A “right” is just a “legal claim”. For example, you may claim to own a car because you traded your savings for it. Someone else steals said car. So now you take said thief to court for stealing your car. The “legal claim” or “right” that you are going to court over is that you own the car and that it was taken from you without your consent.
Self-ownership is anything but a “self-evident proposition”. There is absolutely nothing logically incoherent about either the proposition that “God owns all men”, or “No man owns either himself, nor anyone else”. While one may disagree with them, none of them are “Self-evident”
There are two possible lines of attack against this argument: 1. one does not “control” ones body like an external object, rather one is one’s body, and 2. the possibility of direct mind-control. Either one works, or at least demands a far more rigorous statement of self-ownership.
Are you going to address matters seriously, or are you hellbent on continuing to behave like an immature troll? Just curious.
I find your link unconvincing, as his defense is an emotional one – he simply presents situations in which he assumes others will agree with him that people should not be permitted to commit suicide or withhold their property from being used in a helpful way (as defined by the non-property owner). The writer does not explain why these situations revert control over the property to someone else, nor how being forced to use one’s property in a way one doesn’t care to is not coercion. Whether you agree with the property owner’s decision or not, you can’t coerce him without using your own bodies to do so, implying he is the ultimate owner of his body/property.
1 is semantics and doesn’t disprove the point
2 even granting this hypothetical ability, it is still control once-removed, i.e. using one’s body (or mind, in this case) to control someone else’s. This IMO supports the concept of original control implying ownership instead of opposing it.
All of this is irrelevant. Control is not ownership.
Unfortunately most arguments are predicated on no one defining their terms. Why? Because the idea that “words=concepts” or “words=things” is the most persistent superstition in modern history.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” -John 1:1
However you want to define own, we own our bodies. Be it control over, to have full power/claim/authority over, etc. we have it over our bodies and no one else can without exercising that power once removed, i.e. without using their own bodies.
Slaves are owned by their masters. The end.
What are you on about? With Stirner as your avatar the right of the sword should be a familiar concept…
You argument is still based on the premise of universal ethics. That the master needs to control his own body to control his subject has no meaning to anything here without it.
It was a joke, man! Why would a robot normally make an argument better?
Funny, this reads like an excerpt from a Glenn Beck book. And he’s smart.
He’s actually a different, yet similar model, the “ideological psychotic blow-hard-bot”.
No. Natural rights arguments start from some philosophical foundation, such as, “human flourishing is an ultimate end which it is immoral to oppose” or some other axiom. I think that natural rights arguments come to correct conclusions, i.e. that humans have rights and that the State is an evil, aggressive entity that tramples our natural rights, but I think the approach is flawed and ultimately ineffective. In the real world, the only things that affect the behavior of others are incentives to action borne out of self-interest. That is, people don’t break into banks not because they believe the bank’s owner has a right to not have his property broken into (they might even think that, but that’s not why they don’t break in) but because the banker keeps his money in a foot-thick steel vault and cameras and keeps armed guards willing to kill you for breaking in and a silent alarm to summon the police who are even more heavily armed and willing to kill. Now, this is not to say that the world reduces to “might makes right” because people behave in ways that defy a “red in tooth and claw” theory of human action, that is, people behave as if other people have rights. But I don’t think that they do so for reasons that can be expressed in any simple deduction from metaphysical premises. Rights emerge from law and law emerges from the (self-interested) attempt of individuals to avoid violent conflict. The difference between natural rights and this “evolutionary” natural rights that I’m talking about is that the former can be expressed as a clear system of deductions while the latter cannot. In other words, the natural rights approach is simply analytical, the “evolutionary” natural rights approach is more empirical… we know what our rights are by observing what rights obtain in the real world, not by deducing them from axioms.
I have no idea how we get from here to there. Of course no self-respecting sovereign state in the modern world would submit to a court not under its own control.
Um, I don’t understand how your question resulted from what I wrote - I doubt that any legal system that permits grievous violent crimes could obtain under a competitive law system.
Clayton -
Of course he presents situations because ethics are supposed to be applied to situations, and he uses these scenarios to show that self-ownership sometimes contradicts own moral intuitions, which is quite a case against the principle being self-evident. Furthermore, the most convincing part of the article is where he attacks rationalistic ethics sans a single empirical case:
His only goal in the entire post is to show that self-ownership is not “Axiomatic” (i.e. self-evident) so there is no reasons for him to show otherwise, rather he just makes a case against treating the proposition as self-evident. To quote the article:
It is anything but semantics, the argument shows that the proof for “self-ownership” equivocates one’s body with external objects. Also, note how I also stated in my original post that this argument can be defeated by a more rigorous terminology.
Again, my only point is that self-ownership is anything but “self-evident”, and taking it as axiomatic is philosophically lazy leaving the entire foundation of NAP ethics an article of faith.
Well if one IS one’s body then I don’t see how someone could be say epileptic. I think there is a disconnect between your body and your mind/conscious. I think it is more like your body is a husk in which you reside. Wouldn’t you agree given your values of religion? I mean our souls are not our body and on some level is a soul not consciousness or something like it? Does our body go into the afterlife or does our essence?
According to my religion, the statement:
is a heresy for it both ignores the theology of the incarnation and the resurrections as well as denying the dignity of the human person as created by God by denying a person’s unity with his body, which is how he is created by God in God’s image (i.e. the second person of the Holy Trinity: Jesus).
“Well if one IS one’s body then I don’t see how someone could be say epileptic.”
well..if you are created defective in some way i dont see how that affects rights or ownership.
could you subsitute death for epilepsy and claim one is not ones body?
So you are saying that your body is just as if not more important then your soul? I don’t remember that at catholic school. Also God created humanity in his/her/its image…he didn’t specifically create you.
“His only goal in the entire post is to show that self-ownership is not “Axiomatic””
if your (self) thought of making my hand play a chord on a piano doensnt make my hand play chord and noone elses does either…and if your thought of making your hand make (and actually force your hand) my hand play a chord is the only way to make my hand play a chord who owns what.?
your will cannot make my hand play a chord..only your will and the control exerted over a hand connected to your body to force my hand to play.
is that something other than self-ownership going on?