It certainly does not necessitate ownership for both the options that God owns all, or no one owns everybody with the understanding that control does not necessitate ownership are coherent. As a result self-ownership must be supported by premises, and is thus not axiomatic.
No idea. I thought robots argue like this:
maybe this is why I didn’t understand the humour?
I have no problem with his use of scenarios, my problem is in not rationally explaining why the scenario leads to the desired conclusion. It’s not enough to say that one wouldn’t allow one’s son to commit suicide, therefore implying that the son doesn’t own himself. He must rationally explain why the son doesn’t have that right, not simply that the father would disapprove. Same for using one’s backyard to fight a fire, it’s not enough to just present the scenario without explaining exactly why one MUST permit the use of his property as others wish.
I don’t see how these arguments invalidate the self-evidence of self-ownership. They simply introduce emotional elements that set up a cognitive dissonance between what one knows to be true (that we own ourselves) and one’s desires (e.g. to be helpful, to not lose the company of a loved one). In such a dissonance one might be tempted to deny self-ownership, but it isn’t a reasonable conclusion.
I don’t find this convincing at all – he makes a bald assertion (“property rights aren’t all or nothing”) supported by historical “evidence”. This merely shows that previous philosophers argued against self-ownership, but doesn’t explain the reasoning. It might very well be that they had ulterior motives for attacking self-ownership, e.g. justifying the state’s violation of it, or avoiding cognitive dissonance in favor of the emotional factors.
Isn’t the body an external object from the point of view of the mind? Are we not using Methodological Dualism in this analysis? But even so, how does this invalidate the self-evidence of the proposition? The assertion “I own my body” simply becomes “I own myself”.
I’m not sure I understand this statement. What exactly are the premises that must support the concept of self-ownership?
And what do you mean by “own”? I mean it in the sense of having ultimate control over something, that one’s desires for one’s property are pre-eminent and cannot be directly challenged or interfered with. So I don’t really know what you mean when saying that “[there is] the understanding that control does not necessitate ownership” unless you mean indirect control, which doesn’t logically invalidate the direct control and ownership I have over myself.
Universal ethics, when applied to the concept of self-ownership, results in the Non-Aggression Principle, but we’re not talking about the NAP. I don’t see how self-ownership is based on the premise of universal ethics – it’s self-evident because one must exercise control of one’s body to even deny it.
Control is not ownership.
Well it could be said that ownership implies control. How are you defining ownership? I guess that would be the first logical question.
It is usally the right to control.
But you just said it wasn’t about control, or did you mean de facto control?
Actual control is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership.
the control of a person over their own body is not a mere relationship of control alike to any other, it is a special relationship of control.
this is good enough to put the burden of proof on believers of other ownership forms. a burden that they have never shouldered successfully. (we have numerous reasons for comprehending why they would fail, for example De Jasay’s point of the epistemological necessity of presuming the freedom of the individual, and Hoppe’s good advice for us to watch out on contradictions that will be made in the advancement of the naysayers ‘arguments’)
Because there is nothing to be said against the notion that I can own others without universal ethics. You said they had to first control themselves to control others. Well that doesn’t matter one bit if you aren’t already assuming ownership as something universal which is applied the same to all.
Also, as has been said by others, what you have is just control and not ownership. Ownership is something very different then just possessing. It is a ethical concept and as such we can’t speak of it existing as something natural before we have ethics. Without ethics it is clear the concept is meaningless, the amount of slaves I can appropriate is only restricted by the amount of guns I have and not by some philosophical principle. We can not speak of slavery as right or wrong without first accepting the notion of ethics either. So normative rights are also created from us having a theory of ethics and does not create this theory.
I hope this made it clearer how I mean that the concept of property does not exist in nature as the basis for ethics but instead is a result of us creating ethics. When we create ethics we take into account all the stuff you say and that is why property becomes a logical part of it, but that is not what gives property it’s fundamental justification. That justification is our need to create universal ethics, not the fact that we can observe the phenomena of direct-control over certain muscles..
“the fact that we can observe the phenomena of direct-control over certain muscles..”
doesnt that sound like self ownership? controlling our brains when we lie or our fists when we fight??