've come away disappointed. I haven't written about him before but you can find some interesting critiques here and here (p. 23-25 but you'll probably need the context).