As a few others have suggested, self-ownership is only an issue if you believe property is or must be justified in the Lockean/Rothbardian way. Because you own yourself, you claim ownership over unowned resources by mixing your labor with it. But this is not the only way to understand property or justify your libertarian beliefs.
I think Hume had a better explanation than Locke as to what property is: a social convention. We agree to respect property because it is beneficial to do so. It maintains order by serving as a simple and widely applicable solution to conflict. If you and I both think we have the right to use a certain good, we can resort to the simple and clear rules of property, as opposed to arguing who deserves the good more or who would gain more marginal utility from it. If you reject this property “right,” then you are seen as untrustworthy and a menace by those who do respect property. You undermine all social order.
Where I think Locke and others go wrong is that, instead of explaining how you come to own property, they believe they are explaining why you come to own property. It is not that, by mixing your labor with an unowned resource, you suddenly possess some sort of metaphysical connection to it. Rather, by mixing your labor with an unowned resource, others regard the resource as belonging to you, based on the (again, simple and clear) convention that first-come, first-served.
Where I think Locke and others go wrong is that, instead of explaining how you come to own property, they believe they are explaining why you come to own property. It is not that, by mixing your labor with an unowned resource, you suddenly possess some sort of metaphysical connection to it. Rather, by mixing your labor with an unowned resource, others regard the resource as belonging to you, based on the (again, simple and clear) convention that first-come, first-served-
Thanks for responding. One last question, hopefully, as I am not sure if one can be a libertarian without having natural rights as a basis for almost everything libertarians stand-for.
How do you argue against intervention in your life, body, liberty and property? Since you can’t point to self-ownership what do you do … ? Doesn’t it make your claims as strong as the entity (for example, a government) that wants to claim such ownership over you?
It seems your left to having to refer to “oh but it’s the best way to live in society”! They don’t really care about that …
Thanks
[Oh, and how do you quote someone on this forum ? =] ]
I’m not seeing what the problem is. Why do I need something “solid and concrete” to base my libertarianism on? All I need is something more solid and concrete than the alternative, even the way you’ve set it up. A vacuous “maybe” is not an argument - is there a stronger argument for why someone else has a right to control me than as for why I should control myself?
Fluke, use [ quote] and [ /quote], without the space.
Whoa, how does the government already have a strong claim to owning you? It is up to the state, or anyone else, to argue as to why they should have the right to use your body against your will. It would be ridiculous for you to be on the defense, for you to prove why it is you should be left alone. Consider, the state (or anyone besides you) would have to offer a reason as to why it has a right to your body. It is up to the state to prove its case, not for you to falsify its claim to your body. There is a potentially infinite number of reasons the state could give as to why it owns you; expecting you to falsify each one is epistemologically impossible. Instead, the state must provide one good reason as to why you do not have the freedom to act in a way that does not harm others; so far, it has been unable to do so.
You always have choice. Even if people external to yourself threaten physical punishment you can always choose punishment over obeying their demands.
In that sense you always have control. That’s where ‘ownership’ comes in. That’s why people argue against regulation because it gives government control over your physical property, the can decide what you can and cannot do.This would constitute a violation of your right to property. Simply because someone violates your right does not mean that it does not exist, it only means that ‘violators’ exist.
In life we don’t have control over the choices others will present to us, but we always have choice in how we respond. Any violation of this is a violation of our right to self ownership (physical assaults etc.).
Does this help at all? I’m hazy on points too, so any discussion tends to help my understanding improve as well.
I feel a bit disenchanted by this. If something isn’t ‘set in stone’ and concrete then it seems extremely weak to say that I am entitled to my body (or anything else for that matter).
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. If you are talking about rights, such as slavery, I personally agree that there is no exclusive natural law which suggests that it is wrong to enslave you. I am pretty close to a moral nihilist. Nevertheless, it stands that humans own themselves in the sense that they own their own actions.
Let’s, for example, talk about slavery. I don’t know too much about animal biology, but as a dog owner it seems to me that at a certain point the dog considers himself owned. The dog doesn’t necessarily choose to follow your orders, but may do so instinctually as a result of the fact that dogs assimilate the fact that they are owned. I don’t know if this is entirely true or not, but just for the sake of argument assume it is. Human slaves, on the other hand, reason, and their choice to follow the orders of the slave master is entirely voluntary (not instinctual) and purposeful in the sense that they do so only because the alternative may be worth (such as flogging, death, et cetera). This is the main difference I see.
What does this mean? Given that humans commit to these cost-benefit analyses, it seems to me that over the long run it simply becomes more profitable to cooperate than to force. This is one reason why slavery tends to naturally extinguish itself (as rational thinkers, slaves usually are less productive than paid employees).
So, for me, the root of property rights is not self-ownership per sé, but the fact that we reason.
I argue that even if we owned ourselves, but biologically we were unreasonable (let’s say altruistic), then we would not develop property rights.
The problem is you’ve drunk the semantic Kool-Aid and are thinking of anti-statism in terms of self-ownership, when self-ownership was just a flawed and misguided argument to win people over. The real reason to reject statism is because it does not result in things I want. Does it for you? That is the only question. As far as I’m concerned, rights could just have been concepts invented for the purpose of pleading with the State and rallying political support based on a sense of self-righteousness. They work for that purpose - persuading others - but if you really want to know why you are for or against something, in end you must make a cost-benefit analysis.
If you seek to justify things in terms of morals, fine, but if you then decide to analyze the basis of your morals, prepare to be disappointed. If you want to think in terms of morals, you have to leave them completely unquestioned. That’s a personal choice. If you’re the type who always wants to know why, and justbecause is not a good enough answer, you’re simply going to have to find reasons why you would be happier if the state were gone. And I think you will find plenty of those!
Ethics and objective value have been covered extensively on these forums, especially last summer:
“We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it” -Mises
Hoppe’s AE my refutation David Osterfeld on natural rights - #56 by Amanojack
I think that AJ gave a good enough answer, but I want to add a few things.
Natural rights people are just confused, indirect consequentialists. People came up with “natural rights” based on the consequences of holding those beliefs, but I don’t think that much of it was conscious.
Half of what we call “morality” is what our subconsciousness tells us about how we should treat other people. We think of a situation in which we have a number of options of how to treat other people, and then we feel either a positive emotion or a negative emotion about each of them. We might think of a situation in which somebody is drowning, conclude that we could either try to save them or just leave, feel a positive emotion about the former, a negative emotion about the latter, and then decide that the former is the “moral” thing to do, and the latter is the “immoral” thing to do. This sort of “morality” could be called our “moral feelings”, and biologically evolved just like anything else giving us advice, such as taste, happiness, and so on.
The other half of what we call “morality” is what our consciousness tells us about how we should treat other people. We think of a situation in which we have a number of option of how to treat other people, and then we perform a conscious cost-benefit analysis about the options. We might think of a situation in which somebody is drowning, conclude that we could either try to save them or just leave, think that saving them would be beneficial to us for some reasons, such as social capital from other people who hear about it, the fact that you like the person and would like to be able to hang out with them, or whatever, and think that letting them drown would be the opposite, and then decide that the former is the correct thing to do, and the latter is the incorrect thing to do.
When people sit down and try to spin out what is moral and what isn’t in the first sense, they just try to think of a situation in which they have more than one option of how to treat somebody, and then consult their subconsciousness to see what its advice is. But, when people sit down and try to spin out what is moral and what isn’t in the second sense, they try to consciously figure out what the consequences would be of each option, and for that you often need economics.
Both of the methods are cost-benefit analyses. To put it simply, but a bit superficially, the only difference is that one is conscious, and therefore driven by cultural evolution, and the other one is subconscious, and thereby driven by biological evolution. We should in my opinion use both methods, but always keep in mind that they are both cost-benefit analyses. We shouldn’t think of the former as a sort of cold, sober way of looking at things, and the latter as a sort of romantic, mystical way of looking at things. We should consult both of them, but just realize that they both are of the nexus of means and ends.
(By the way, we can use economics to find out why we evolved those subconscious feelings about how we should treat other people, and why they spit out the advice that they do. To put it simply, dividing labor is more productive than not dividing labor, and anyone in the division of labor, no matter how far away they are, are to some extent helping you out. We feel compassion for other people, and want to help them out, because them being active in the division of labor helps us out in the long term.)
Taste is the best example of something else where we have subconscious advice in the form of feelings, but also conscious thoughts about it. Our taste tells us whether it would be a good idea to keep eating something. A bad taste is our subconsciousness advising us to stop eating what we are eating, and a good taste is our subconsciousness advising us to continue eating what we are eating. But we can also think about whether something is a good thing to eat. We might decide that ice cream isn’t a good thing to eat based on research studies linking it to a disease or something.
Why is our taste so wrong so often? Why do people so often want to eat something that they know in their thoughts is unhealthy, but do so just because it tastes so good? Why would our two senses, our feelings about what foods to eat, and our thoughts about what foods to eat, be so against each other? Well, the problem is this. Our sense of taste evolved around certain inputs. Our taste evolved only needing to deal with giving output about a small number of inputs. But we have in the modern world many more things that our sense of taste didn’t have to deal with when it was evolving. To give you a quick example, maybe one of the parameters was basically “the denser the food the better”, which would have worked when the densest thing that we could find were nuts and seeds, which we might not have found very often. But we have in the modern world the ability to make things artificially dense, so our sense of taste rewards us even though it didn’t evolve to even appraise anything as dense as that. Maybe, if it did have to appraise things as dense as that, it would have developed a more nuanced set of parameters.
Now, could our moral thoughts and moral feelings also be in conflict like that? Of course, and I actually think that they are. We apparently lived in small tribes of mostly people of our extended family during the time when most people consider our biology to have reached pretty close to where it is right now. But the way that the economy worked in small tribes like that was different. Price gouging would be evil, simply because we would have bought the thing that we were selling from the same person that we are trying to sell to after they find out that they need it after all. Walter Block, among others, has talked about this. He thinks that a lot of the tendencies of most people to embrace socialism and whatever are just fueled by the fact that our biology is basically the same as those people who lived in small tribes of most people of your extended family, where mild socialism actually makes sense. But now we live in a huge, integrated society, where we divide labor with complete strangers across the world, and which is much different, which means that, contrary to a lot of our moral feelings, socialism doesn’t really make any sense. Foreign aid packages are a good example. They sound great, and average people might call you selfish or something if you tell them that we shouldn’t be sending foreign aid packages. But we know through our moral thoughts that foreign aid packages might sound good, but they mess up the people who are getting them in the long term, whether anyone involved knows or not.
So my conclusion is that I think that both the moral thoughts, and the moral feelings, are important, but that, just like with taste, we need to be very wary of the advice of the moral feelings, because the input that it evolved around is a lot different than the input that it gets nowadays.
I am against statism because of what my very limited economic knowledge tells me are the consequences, because of the fact that my very limited economic knowledge tells me that it isn’t a good means to our ends, not because of a mystical thing like natural rights.
Natural rights are just where people consult their moral feelings about certain things, consult their moral thoughts about those things, and then give an answer to what is moral, pretending that they didn’t ever consult their moral thoughts. I don’t think that anyone ever spins out anything that is purely just moral feelings, and I don’t even think that is possible, because I know that our thoughts about the healthiness of food can affect what our subconsciousness tells us, though not very much. So, if they pretend that they aren’t also consulting their moral thoughts, and that they are just spinning out something from their “conscience” or something, they are just replacing what could be explicit, systematic investigation, with implicit, unsystematic investigation.
For further reading, and restatements of the same sorts of things, see this post and the links in it.
“I feel a bit disenchanted by this. If something isn’t ‘set in stone’ and concrete then it seems extremely weak to say that I am entitled to my body (or anything else for that matter). It know it does sound stupid but if someone was to ask me why I have exclusive rights over my property, or body (trying to stop me from using drugs or whatever) then I don’t feel like I could say “I own myself” or the natural rights stuff …”
So the other person would’nt own him/herself either, so you could own the other person and the other person owns you, and you can order the other person to stop ownong you and the person can order you to stop owing him and now you went full retarded, and you know you never go full retarded.
Half of what we call “morality” is what our subconsciousness tells us about how we should treat other people. We think of a situation in which we have a number of options of how to treat other people, and then we feel either a positive emotion or a negative emotion about each of them…The other half of what we call “morality” is what our consciousness tells us about how we should treat other people. We think of a situation in which we have a number of option of how to treat other people, and then we perform a conscious cost-benefit analysis about the options…
When people sit down and try to spin out what is moral and what isn’t in the first sense, they just try to think of a situation in which they have more than one option of how to treat somebody, and then consult their subconsciousness to see what its advice is. But, when people sit down and try to spin out what is moral and what isn’t in the second sense, they try to consciously figure out what the consequences would be of each option, and for that you often need economics.
Both of the methods are cost-benefit analyses. To put it simply, but a bit superficially, the only difference is that one is conscious, and therefore driven by cultural evolution, and the other one is subconscious, and thereby driven by biological evolution. We should in my opinion use both methods, but always keep in mind that they are both cost-benefit analyses.
An excellent defense of social contract (the consent part, not the rule of law part), tho you may have not meant it that way. It just logically to me, if you accept this description, that any system of social order (from anarchy to totalitarian) requires the consent of the governed to function. Why? Because we all try to make these cost-benefit analyses, but we all have different socio and biological morals. If we were to function from a non-contractual mindset, there is no logical way to say we can stop the serial killer, his morals say he is doing what is right. But from a contractual standpoint, it is unlikely he will find enough people to allow him the freedom to live as he desires. (Of course this has its own problems, namely the rise of political socio-paths like Hitler or Stalin).
Up to this point, it would seem we are in agreement (not about the social contract thing, just about what you said about morality of hte conscious/subconscious). Here is where I have some questions/hang-ups…
We apparently lived in small tribes of mostly people of our extended family during the time when most people consider our biology to have reached pretty close to where it is right now.
What do you consider extended family? Tribes would include 4, 5, even 10 times removed family members. These weren’t tribes of 30 or 40 people. Rarely were/are they even as small as 200. 1000+ is more along the lines of most tribes. Now, individual clans within that tribe were/are much smaller, but the tribe itself could not function (marriage/mating) if all its members were extended family.
foreign aid packages might sound good, but they mess up the people who are getting them in the long term
I believe that is an assertion that will require some proof (and please not “charity makes you lazy”)