I’ve been reading a bit about feudalism and medieval Europe, and it’s crystalized what bothers me about the philosophy of voluntarism and the concept of self-ownership.
The problem with both is that they don’t actually protect human freedom, because they allow for freedom to be ‘voluntarily’ given away. After all, if you “own yourself,” you can also “sell yourself,” into slavery for example. So, although it sounds like a concept which would protect freedom at first, voluntarism actually creates an intellectual justification for slavery.
For example, if I were dying of thirst in a desert, and someone came by and offered to give me water only if I signed a contract becoming their slave for life, it would apparently be justifiable under a theory of voluntary contracts for that person to enforce that contract, because it was ‘voluntarily’ entered in to. That’s an unlikely scenario, but this kind of situation happened all the time in Medieval Europe - someone would be hungry and landless and enter into a feudal contract with a land-owning lord, or and independent land owners would voluntarily become a serf of a local lord, becoming a serf and recieving a plot of land to farm, but they would also often lose many of their rights in the process, for life. Serfs might have to ask their lords permission to marry, for example, or might be banned from leaving their plot, and on and on. But, still, it was a voluntary contract, voluntarily entered in to by both parties.
This same kind of idea seems to underlie the idea that soldiers lose their rights when they enter the military, because they sign a piece of paper waiving those rights.
The alternative idea is one that I think is far more protective of liberty in the real world - more libertarian you might say - and that is the idea of “inalienable rights.” Inalienable rights are rights you can’t give away - you don’t ‘have’ them in an ownership sense, but rather they’re an inseperable part of you. Since you don’t own them, you can’t give them up, and any attempt to do so is fraud on your part and aggression on the part of the person who would have you waive them.
Self-ownership is often thought to be compatible, or even beneficial to property rights, but I’m not sure that this is the case. How can we legitimately own something we did not buy or create? Granting the principle of self-ownership implies that we can own things we didn’t buy, create or have given to us, since we do not buy ourselves, give ourselves to ourselves or create ourselves. Self-ownership introduces a case in which we supposedly can own something which we don’t buy, receive or create, and in that way is corrosive to a good theory of property ownership.
Voluntarism and freedom to contract are sometimes thought of as compatible with anarchism or even being anarchistic, but I’m not sure this is true either. Enforcement of contracts is a major wellspring of government. An agency with the power to enforce contracts looks very much like a government, whether it is publicly or privately provided.
Voluntarism is mostly concerned with process, while the idea of inalienable rights is mainly concerned with outcome. The later seems preferable to me, because whether we can exercise a certain right is more important than how our ability to do so came about. Process is important too, of course, but less important than results.