But, you see, the will is part of the body. A human being is not just the body. I mean, he is, but he is a living body. If a human is not exercising his will, as I stated above, he is either dead or on a vegetative state.
That leads me to a thought. If Bob agrees to be Alice’s slave by contract, he is giving himself completely to her. I mean, the two parts that make him a living being, the body and the will. The body is clearly material property, but the will itself is not, as you said. So he is giving property and non property in the same package to Alice. Since the will cannot be taken out of the body, and since contracts can only be over property titles, I guess that’s why you can’t have a voluntary slavery contract. You can only have contracts over “full” properties, not a mix of property and non property like a human being is. I’ll make an analogy; let’s say I capture a man on the street and lock him in a cage inside my house that is virtually impossible to open or break (this is impossible of course, but lets pretend for the sake of the analogy). Then I sell my house to you. Did the man became your property? In the analogy above, of course, the house is the body and the man caged is the will. I don’t know if that’s a good analogy, but that’s what I could think about now. EDIT: [Thinking about it, I don’t think that this is a perfect analogy because the caged man can’t control de house, but I think that this makes the case against voluntary slavery stronger, rather than weaker.] What do you think?
Of course, that leads me to animals, and animals are an exception to this rule. Why? Well, I am not completely sure why, but I have so guesses (and there are topics and articles about that, like this and this (I didn’t read them yet)). One thought that I have is: humans evolved eating meat, for example, and this is a natural process, and nature just is.
So we arrive at this:
True. As I said above, humans and the rest of the animals are different from several reasons, but my argument was “if a car could will itself into motion”, and a horse clearly can. I take that back.