Protected: self-ownership does own itself.
Update: dbzer0 has compiled a sqworl, Debunking Self-Ownership.]
Self-ownership is often treated as the very basis of liberty and anarchy, by a majority of American libertarians and “anarcho-”capitalists. It’s accepted as an axiom, and as an extremely fundamental truth, but when we examine it closely, it falls apart.
The basic justification for self-ownership is that when I perform an action, I am affirming a right to control my body, and therefore I have a property right in my body. (Some use ‘self-ownership’ as simply a metaphor for personal sovereignty or self-control, in which case I object to the term for more semantic reasons. But this does not mean my entire objection to the ‘self-ownership’ concept is entirely semantic.)
Stating that the mind owns the physical body as if they are separate entities, essentially assumes the existence of a soul-like being that occupies the physical, which is questionable especially from an atheistic or materialistic view. The mind or consciousness is better viewed as being a function of the body, not a separate entity, and thus “the body owns the body” becomes meaningless.
Some will argue that it may be true that you are yourself, but you can collapse the “owner” and “owned” into a single entity that is self-controlled. This seems to conflate physiological control with a right to control, so self-ownership makes a jump from the descriptive to the prescriptive. It may be a truism that I control my body in the physiological sense via my nerves, but it does not follow that I have, or need a right to control my arm. The right is simply unnecessary because there is no other way anyone but myself can control my arm physiologically. No one else can get into my mind and make me control my arm. A right to control is simply unnecessary, just like I do not need a right to have naturally dark hair. It’s a biological fact that cannot be any other way.
Another argument is that if I don’t own myself, then others can have a property claim in my body. But the conclusion does not follow– just because I do not need a property right in my body, it does not follow that others do. It’s certainly possible to reject that anyone owns my body, period.
When people talk about self-ownership being necessary because of say, politicians claiming to have a right over the person’s body, we must note that no politician can actually go into a citizen’s nerves and make them move their arm in a physiological sense, or even attempts to do so. If for example, a cop harasses me and handcuffs me as I physically resist, the cop is still unable to actually get into my mind and move my arm via my nerves. My nerves are inherently tied in to control the rest of my physical body– there is simply no other way. I do not need a right to control my body anymore than I need a right to be naturally a member of the homo sapiens species. The right does not necessarily follow from the fact of reality.
So in the cop case, you have only two alternatives to express your values– either comply, or get beaten up. If you value your life more, you will allow the cop to do what he wants, and if you value non-submittance more than your life or the pain, you will continue resisting. In both cases, you still physiologically control yourself, and you are still technically a “self-owner.” If self-ownership derives from the biological fact of physiological control, it has to be noted that the State does not claim to have physiological control over a citizen, which is impossible anyway– it merely uses threats of aggression to limit freedom.
And even if (hypothetically) it was possible for the cop to somehow will me to submit via internal means, the biological fact that he now controls me would seem to justify him having a right to do so. The fact of reality that he mentally controls me would logically lead to that he has a right to do so. Some will argue that since I own myself, he does not have a right to take over my body. But then if I have a right to own myself due to the fact that I physiologically control myself, then the same could be used for the fact that the cop now controls me.
“But weren’t the African slaves being denied self-ownership?”
Those who argue that African slaves were being denied self-ownership, aren’t taking into account that the slaves still physiologically control themselves, and when a slave chooses to work rather than be beaten up, he/she is merely exercising a right over his/her body, and thus he/she still owns himself/herself. From this view, the slaves still own themselves as they still have physiological control over their bodies.
Some would argue that the overseer is simply attempting to deny the fact that the slave is a self-owner. The problem with this is that again, the overseer is not trying to get into the slave’s neurological system, take over the slave’s nerves, and make the slave perform labor. The overseer is limiting the slave’s freedom by restricting his/her alternatives: either the slave must labor, or be beaten up.
Besides, slaves have also been used for their mental abilities, not just physical labor. If I was to use a slave as a tutor, there is effectively no claim over owning his/her body. It’s a restriction of the slaves’ alternatives to express values.
As for individual sovereignty, it would seem that defining personhood in property terms reduces to a view where the body is nothing but a sack of property meat, and if you lost your mind, your body can be someone else’s property. When you deny that bodies can be property, there is no jeopardy.
Some additional arguments against self-ownership:
1. If we hold that people are property, and one owns the product of their labor, it would follow that a baby is the property of the parents’, as the baby is wholly made of the parents’ flesh and resources. This contradicts that the baby is supposedly a self-owner to any degree.
2. If you own your body as property, then logically you can sell your body, but you cannot actually give up your physiological control of your body. The conventional usage of the term “selling your body” usually means that you allow others to do what they would like with you– but in reality, you are simply willfully consenting to whatever they do to you. You cannot actually give up the fact that your mind is interconnected with your body (and if that was even possible, one could argue that “the right to control yourself follows from the biological fact of self-control” would lead to the conclusion that the controller now has a right over you due to the fact that he/she has physiological control of you).
When one argues that it is true that it’s impossible to give up a right to one’s body and therefore self-ownership is axiomatically true, that makes the “right” completely unnecessary and superficial, just like I do not need a right to be born with dark hair. I simply am that way. These are nothing more than fundamental properties and biological facts, and a right to a biological fact makes no sense.
3. If it was actually possible to ‘sell yourself’, you sell your liberty into slavery. Typically the right-”libertarian” argument for ‘voluntary slavery’ is basically that you should have “liberty to sell yourself into slavery”, but to have liberty to enslave yourself leads to a contradiction.
4. If people are their own property, then logically you have no right to forcefully remove a trespasser from your property because the trespasser still owns himself. In this case, it would appear that your property right conflicts with the trespasser’s self-ownership, and if they are both ultimately nothing more than property rights, then they should be treated on the same level. So here we run into a conflict– if both the body and land are to be thought of in propertarian terms, they end up trumping each other.
4. The arguments are all circular if you bring in self-ownership as the basis of property, because the concept of self-ownership (which always means property-ownership) cannot exist without the concept of property. So we must ask, which comes first, self-ownership or property?
If self-ownership comes first, then what justifies self-ownership in the absence of a justification for property-ownership claims, and if property comes first, then what justifies property in the absence of self-ownership as its basis?
So what about freedom and individual liberty? Freedom (as in freedom to have as many viable alternatives) is necessary for people to achieve their values, and freedom is necessarily anarchistic because the State and other systems of control and oppression interfere with that.
- Noor