So, as self-ownership is pretty much the lynchpin of libertarianism, what is your justification for it?
It seems like it is just an axiom that everyone on this board accepts, but i’ve never heard a sound justification for it.
i.e. why do you have the right for your property not to be violated?
I’ll provide a lot of resources for more info, but basically and most simply, you own your body because you have a better claim to it than anyone else.
See:
“How We Come to Own Ourselves”
“The Economics of Self-Ownership”
“Argumentation and Self-Ownership”
“Self-Ownership, World-Ownership, and Initial Acquisition”
“The A Priori of Ownership : Kant on Property”
“Private Property’s Philosopher”
Hoppe in One Lesson, Illustrated in Welfare Economics
Be sure to check out The Economics and Ethics of Private Property and The Philosophy of Ownership
And as for your question about rights, it is addressed in the texts above, but also you might check this playlist. (If you’d like all the Tom Woods lecture one page, it was posted here.) Also check out selected parts of The Ethics of Liberty and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (such as chapter 15 and chapter 2, respectively)
Here. Scroll down and watch the video. Hoppe justifies it within the first 5 minutes.
You and Nature
Imagine you are all alone in nature. You’ll need to get goods. You can get these by working. If you have time or savings left after feeding yourself, then you can spend that while making tools. These tools can increase your production.
Other People
You come across another person. He has different skills and a different environment. What the two of you can do is that each spends his time doing what he’s best at, and then you trade with each other, making you both better off. This means you’ll be important to each other. After you’ve specialized, those skills will keep improving.
A third and fourth person show up. You’ll only do a trade if you think it benefits you. Someone has to offer you that good of a price where you can stop making it yourself; and that is based on your skills, environment and wants. This is the way all can coordinate their production, which they also keep adjusting over time. Becoming wealthier here is a case of producing and trading a lot of what the others value.
Interfering with the work or the trading of the individuals means there will be less to trade or it will distort the coordination of work in the group. To prevent this, the concept property can be adopted. It means: what you make out of nature becomes yours, and you are free to trade it.
You can choose to hold your property in common ownership with someone else, but it means you stop checking if you’re materially benefited between you and that person, which would be the case under trading.
There are a million justifications for the NAP, as a moral nihlist I merely consider that it’s disgusting, vulgar, barbaric, and usually contradictory not to adhere to a system of individual property rights. Men, as entities who seek after different goals, should be able to live in the way that they each see as fitting.
There is no ultimate logical justification for anything. All logical reasoning depends on premises. Self-ownership is a premise, not a conclusion.
I think Hoppe and others would disagree with you.
Could you please explain what you mean by that? I hope you’re not making an appeal to authority and an appeal to the majority at the same time.
Do you think you have a right to decide what to do with your own body or does the “public” own it?
If it’s the former, then private property exists.
If it’s the latter, then you should be asking everyone if you should be using the computer or not.
I mean exactly what I said. I think Hoppe and others would disagree that “there is no ultimate logical justification for anything” and that “self-ownership is a premise, not a conclusion.”
Might be a hassle if anybody could go around taking whatever they wanted.
Okay. I guess I’m wondering what your intentions are with that statement. I mean, are you expecting me to now revise my thinking because (you think) Hoppe and others would disagree with it?
The concepts of Self-Ownership and Non-Aggression are two very different things.
The axiom or principle of self-ownership is defined as being ‘correct’ because to dispute this axiom, means you implicitly agree with it. To dispute it requires you to assert self-ownership of your body in discourse / arguementation.
You cannot disagree with the concept of self-ownership without engaging in a performative contradiction. So in Libertarian philosophy ‘Self-Ownership’ becomes an incontestable axiom. The act of disagreement itself implies self-ownership of ones own body / mind.
How Libertarians then apply this to property rights in physical, external objects is logical, but more vague and not as strong a link IMO
This is all called arguementation / discourse ethics and was developed by Hans Hoppe based on earlier work by Jurgern Habermas. Once an normative axiom such as ‘self-ownership’ is indentified, then a system of ethics can be deduced out from this incontestable starting point.
As it is with all libertarians: it is my personal preference and we believe we should all have a clear conscious in defending that moral code with mortal force. Apart from that, there is no universally objective reason why anybody should adopt the non-aggression principle.
it is like chocolate. Some people like it and others do not. There is no science behind those preferences.
My intention was to point out that others (meaning more than one, meaning more minds than you), and who have spend a considerable amount of time studying the subject and writing about the subject would probably disagree with your assertion. So while I don’t ever expect anyone to change their mind, I would say it may be wise to look more into what these people have to say, and at the very least, perhaps not state your position with such an assured, undeniable-factual tone.
I mean, I’m aware you’re one of those who believes that everything is releative, words don’t have meanings, and more or less everything is anything and anything is nothing, so I suppose asserting “there is no logical justification for anything” kind of goes right along with that, but can you honestly not think of a framwork in which self-ownership is a conclusion and not a premise?
I have looked into what those people have to say, and I don’t mind doing so again. But I don’t understand why you’re so offended by my apparent tone.
No, I don’t believe that everything is relative. I also don’t believe that words don’t have meanings - only that they have no inherently true meanings. With all due respect, how you could see me as believing otherwise is beyond me.
And I didn’t say that there’s no logical justification for anything. I said that there’s no ultimate logical justification for anything. That is, all logical reasoning ultimately rests upon one or more premises, i.e. propositions that are simply assumed/taken as given. Please understand that in no way did I mean to present myself as a complete skeptic of logic.
I suppose one could make self-ownership a conclusion in the sense of concluding it from a given, broader definition of “ownership” or the like. But that would just be shifting the premise further back in the chain of logical reasoning. My point is that, for better or for worse, self-ownership cannot be established as a fact about the world.