Ah, the classic problems with the concept of self-ownership. Laminustacitus already pointed out part of the problem: there is a conflation between using “ownership” to refer to the fact of purposeful action and how we otherwise use the term “ownership” to refer to relations between a person and an external object. Using the concept of property for the consequences of people’s actions is just philosophically sloppy. Willpower, intentionality, action, etc., is not ownership. At best, self-ownership is just a bad metaphor for individual agency in the world.
There are problems with what the OP wrote for sure. How do you suppose that we have any concept of ownership if people aren’t considered self-owners by default though?
To me, that question is circular. It’s effectively asking “how do we have a concept of ownership if we don’t presuppose the concept of ownership?”. I think it’s pretty simple: ownership is a relationship between a person and an external object in which people control or possess that object. I don’t need the notion of a dualistic self or a selfhood that is owned to grasp the general notion of ownership. What is presupposed by ownership of external objects isn’t “self-ownership”, but the capacity of people to purposefully act. If people are using “self-ownership” as a metaphor for purposeful action, then I don’t see a need for the term to begin with. It just seems to confuse personhood or agency itself with ownership.
I hold to the 4th position that Rothbard barely addressed in his three-way choice between self-ownership, other-ownership of bodies, and ownership of each by each: noone owns anyone, including themselves. I see it as unecessary and potentially philosophically detrimental to concieve of personhood in the exact same terms that we concieve of property in external objects. The simple argument that “if you don’t own yourself, you couldn’t act at all” doesn’t really demolish this because it’s simply conflating the concept of ownership with individual agency (not to mention that it implies that some sort of mind/body dualism is necessary for an explaination of human action).
At this point, the discussion devolves into some really tiresome metaphysics.
Who is acting when the human acts?
No. If we can’t call it human action, then what are you proposing to call it? human=property. It’s semantics.
It is utility. The person acting is the property acting. person=property. It’s semantics.
If you are saying ownership deals with just or unjust property, then I see the confusion. I have not defined just or unjust ownership. I have not qualified it that way. It is an acknowledgment on my behalf that semantically when a person is acting, they are in control of whatever they are acting. It is deliberate and purposeful. The person via control or possession of him or her self or the external object thereby semantically owns (or replace owns here with controls, possesses, acts) their individual person and the same goes for any particular external object.
You spent that whole paragraph arguing against something that you, yourself, concede to right here.
P.S. here’s a dictionary link to the definition of own
so that’s your hang-up. Not because of any arguable reason, but an opinion to what “potentially” is “detrimental”. Now I understand your position.
The underlined portions contradict each other.
But the problem cuts deeper. As Brain Police explained, the argument is based on ignoring the difference between two senses of the word *“*ownership”: 1) actual control - what one does control, and 2) normative ownership - what one ought to control.
The notion of self-ownership as a foundation for libertarian ethics starts and ends as a garden-variety equivocation between those two senses. I think this will be clear to you if you reconsider what you wrote above. You know the argument is meant to establish a normative (“ought”) conclusion, namely ownership of type (2) above. Yet you ask, “how would you act if you didn’t own your self?” which plainly refers to ownership of type (1) (actual control).
If it helps, whenever you use the word ownership (or right, property, etc.) in the sense of “actual control” (de facto rights, property actually under one’s control, etc.) make it bold, and whenever you use it in the sense of normative ownership, underline it.
Example from what you wrote above:
“Doesn’t the very fact that you act NECESSITATE that you own your self? And since you necessarily own your self you own your labor? And therefore private property is a fact of the world?”
This way you’re effectively saying, “The fact that there is property actually under people’s control is a fact of the world.” Pretty uncontroversial.
Or suppose instead you wish to end up with a normative statement. Then somewhere you have to change bold to underline, but where?
“Doesn’t the very fact that you act NECESSITATE that you own your self? And since you necessarily own your self you own your labor? And therefore private property is a fact of the world?”
The problem is now that there are no grounds for going from actual control to normative ownership at any point in that line of reasoning.
I hope this clarifies the basic conflation in terms that Brain Police mentioned. In principle it’s no different than saying, “Rivers have banks. Banks contain a lot of money. Therefore rivers are wealthy.” Of course, one might object, river banks and money banks are completely different things, but then so are actual control and normative ownership. Indeed, to argue that they are pretty much the same would be to tantamount to declaring, “Might makes right.”
Brianpolice, you, and others in this thread are assuming the OP meant 2. I don’t know of anybody in this thread that has explicitly stated 2. The assumptions thereby cause unnecessary mal-contention. I suggest not assuming what the OP has stated, as I’ve stated to banned earlier in the thread.
Even this distinction leads to a faulty conclusion, as the thoughts you use to determine action are brought in front of your “mind’s eye” for consideration by a means that the ego (the self, the homonculus) is not in control of.
I actually I go a bit further than that, in that even (1) doesn’t make sense in terms of “ownership”. I don’t think it even makes sense to say, descriptively, “I own myself”. Perhaps you are yourself, and a feature of selfhood/personhood is the capacity to act, but ownership isn’t the capacity to act. I don’t see how it makes sense without assuming a mind/body dualism, with “self-ownership” effectively translating to “my mind owns my body”. But if we reject mind/body dualism, the whole notion of “self-ownership” even as a description sort of collapses. “Self-ownership” begins to appear as a euphamism for a ghost in the machine, and we’re right back at the annoying metaphysical debate that plagues modern philosophy from descartes onwards.
Methinks it’s best not to concieve of people as owned meatsacks.
When a person acts they own their actions. Their actions are deliberately their actions. Their actions are controlled by him or her self. That’s human action.
My stating “my mind acts my body”. That’s not dualistic. Or, I can also descriptively state: “my mind controls my body” and it does when I think to move my arm and thereby move my arm. It’s teleological. Means-ends. Own semantically is control or deliberation. In case you oversaw it in my last post here’s a quick link to a dictionary to make it helpful.
No. It’s doesn’t collapse and the injection of dualism isn’t necessary to understand human action. How about “I control” or “I act and even deliberately and with purpose”? To say “I control myself or I own myself” isn’t dualistic. That is simply a self-reflective statement on who is acting, controlling, and owning, which is the human. That’s why it’s called human action to point out who is doing the action. When a human acts such a human acting isn’t being controlled (read semantically owned) by another person or that would defy human action spelled out by Mises. The human acting does so deliberately and with purpose and involves choice.
To argue that a human acting isn’t making the choice, or isn’t in control, or isn’t being deliberate, then such an argument is against praxelogic. I still think you’re are arguing semantics as control, possession, and acting equates own in common everyday terms today. Maybe you’re not the common term type of person. So be it. I don’t think it helps for anybody to argue semantics, so, I’ll leave it at this.
And this all still doesn’t say who ethically owns or who is the just owner. I haven’t brought that up at all throughout this thread and I’ve argued to assume the OP did is to fall prey to all the pitfalls of assuming without self-evident logic or facts. Who knows. Maybe the OP did, but I don’t see any of those words “ethical” or “just” or even the word “right” mentioned in the OP.
Actions are not material resources that can be possessed, exchanged, inherited, and so on. That’s why I don’t think it makes sense to call this “ownership”. My actions are “mine” in the sense that they can be attributed to me as an agent, but that’s not exactly the same thing as ownership - it’s personal identity and responsibility. Something that is inherently a part of you or a consequence of you isn’t the control of a resource.
It is dualistic in insofar as it implies that the body and mind are separate entities or substances. It seems to me that, if anything, you’re defining “self-ownership” as the same thing as “free will”, with “free will” being described in terms of the mind owning the body.
I don’t think it’s purely semantic. It’s conceptual. To say “I own myself” is dualistic in that the “I” and the “myself” in the statement are relational. The moment that we think of the self as a whole, you bump into this skeptical line of reasoning: If I’m owned, then it must be something other than me doing the owning, and if I own something, it must be something other than me that I’m owning. I cannot “own myself” without splitting myself into two parts: the part that is owned and the part that owns.
I’m not argueing that humans don’t make choices. I’m rejecting the idea that “self-ownership” is the same thing as Mises’s “action axoim”. And that’s what I think the OP essentially puts foreward.
Maybe it’s over the use of the term “self” in “self-ownership” that might be confounding the issue. I’m focused on “own”, which means semantically control. If I point out who is controlling or making the act of such an entity called human, then I think it’s valid to replace human with self without losing anything that is being descriptive of human action for I haven’t stated who’s self or any quality about the self. I’ve used self in the descriptive sense of pointing out the agent or reference point.
Are you saying the self is the mind? And that the owning is the body aspect? If so, then I think that doesn’t get to what I’m trying to say. I am pointing out that the self is the whole person, body and mind. And such a person (self) controls him or her own person (self). I wasn’t thinking about free-will in terms of self-ownership, though, that is the act of making a choice, it involves free-will. And to be able to use free-will involves controlling of something called free-will.
I am not thinking in terms of mind owning body. You are assuming I’m thinking of the mind separate from the body. I can only guess why. You are introducing dualism to this and dualism is only arbitrary, so, since I didn’t introduce that word to the conversation and you did, then it is based on your assumption. I will make a guess as to why you think this way, but it’s a guess so I’m going to assume here to maybe figure out why you are saying this. Maybe you only think of the “self” in terms of the mind, therefore to say the self owns something your definition of self being only mind therefore would lead to the conclusion that the mind or self owns body. Since self is only mind according to your interpretation, remember I am assuming here because I don’t know why you are saying this, then that leaves out the body. So what is the body? If it is not the self, then it must be what the mind/self owns. But that doesn’t corroborate with human action or deliberate control of a human making a choice. I think choice happens in the mind. I choice and deliberate upon my actions from my mind, but it is still my mind and body involved in the choice/action. I thereby am controlling my choices. I own them. And they are private until I make them public thereby confirming human action or the choice I made for all to see.
Not relational. It is reflective. There is a difference. I control myself isn’t relational. It is self-reflective to acknowledge that I am able to control this “I” or in other words, to control this self (which is mind and body). I am not dualistic in these regards. I think the self is this whole person.
No. Semantically own is control. It also means my effort. That’s why I pointed out the dictionary not as an authority but to point out that I am not making up a new definition to fit with my reasoning.
But that could be said about human action. There is the part that is acted and the part that acts. There is the instigator of the act and then that which acts. It’s teleological, meaning, a human makes a decision to act whether it is to act towards goal A or B. But always there is something that causes the act and that is choice. But to say choice owns what it has chosen is true as well. It owns it in the sense that it has controlled or possessed the choice and has therefore made the choice. The choice is owned by the person making the choice. It is that particular person’s choice and thus action. I admit this bit took me a little time, but I keep mentality in this exercise replacing own with control or vice versa to get the full meaning of the word own. It makes it easier for me to think of own in terms of control or deliberation, meaning, the choice didn’t control me. I made or controlled the choice.
I don’t think it is the same thing. I think axioms coincide with one another. Each axiom coming from a different angle and when it is being descriptive of human nature, in other words, defining what a human is, then such axioms being self-evident will necessarily coincide but there are distinctions. Action axiom is choice and the means to end human effort. Self-ownership on the other hand defines who is acting and that is the human and it also implies that the human is in control or owns their actions. It is not another person but it is the particular person doing the act. It is not another person but it is the particular person controlling/owning the act. It is their act. It is theirs.
I don’t know. And I’d rather refrain from assuming about the OP.
I responded in a separate post to this as I saw you edited it in after I was finished with my reply. God knows I do that a lot myself.[:P]
I would say that in practical terms there is certainly a mind/body dichotomy which is sufficient to support “self-ownership” as more than a metaphor. The fact is that the entire body is not necessary to sustain the mental “self”, and those parts which are not so necessary are certainly owned by “me”. I could sell a kidney or a tooth or a leg, if I so desired. I could even sell my brain, though of course this would result in “my” death. So in this sense “I” (the actor) can and do own “myself” (the scarce resources used to implement the actor’s desires, i.e. the body). It’s not just a matter of semantics in that we have “individual sovereignty”, we actually do own ourselves and most people instinctively understand this.
Well, flip it around. Are coma victims just lumps of un-utilized resources? Would a homesteader of said body be able to wholesale them to Purina if he wanted?
The thing is that nobody knows how much of the human body is required to sustain the concept of the self, or in what condition is it required to be in. This is getting metaphysical very quickly.
I don’t know what purpose there is to flipping it around, but I’d say coma victims own themselves as much as any other human. If they die the body would be disposed of as directed, or otherwise as directed by the property owner of the space occupied by the body.
Regardless, my point stands. There is enough dualism between mind and body for some body parts to be lost, and for me that’s sufficient to establish a real (not metaphorical) property right described by self-ownership.
But if they don’t respond to stimuli, if they are “brain-dead”, how do we know they still have a self to won them? We have no evidence of one.
I don’t really understand how that follows, but if that’s your belief, more power to you.
Isn’t evidence all we have to go on when it comes to understanding the external world? Some people get buried alive. It sucks. Technology gets better and in hindsight previous generations might seem barbaric. Thus is the way of the world don’t you think?
Thinking about it, if a body can exist without a mind, supported by exterior machines and whatnot, clearly there is a duality, is there not?
This just tells me that without at least some minimal body, or physical structure, the mind could not exist. This would imply that they are one in the same. You could have a body without a mind, but you couldn’t have a mind without a body.