The Only Two Problems with the Idea of Self-Ownership
'I was dead wrong. There are two main problems with the idea of self-ownership -- the "self" part, and the "ownership" part.' -- Ed Feser
Read the whole thing.
Read the whole thing.
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've read about 3/4 of it, but my tiny brain has to think more about the implications. I will say, however, that your comment on the page is spot on.
ReplyDeleteThen there is the problem with reading someone so full of himself. Go read that again and note how much he refers to himself.
ReplyDeleteI gave up reading him years ago. His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either, and trudging through paragraph after paragraph of narcissism for such a dubious pay off makes no sense.
August, your charge may or may not be correct, but...
DeleteThis was a *autobiographical* piece! It's really not very odd to mention oneself a bit in a work of autobiography, is it?
"His little anti-self owner-ship word magic wasn't impressive then either..."
Word magic? He provides long, substantive arguments for the emptiness of the concept. But I suppose it is easier to call this "word magic" if it helps maintain those beliefs!
This is the same Feser, autobiographical or not. At one time he just kept arguing with this same guy over and over again- and the argument seemed to be about Feser, not whatever the original subject was.
ReplyDeleteThe simple thing to do is point out Rothbard is wrong and any sort of property right to self must be serious enough to merit being able to get out of the womb alive. In other words, parents are the actors. It is a bad magic trick to focus on the property right when the act is the issue. A kidnapper cannot claim it just to let his victim die just because his victim happens to be on his property- the victim's self-ownership trumps all this other silliness. I suspect this is what Rothbard gets for trying to lie strategically; he never attracted any feminists and Feser's arguments likely serve the purgatorial function well.
"he never attracted any feminists"
DeleteWell, there was Wendy McElroy. :-)
I don't know what to think of self-ownership anymore, but this seems like too simplistic of an argument to be a good one, like arguments for self-ownership that cite the use of possessive words when speaking about one's body.
ReplyDelete