Self-ownership
Rajiv Shah shows why the concept is incoherent.
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
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.