@Autolykos, I think I’m pretty ok with DavidB’s responses to you (I was having auto issues today and missed a bunch of this thread, and I’m finding it a bit hard to choke it all down at once). When I said “inherent self-ownership” I MEANT it to mean “inalienable self-ownership”, but I don’t have the jargon down and was being sloppy. I think this is important because per the responses above, yes I DO see how inherent self-ownership conflicts with the idea of reciprocity governing torts, and this highlights an issue I’ve been thinking about this past week or so.
Granted I have not done any reading on this. But my initial response would be to say that any infraction that falls under the term of “tort” seems only to be an infraction in the sense that it breaks the rules of acceptable behavior among like-thinking people. Maybe a “tort” only exists between members of a kind of cultural contract, and this contract -if I’m making sense- is what is broken. The member that committed the act had, then, implicitly accepted the consequence by committing the act, and thus the enforced punishment was not a violation of his inalienable self-ownership.
Does that reasoning, fuzzy as it is, approximate an answer to the conflict?
Like I say I’ve been thinking about this because I sat on a jury last week, in a medical malpractice civil case, and found myself entirely unable to justify awarding a monetary settlement for “pain and suffering”. This is NOT an exact match for the question at hand, but it’s why I’ve had it in mind.