Self-ownership
Rajiv Shah shows why the concept is incoherent.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I don't think I buy/understand Shah's argument that self-ownership is an incoherent concept.
ReplyDeleteBy way of analogy, I could imagine someone claiming that the concept of God is incoherent because God is supposed to be self-caused, and it is incoherent for something to be the cause of itself. I don't think that's right. Sure, most things have a cause other than themselves, but that doesn't mean that self-causation is conceptually impossible. Likewise, most things do not own themselves, but that alone doesn't make self-ownership conceptually impossible.
A better argument, I think, is that if a person really did own himself, then he ought to be able to sell himself (part of being the owner of something is the right to sell it). Rothbard, however, explicitly says that you aren't allowed to sell yourself. So either you don't really own yourself, or ownership doesn't necessarily imply the right to sell the thing you own (with all that this implies).
I would say God is uncaused rather than self-caused. "I am that I am" and all.
DeleteI don't know if incoherent is quite right, but owning oneself has always seemed to me like marrying oneself.