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Self-ownership (or sovereignty of the individual, individual sovereignty or individual autonomy) is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of her or his own body and life. According to G. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership "says that each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply."[1]
The writers William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson described those possessed of a mind conducive to self-ownership as sovereign individuals, which have supreme authority and sovereignty over their own choices, without the interference of governing powers, provided they have not violated the rights of others. This notion is central toclassical liberalism, individualistic political philosophies such as abolitionism, ethical egoism, rights-based libertarianism, objectivism, and individualist anarchism. Sovereign-minded individuals would then seem to prefer an atmosphere consisting of decentralized administrative organizations acting as servants to the individual.
Friedrich Nietzsche uses the term sovereign individual quite differently in the work On the Genealogy of Morals.
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[edit]Origin of the concept
Some have traced the concept of self-ownership to certain individuals such as John Locke, who said, the individual "has a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did."[2] Or, as stated more succinctly by Locke, "every man has a Property in his own Person."[3]
[edit]Private property
Sovereign-minded individuals usually assert a right of private property external to the body, reasoning that if a person owns themselves, they own their actions, including those that create or improve resources. Therefore, they own their own labor and the fruits thereof.[4]
[edit]Self-ownership and labor markets
Ian Shapiro says that markets in labor affirm self ownership, because if self-ownership were not recognized then people would not be allowed to sell the use of their productive capacities to others. He says that the individual sells the use of his productive capacity for a limited time and conditions but continues to own what he earns from selling the use of that capacity and the capacity itself, thereby retaining soveriegnty over himself while contributing to economic efficiency.[5]
[edit]Examples
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is sometimes viewed as an implementation of the concept of self-ownership, as are some portions of the Bill of Rights.
Self-ownership could be viewed as a decentralized bottom-up philosophy, as opposed to totalitarianism being a centralized top-down system. Henry David Thoreau regarded self-ownership as a key component in achieving utopia, while libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick based his theory of property-ownership on the premise of self-ownership.
[edit]Disagreement about distinctions
The trouble of defining the border of the self can be seen in the debate surrounding abortion where the fetus could alternatively be seen as its own or as a part of the property of the mother's body, and the right of the woman to control her own body could therefore be viewed as being in opposition to what may be considered as "the fetus' right to live". This contrast is even more pronounced in situations where women are forced to undergo surgery in order to deliver a healthy baby. Even though self-ownership advocates civil rights, it does not extend these rights over others, an argument used by both sides of this debate.
In addition to the abortion debate, there are also debates surrounding euthanasia and suicide. However, some of these actions can be viewed as self-destructive, which is not removed from the original meaning ofself-ownership. The debate is further complicated as many individuals recognize the right of ownership to include the right to destruction: what one has constructed, one may deconstruct. Additionally, some cultures not only respect the act of suicide as an individual right, but also as an honorable action.
Discussion of the boundary of self with respect to ownership and responsibility has been explored by legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen in his essays on The Value of Ownership and Responsibility and the Boundaries of the Self. The emphasis of this work is in illuminating the phenomenology of ownership and our common usage of personal pronouns to apply to both body and property; this serves as the folk basis for legal conceptions and debates about responsibility and ownership.
Defining the borders of the self can also be difficult if one accepts the notion that the self includes objects that are external to the human body, as is proposed in Andy Clark's essay, Natural Born Cyborgs.
The classically liberal view of self-ownership holds that money is alienable because it can be physically alienated from the body (taken, given, earned, paid), while labor is not because it can only be achieved by use of one's inalienable body. Alternatively, some anti-capitalists believe that, because money is the product of inalienable labor, it should be viewed as similarly inalienable, regardless of any voluntary contractual agreements made by the laborer. This leads to a disagreement about how far self-ownership, if affirmed, extends. From this springs the idea of a "wage slave" or a "debt slave," which are meaningless terms in one view, and violate the principle of self-ownership in the other.
Another third view holds that labor is alienable, because it can be contracted out, thus alienating it from the self. In this view, the freedom of a person to voluntarily sell himself into slavery is also preserved by the principle of self-ownership. [6]
[edit]Arguments for self-ownership
It has been argued by Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe that self-ownership is axiomatic. His reasoning is that a person contradicts himself when he argues against self-ownership. The person making this argument is caught in a "performative contradiction" because, in choosing to use persuasion instead of force to have others agree that they are not sovereign over themselves, that person implicitly grants that those who he is trying to persuade have a right to disagree. If they have a right to disagree, then they have legitimate authority over themselves.[7] However, it has also been noted that attempting persuasion in place of force does not necessarily acknowledge a right to disagree but may be a rational economic choice, as using force may have unfortunate consequences for the speaker as well.
The person argues that self-ownership is an undesirable condition, and currently he is only authorized by law to argue against the status quo that allows self-ownership.[citation needed] Moreover, someone that argues against self-ownership does not necessarily do it in an absolute way. Sovereignty does not need to be a black-and-white issue: for instance, the person could be sovereign to have opinions, but not to perform any kinds of acts. For instance, a person that thinks the consumption of drugs should be always illegal is against absolute self-ownership, but not necessarily in favor of full subordination.[citation needed]
In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard argues that 100 percent self-ownership is the only principle compatible with a moral code that applies to every person - a "universal ethic" - and that it is a natural law by being what is naturally best for man. He says if every person is not entitled to full self-ownership, then there are only two alternatives: "(1) the 'communist' one of Universal and Equal Other-ownership, or (2) Partial Ownership of One Group by Another - a system of rule by one class over another." He says that it is not possible for alternative (2) to be a universal ethic but only a partial ethic, which says that one class of people do not have the right of self-ownership but another class does. This, therefore, is incompatible with what is being sought - a moral code applicable to every person - instead of a code applicable to some and not to others, as if some individuals are humans and some are not. In the case of alternative (1), every individual would own equal parts of every other individual so that no one is self-owned. Rothbard acknowledges that this would be a universal ethic, but, he argues, it is "Utopian and impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby to exercise his equal share of partial ownership over every other man." He says the system would break down, resulting in a ruling class who specializes in keeping tabs over other individuals. Since this would grant a ruling class ownership rights over its subjects, it would again be logically incompatible with a universal ethic. Even if a collectivist Utopia of everyone having equal ownership of everyone else could be sustained, he argues, individuals would not be able to do anything without prior approval by everyone in society. Since this would be impossible in a large society, no one would be able to do anything and the human race would perish. Therefore, the collectivist alternative universal ethic where every individual would own an equal portion of every other individual violates the natural "law of what is best for man and his life on earth." He says that if a person exercises ownership over another person, that is, uses aggression against him rather than leaving him to do as he wills, "this violates his nature."[8]
[edit]Arguments against self-ownership
Arguments against self-ownership ususally come from the Anti-Capitalist camp although there have been pro-capitalists, even within the Austrian school of Economics [1] who reject the concept. There are various lines of attack:
The first and most serious one revolves around the point that the concept of self-ownership implies a cartesian mind-body dualism. Mainly that there needs to be something external to one's body that controls the body itself. There are serious contentions against dualism however that attack the basis of this position. Furthermore, even if one accepts a mind-body dualism, then if one accepts that it is immoral for one to own another's body, the self-ownership proposition becomes inconsistent as the act of the mind controlling the body become immoral in turn. Another contention, again based on accepting mind-body dualism, is that it would imply that an intangible entity (the mind) would own a tangible entity (the body) that is metaphysically impossible in reality (a thing without a tangible existence cannot act on a thing with a tangible existence).
When self-ownership is not based on cartesian dualism it creates an arbitrary separation within one human, i.e. within yourself and yourself. It implies that an entity can be owned by itself, which is impossible given the definition of "ownership," which explains the relation between two different entities, a subject and an object. Thus it would mean that one human is both the owner and the owned at once and therefore turning self-ownership into an oxymoron.
Another vector of attack is the chicken/egg issue. Specicially Self-ownership manifests a property rights concept and then defines self-ownership on the basis of those property rights. However it simulataneously the case that self-ownership tries to justify the existence of property rights as if they are stemming from it. This in effect creates a circular argument fallacy. To put it short, if property rights justify self-ownership, then the latter cannot be used to justify the former on the basis of someone owning the result of their actions. If Self-ownership is used to justify property rights on the other hand, then a different justification must be found for the concept of self-ownership itself that does not rest of people owning themselves (thus presupposing property rights)
Finally an argument can be made that self-ownership rests heavily on the way the English Language is formed, which uses words such as "my hand" or "myself," which imply ownership. The way language is formed, can be used to start arguing for the concept of self-ownership (eg "Why do we say that this hand is mine?"). However different languages or even different phrasings of the English language can avoid such a dualistic implication. For example, one can say that "I am my body" rather than "I own my body". This directly assaults the axiomatic conception of self-ownership as supposited by Hoppe.
[edit]See also
[edit]Notes and references
- ^ Cited in The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. 2004. Blackwell Publishing. p. 630
- ^ Olsaretti, Serena. 2004. Liberty, Desert and the Market. Cambridge University Press. p. 91
- ^ Dan-Cohen, Meir. 2002. Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. Princeton University Press. p. 296
- ^ Harris, J. W. 1996. Property and Justice. Oxford University Press. p. 189
- ^ Shapiro, Ian. 2001. Democratic Justice. Yale University Press. pp. 145-146
- ^ mises.org/journals/jls/17_2/17_2_3.pdf
- ^ Terrell, Timothy D. Property Rights and Externality: The Ethics of the Austrian School. Journal of Markets & Morality, Volume 2, Number 2 • Fall 1999
- ^ Rothbard, Murray Newton. The Ethics of Liberty. NYU Press. 2003. pp. 45 - 45
[edit]External links
- Self-Ownership, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Philosophy of Liberty
- The Ego and Its Own (also translated as The Individual and His Property), the main work by German philosopher Max Stirner
- What is a sovereign individual?
- A collection of arguments against self-ownership
