I very well know that the term “property” can be used to refer to a characteristic. But you’re only making my case stronger here, in that it is obviously fallacious to conflate “property” in the sense of a characteristic of a thing and “property” in the sense of control over something.
The way that you are using “self-ownership” here is nonsensical, in that a slave would still have “self-ownership”. Are you seriously claiming that a slave still has liberty? If by “liberty” we mean the lack of an interferencing with their person, their “liberty” is obviously lacking.
Part of the problem is that “self-ownership” is normally used to refer to “the right of self-ownership”, to not have one’s person interfered with. Using “self-ownership” to refer to individual identity is highly confusing and has nothing (directly) to do with normative rights claims.
I control my arms, but those arms are still my property. No dualism.
I mentioned “ownership” in a qualifying way, but I’ll clarify further. In the case of a slave, the master owns me. It’s conventional to state it this way. Yet, I am still owning me too. Yes I have liberty cause I could sit down and do nothing. Thus why I stated if I disobey a master I could be beaten until I, by choice (liberty), decided to cooperate. Or the master could simply kill the slave and be done with the rebellious person. This is why I said this is revolving around “definitions”.
It’s not highly confusing to me, but you made the remark, it came from you. For instance, this word “self” in the whole word: self-ownership. It is identifying an individual.
circularity doesnt come into it when you are talking facts. it is a fact that you own yourself.
It would be pretty weird if everything under anarchy were privatised, apart from peoples bodies, that where little spots of unowned property wandering around. why would you want to claim you didnt own you?, unnless you were wanting someone else to come and homestead you?. being homesteaded doesn’t sound like a good time in my opinion. Brainpolice might disagree.
You were not the same self as you were a year ago. You have different memories and views on life. In fact, ninety-eight percent of the atoms in a human’s body are replaced with new ones every year.
Alfred Korzybski (1933, pp. 429-432) will probably attribute the conflation of the ‘mental self’ with the ‘physical self’ as the confusion of orders of abstractions. Read pages 429-432 from Science and Sanity.
Korzybski (1933, pp. 441-442) suggests that the term ‘fact’ functions like a multiordinal term. A multiordinal term means that its meaning will change when used at different contexts.
The ‘fact’ that one owns his ‘mental’ self is not the same ‘fact’ that one owns his ‘physical’ self.
One can still argue even if he currently owns (possesses) some mere parts of his body. Why should we “maximize” his ownership? Why should we retain his maximized ownership in the future?
Because the maximization of ownership will have beneficial consequences? Going from partial ownership to the maximization of ownership is a non sequitur.
Hoppe should have just offered his consequentialist arguments for the maximization of ownership instead of trying to bridge the ‘is-ought’ dichotomy (which he didn’t) by mere rationalization.
yes, I agree with Jon. Argumentation ethics highlights what can and cannot be argued for. It tells you what possible moral positions are so incoherent that they can’t even be positively stated without trapping the stater in a contradiction.
The implied dualism is between the “I” and the “my arms”. In either case, this didn’t respond to what I was actually talking about in the quote. I was talking about the fallacy of conflating two different senses of the term “property”, I.E. a characteristic of something and control over something. For example, the fact that this computer is my “property” does not mean that the metaphysical “essence” of computers is that I have control over them.
To approach this from the inverse formulation, the fact that purposeful decision-making is a characteristic (or “property”, if you will) of me being a human being does not mean that I “own myself” in the other sense of the term “property”, in the same way that I could be said to “own” this computer. One significant difference is this: the computer is alienable from my “ownership”, while my will is not alienable from my body. This is part of the issue that I have with “self-ownership”, in that personhood is clearly not exchangable, alienable property in the same way that external objects are.
And, once again, this is a bizarre definition of “liberty”. In the normative and ethical sense, “liberty” does not refer to the mere fact that you have the capacity to make purposeful decisions or physiological autonomy. Neither does “ownership” refer to that. If we were to take such a definition seriously, then we’d effectively be asserting that everyone already is inherently free, and libertarians would not have liberty (or greater or more consistent liberty) as a goal to reach in the first place. The world would already be libertopia, since we’re basically defining liberty as a metaphysical given.
It should be quite clear that liberty is not a “natural law” in the sense of an inherent metaphysical “essence” or a scientific “law of nature”. It may be considered a capacity or a potentiality for a particular state of being, but that state of being that we call “liberty” is obviously not inherent, it is conditionally based on a lack of interferance by an external authority. It is an interpersonal norm, not a metaphysical category. Treating it as a metaphysical category is to misconceptualize it at the very core.
The problem is that the contradiction is not a formal or logical contradiction, it is only a contradiction between one’s theory and one’s behavior at best, and even that isn’t necessarily the case because it is simply not true that everyone already presupposes the same normative ethic as you. It only works if we conflate normative ethics (“people should not initiate force”) with metaphysical categories (“it is the essence of man that he does not initiate force”; which would be a falsehood in either case). To argue against a normative ethic is not to implicitly assume that normative ethic. Furthermore, even if there is a contradiction between someone’s theory and their behavior, that does not constitute a logical proof of the theory, it can only demonstrate personal hypocrisy at best. This is why argumentation ethics completely fails, because the statement “people should not have property rights” (as a normative ethic) is not inherently falsified by someone, in fact, controlling things - because “property rights” does not refer to the mere fact that people control things. “People should not have property rights” cannot reasonably be conflated with “people do not control things”, and argumentation ethics can only work if we engage in such a conflation.
Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics”, Kinsella’s “estoppel argument” and Molyneux’s “universally preferable behavior” all suffer from these same basic philosophical problems: the conflation of prescriptive statements with descriptive statements, the conflation of normative ethics with metaphysics, the conflation of acts of personal hypocrisy with logical contradictions and the conflation of falsifications with positive proofs. If someone says, “I don’t own myself”, this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because “ownership” does not mean “physiological autonomy”. If a slave says, “I am free”, this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they purposefully act, because “freedom” in the normative ethical sense does not mean “the capacity to purposefully act or make a statement”; the slave is in fact not free. If an average middle-class person says, “the normative ethic of private property rights is false”, this is not inherently disproven by the fact that they actually own a lot of things, because “property rights” does not merely mean “the fact that people own things”; at best, all you can point out using this method is that they are being hypocrits. In short, there are no formal logical contradictions in the mere act of making these statements and the assertion that there is reduces to plain old sophistry of an obvious sort.
as far as hypocrisy goes, if its not possible for anyone to state some particular position without being hypocritical in so doing. then in the case of that particular propostion the problem is not in the hypocrit, but rather, in the contradiction the hypocrit espouses.