The concept of self-ownership is central to libertarian and individualist philosophy. It is often assumed to be true a-priori by libertarians when making their arguments. Most consider it an irrefutable axiom from which all other libertarian ideas about rights, property and ethics are derived. But how is this concept itself derived? Where does it come from, and how do we know that it is valid? Self-ownership is central to libertarian theories for a good reason. It is an a-priori ethical truth that is implied by the very fact of human action. This can be shown by examining some typical arguments against the concept. Other libertarian theories about individual rights and property are derived from this starting point.
One common objection to the concept of self-ownership is to say that you don’t own yourself, you are yourself. This is a fairly empty statement. First of all, saying that you are yourself is just a simple tautology. Nothing follows from it. Second, it does not even contradict the statement that you own yourself. To compare the two statements is to compare a purely factual statement to a normative statement. It is apples and oranges. Both statements can be true at the same time.
Self-ownership is a normative concept. It is a statement about how things should be. To say that you own yourself is equivalent to saying that it is right that you own yourself. It is right and proper that you should be the one to decide your actions for yourself and to control your own destiny. You should have the right of exclusive control over your body and mind. It is a statement about ethics. But these ethics are not subjective or arbitrary. They are necessarily implied by the facts of human action, specifically the action of argument.
Since you cannot help but exercise control over yourself — even if just to make an argument against self-ownership — self-ownership is a fact of human action. It is a requirement for the action of argument. If just by the fact of exercising exclusive control over yourself you are not doing something that is wrong, immoral or unethical, then you must be doing something that is perfectly right, moral and ethical. How would you argue that self-ownership is morally wrong, without doing something that is morally wrong by your own definition? Self-ownership is thus both a moral right and a factual property of human beings.
You can be yourself, and still be a slave. If you just are yourself but you do not own yourself, on what grounds would you object to being a slave? How could you ever say that slavery is wrong? Most people that make this objection are in fact trying to justify some kind of slavery. While they would probably cringe at the implication that they are advocating for slavery, they are usually attempting to argue for the subordination of the individual to a “collective” or “society.” In reality these are just code words for the will of another person or group of people. The relationship of the individual to “society” in this scenario is fundamentally the same as that of a slave to a master. In making this argument the speaker presumes to grant for himself exactly that which he seeks to deny others. He is necessarily being tyrannical.
The notion of self-ownership is already presumed by the individual making the argument against it with regards to himself. He has engaged his rational faculties and made the decision to put forward the argument against self-ownership. In doing so he has attempted to deny the very property that he has necessarily used to make the argument. He has taken ownership of himself. He cannot very well then deny the concept of self-ownership without falling into a contradiction. It would be equivalent to saying “I cannot speak” or something similar. The concept of self-ownership is necessarily presupposed for the speaker himself by his action of making an argument.
Self-ownership is also necessarily presupposed by the speaker to be a property of the individuals hearing or reading the argument. After all, why would someone make an argument if not in attempt to convince others of his point? He is necessarily assuming that the people that hear the argument also have ownership of themselves and the right to make decisions for themselves. He is trying to convince others to make the decision to change their minds. This assumes that the people he is addressing are the owners of themselves and rightfully control their own ideas, even if those ideas are incorrect.
It is further implied by the act of making an argument that self-ownership is a universal right and property of all humans. Who is the argument being made to, and who is it being made about? Would this person make the argument to anyone, or only to specific people? If someone claims to own themselves, and another person seeks to deny this claim, is the latter person’s argument specific to one individual or universal for all people? It would have to be universal. The act of correcting someone else necessarily implies that the correction is universally valid. It assumes that there is such a thing as right, that people can have ideas that are right, and that this is universal for everyone. How could it be argued otherwise?
The concept of rights is the necessary logical result of the properties of acting human beings. Property rights, starting with property in the self are derived from the facts of human action and the necessary conditions for interpersonal proposition making. To engage in the act of making propositions to others about how things should be or what people should think and do is to assume that there exists a state of rightness in thought and action that can be achieved by human beings. Many philosophers talk about the so-called “is/ought dichotomy.” The claim is that since there is theoretically no fact that is from which a statement about what ought to be can be derived, that it is incorrect to make such statements. But any argument that makes use of this point labors under its own premise. It assumes that there is a correct way to think and act and that one ought to do so. The “is/ought dichotomy” is contradicted in reality by the facts of human action. One can indeed derive statements about what ought to be from what is. There is no possible way to deny this without yet again affirming it.
A statist commenter recently left this note on an earlier post on this blog:
I don’t really understand this self ownership concept… no-one owns themselves. If someone wanted to take you and make you their slave they could. Your self ownership doesn’t mean anything, its a human concept that has no teeth and no rights or protections. The only way you can be protected is by entering into an agreement with the members of your society to form moral definitions and institutions in order to give the members of that society the greatest level of “freedom” without overlapping into the “freedoms” of others, and these precedents are ever-changing anyway. You don’t own anything. you have no rights to anything. If a person wanted to they could take my so called “property” and my life. Without an institution and a moral consensus based on mutual benefit you don’t “own” anything. You get these things by entering into the social contract.
Like all arguments against self-ownership and property rights, this argument contradicts itself and falls into an infinitely recursive backward loop. It is a “turtles all the way down” argument.
The statist here makes the same error of confusing a factual for a normative statement. The fact that someone could in reality forcefully take you as a slave and make you obey their will says nothing about the rightness of such an action, nor does it negate the property of rights that each individual holds. The person taking another as a slave must make use of the property of self-ownership for themselves while denying it to the slave. The action of enslaving another denies the universal property of self-ownership in the same way that the argument against self-ownership does. On what grounds does someone that claims self-ownership for themselves deny it to others? How could they ever claim that it is right for them to do so without contradicting themselves?
The state is empty
The statist wants to show that the individual is subject to a abstract entity called “society” or sometimes “the community.” In reality this is just a group of people that claim to be something called “the state.” This group reserves for themselves the right of self-ownership while denying it to others through the use of force and threats. The statist not only wants to subject you to this group, but he wants to convince you that it is right that it should be this way. In typical contradictory fashion the statist is attempting to convince us that rights are not a property of human beings that are implied by action, but something granted to people by subjecting themselves to the will of “society.” But this very action presupposes the rights he is denying.
The use of the “social contract” argument as the source of rights fails for the exact same reason. It already accepts contracts as something that are valid a-priori. The validity of contracts does not stem from contracts themselves, but from the universal human property of self-ownership. Contracts cannot arise contractually. How can a person enter into a contract to gain rights if he has no rights to enter in to the contract in the first place?
The great libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy has explained it like this:
[A] contract is nothing more than a voluntary exchange of what is mine for what is yours. Embedded in the very idea of contract, therefore, is the concept of voluntary versus forced exchange, and the concept of property. Contracts make sense only in the context of rights. To claim that rights spring from contract is to invert the logical order.
And as Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out in his essay Argumentation and Self-Ownership:
To argue and possibly agree with someone (if only on the fact that there is disagreement) means to recognize the prior right of exclusive control over one’s own body. Otherwise, it would be impossible for anybody to say anything at a definite point in time and for someone else to be able to reply, for neither the first nor the second speaker would be a physically independent decision-making unit anymore at any time.
…Hence, one is forced to conclude that the libertarian ethic not only can be justified and justified by means of a priori reasoning, but that no alternative ethic can be defended argumentatively.
Collectivist and statist arguments that attempt to deny the universal right of all individuals to own themselves and make their own choices — whether these arguments make use of the imaginary construct of the “social contract” or not — must necessarily fail because they seek to deny the very rights and properties that the action of argument must assume as valid a-priori. Self-ownership and property rights can thus be derived from the facts of reality and the nature of human action.
Self-ownership is a great idea but completely devoid of any meaning. Since the concept of ownership is entirely arbitrary and culturally/temporally conditioned the entire argument is specious and pointless.
I can declare I have rights. That’s a mental construct derived from my conscious mind. Nature doesn’t have a clue about my declared rights. Wildlife would just as soon eat me, parasitically leech off me and a virus feed on me. I can defend and protect my life from those predators but I can’t enter into contract with them. They don’t posses the ability to form the mental construct.
It’s true that other conscious beings could do the same acts that wildlife could. Yet a person has the ability to derive the same mental/conscious construct about contract. Best I can tell, I have rights because I declare them. They exist nowhere outside of my mind.
A “florgumnorf,” which is difficult to explain or describe so you could grasp a “picture” in your mind of a florgumnorf , it exists only in my mind. I can declare I have florgumnorf but no person, other than myself, would be able to form a mental construct of a florgumnorf.
Rights and florgumnorf are the meaning I give to each. The only meaning they have outside of my mind is what I’m able to convey to anther person.
Every person has rights. So What!?
Every person has florgumnorf. So What!?
BTW, the first time I heard/read the phrase, “social contract,” I had to pause and put meaning to it. It was immediately clear in my mind that it’s the NAP (non aggression principle).
I think the objection to self-ownership stems from the question of whether human beings are property. One could argue that human beings are property — and from there it all boils down to a question of ownership. The other side might suggest that human beings are not, or should not be property and that, I think is where many of the objections start flying. While I personally hold the former position (human beings are property and the question is one of ownership), I’m still perfectly comfortable with either mindset as long as others respect to my will and desire to live as I choose and allow me to do so, circumscribed only by my respect for others to do the same, save any harm to each other. That said, an interesting thought experiment for me in this regard was a book called “Forbidden Property” by Grant Sterling. http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Property-What-Dont-Hurt/dp/product-description/1594110395
To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you have. And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it. And it is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.
Cohen the concept of self-ownership is that each person enjoys over himself and his powers full and exclusive rights of control and use and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply. .The writers and described those possessed of a mind conducive to self-ownership as sovereign individuals which have supreme authority and over their own choices without the interference of governing powers provided they have not violated the rights of others. wrote in his Two Treatises on Government every man has a Property in his own Person. .Locke also said that the individual has a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did. . .Sovereign-minded individuals usually assert a right of external to the body reasoning that if a person owns themselves they own their actions including those that create or improve resources.
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Hey Mike,
as always, love being the devil’s advocate to some of your thoughts. But in this case, there is a simple and important part of ownership and rights that you are not discussing at all: the ability to protect and enforce you ownership and rights. The reality on the ground is that no matter what abstract rights you chose to endow yourself with (since you own yourself, that means you are responsible for the rights you desire to posses), those rights effectively do not exist unless you can protect them and enforce them.
I can pay for a piece of land and get a property document signed by the highest authority, and yet anyone can squat on my land, eat my corn and sleep with my wife unless i can protect what i own. Just yelling out that i own something and i have rights will not protect me against anyone who has other ideas. So you say, it’s my personal responsibility to protect my rights and property.
Ok. Say i buy a few guns. Next day, a group of 10 show up at my property and overwhelm my army of one and steal my property. What you have here is a group of individuals who have pooled resources and have effectively imposed THEIR rights and ownership onto me. Nothing abstract about it. No right or wrong. Just pure physical reality. You can say that the thieves signed a social contract among themselves to enforce a common right of ownership which they endowed themselves with (since they own themselves as well, they have the right to endow themselves with any right they desire, including the right to take away other’s rights). How do I get around this by myself? I can’t.
At this point, i need to get with my neighbors and make a similar contract based on a common right of ownership which allows us to pool our defensive resources and allows us to effectively protect our rights. This ends up helping the individuals in the group maintain their individual rights and ownership of property.
You can see how this concept escalates due to population growth and resource scarcity.
Eventually you end up with large groups of people, larger them tribes and villages, larger then city-states, about as large as a … country. The state is a legacy social contract based on pooling resources to defend and enforce common rights between like minded individuals. INDIVIDUALS. Weird, how the whole cannot exist without the parts and the parts cannot survive without the whole.
What would happen if say, there was one group of baddies who decide they want to pool their resources and enforce their self-endowed rights of taking other’s rights and property away, and the individuals targeted decide that they want to try to survive without pooling resources and sticking to an abstract contract with themselves only? Those highly idealistic individuals would become enslaved by the baddies and become incorporated into the evil machine, whether they like it or not. Dictatorship, 1984, whatever you wanna call it ensues and your individuals are assimilated into their own worst nightmare. FAIL.
So, at some point, you have to create your own gang, allow for some delegation of power and for some pooling of resources, so that you CAN enforce your self-endowed rights and property. It’s a paradox. And the weird thing is that at that point, the physical structure of the groups opposing each other become very similar, and what differentiates them turns out to be abstract ideology. The circle is complete and we are back where we started
In fact, the simple action of you posting your thoughts in this blog implies that you are looking for people who are like minded, to sign up to your libertarian contract
If that wasn’t true, you wouldn’t ever post your personal individual thoughts in a public forum. You wouldn’t care. Now, if you say you are doing it because others are infringing on your personal rights and beliefs, it still doesn’t make sense that you would post this in a public forum. Because you are an army of one, and you don’t need anyone’s acquiescence or agreement or common ground or help. You can defend yourself, thank you very much. So either you are very egotistical and want everyone to hear you from you bully pulpit, even if doesn’t matter to you what they think, or you’re looking for acceptance from common minded individuals. 
Hey Andy, thanks a lot for writing on my blog. Good comment. I think you are confusing the normative, meaning statements about how it should be with the factual here. Your factual point is valid. Others may not respect your property rights, so you need a strategy for defending them. But this is separate from my point that you should have property rights.
I agree that people need to have a strategy and agreements with others in order to protect property. But this is not where the right to property comes from. It is a result of it. The same goes for contracts. The right to engage in a contract, and the ownership of the self and property that is implied when you engage in a contract does not come from a contract. A contract is a mechanism for agreement and exchange between people that already have rights, and already assume each others rights.
I disagree that self-ownership means that I can give myself any rights. I cannot. I can give myself rights provided they do not infringe on the rights of others.
The means that people come up with to defend property and live together and exchange goods an services and enforce contracts cannot be the state. The state did not arise in response to demand for these services. The state arose as a group of people that granted themselves the right to tax and control others. They monopolized these services in order to keep a firm grip on power. But as a group that systematically violates property rights, the state cannot be the solution to protecting them.
You are also correct that in writing this I am seeking agreement from others. Of course I am. I want people to agree with me and think like me. I want people to respect my rights and the rights of others. No argument there at all.
You explained the matter in a very understandable way, and applauds for that.
However, you did not prove that I (and everybody else) really own myself. Two brief points:
1. When I lift my hand, take a walk, pick up my socks from the floor or start talking (while disagreeing with someone’s claim that we have self-ownership, for instance) I truly am exercising control over my body in different ways.
But so what?
At best, this just means that I am really acknowledging that it is moral for me (and others?) to lift my hand, walk, pick up socks from the floor and talk. It does not mean, for instance, that it is also moral for me to curse while talking (since I am not cursing while talking myself, therefore my proposition does not contradict my action). It also does not mean that it is moral for me not to call for an ambulance when confronted with a heavily bleeding person (since I myself call in such a situation, my proposition again does not contradict my action). In other words, just because I am exercising control over my body does not give me full self-ownership. At best, it just proves that some specific actions are morally right. That’s a looooooong way from “every non-aggressive action is morally right”.
2. Self-ownership means something more than “it is right for me to exercise control over my body”. It means it is right ONLY for me to exercise control over my body – which means that no one else can rightly exercise control over my body (which usually means that it is wrong for them to physically assault me, since it is impossible as of yet to take control of another’s body from within).
But what if I claim: it is morally right for me to talk and it is moral for X to punch me in the face? I am not contradicting myself, since I acknowledged that it is moral for me to talk (and exercise control over my body); yet clearly I do not have self-ownership, since SOMEONE ELSE also can rightly exercise control over my body. In other words, just because it is morally right for me to exercise control over my body does not mean it is morally right ONLY for me to exercise control over my body. Just like both A and B can both rightly walk on the ground, both A and B can also rightly exercise control of A’s body.
Regards,
RC
I love this article. I have been thinking a lot about this topic.
I came across this article by two libertarians that I respect
HANS-HERMANN HOPPE’S ARGUMENTATION ETHIC: A CRITIQUE
By ROBERT P. MURPHY AND GENE CALLAHAN
http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_2/20_2_3.pdf
They have many objections.
“…his [Hoppe’s] argument only establishes ownership over portions of one’s body.”
You don’t need your feet to argue so someone else owning them is not a contradiction. They can be removed and given to someone else and you can still argue.
My argument against this is that you can’t not occupy your own feet unless someone removes them, and that would still not invalidate that they belong to you.
“…it also only establishes self-ownership of those body parts during the course of the debate.”
The claim is that it is not a contradiction to advocate infringements on self ownership at a time other that the debate is taking place.
“Hoppe has only proven self-ownership for the individuals in the debate. This is because,
even on Hoppe’s own grounds, someone denying the libertarian ethic would only be engaging in contradiction if he tried to justify his preferred doctrine to its ‘victims.’”
I think you addressed this in well in the article
>The act of correcting someone else necessarily implies that the correction is universally valid. It assumes that there is such a thing as right, that people can have ideas that are right, and that this is universal for everyone. How could it be argued otherwise?
They also bring of the complication of separating animals that can control their bodies but don’t own themselves from humans that do own themselves. I claim animals can’t reason and aren’t responsible for their actions, so it seem obvious why they can’t own themselves.
Further they claim that Hoppe conflates use with ownership. I am working on addressing this.
They bring up the Theist argument that God owns everyone. My response to this is, that it may be true, but it does not negate that individuals are stewards of their own bodies, which means the same thing as self ownership.
Then the attempt the Hoppeian move of sweeping the opponents argument of its feet by claiming that everyone needs to be somewhere to make an argument so they are assuming ownership of that space to argue. Does this mean we all assume we own the ground we walk on? My response to this is that we can argue on any piece of ground we can’t only argue with our own bodies.
The article has some weak spots but we need to address the changing critiques.
Why are libertarians the best critiques of each other’s ideas. Most none libertarian arguments are obviously tautological like Alex’s. No one owns anyone is so obviously a contradiction. If not then everyone is a trespasser.
P.S. Try to avoid using rape examples to prove a point. They turn off a good portion of the population, and your point is missed entirely.
RAA.
From about the 5th paragraph on you’re just assuming that ‘self-ownership’ is valid already in order to ‘prove’ that it’s valid! The assumption is that the only alternative to ‘self-ownership’ is someone else owning you, rather than an entirely different premise.
The reason you are yourself contradicts ‘owning yourself’ is because you are one entity and ownership means two entities: the owner and the owned.
Even if you did ‘own’ yourself, it would be a use-ownership right, and by no reasoning entail property/non-use ownership rights.
OK, for the sake of other readers I will bite further into this. I have little interest in debating this with you, since by the act of debating you are already proving my premise. Although your response does raise some interesting questions.
> From about the 5th paragraph on you’re just assuming that ‘self-ownership’ is valid already in order to ‘prove’ that it’s valid!
You are assuming it’s valid by the act of making this post.
> The assumption is that the only alternative to ‘self-ownership’ is someone else owning you, rather than an entirely different premise.
An entirely different premise? Such as? If you propose that a group of people or an abstract entity like “society” owns me or you, then that is still somebody else.
> The reason you are yourself contradicts ‘owning yourself’ is because you are one entity and ownership means two entities: the owner and the owned.
By your definition only. Is your definition of ownership a universal rule? Should everyone adhere to this definition of ownership? If I do not use this definition of ownership am I dong something wrong? Ownership as I am using it simply means the legitimate exercise of exclusive control over a resource. This is also how wikipedia and various dictionaries define the word, so I am on firmer ground than you are in terms of using language in a way that is generally agreed on. This need not imply two entities at all. Should I not use the word this way? If not, why not, and why are you the one that gets to decide?
> Even if you did ‘own’ yourself, it would be a use-ownership right, and by no reasoning entail property/non-use ownership rights.
So then presumably there is nothing morally wrong with rape. After all, if someone can overpower a woman and have sex with her body against her will he is just exercising a “use-ownership right” and she has no property right in her body that extends beyond her ability to use it. So if someone were to show that they have a superior ability to use her body, they have a superior ownership claim. If you object to this reasoning, please explain why.
‘You are assuming it’s valid by the act of making this post.’
You could just as well declare that everyone who posts on here must in fact have a dog, and then say that anyone who argues against that as ‘proving your point valid by posting’.
‘An entirely different premise? Such as? If you propose that a group of people or an abstract entity like “society” owns me or you, then that is still somebody else.’
You proved my point by being unable to comprehend anything but ‘owning’ of humans. I’m saying that humans aren’t ‘owned’ at all.
‘Is your definition of ownership a universal rule? Should everyone adhere to this definition of ownership? If I do not use this definition of ownership am I dong something wrong?’
Fine, go into subjectivity of definitions if you want, it’s utterly pointless.
‘Ownership as I am using it simply means the legitimate exercise of exclusive control over a resource.’
Note the word ‘over’. You cannot logically have anything ‘over’ yourself, because you are yourself, always on an equal footing. The idea of something being ‘over’ means something must be ‘under’ that thing. So you’re saying that you are both ‘over’ and ‘under’ at the same time.
Also, from the various definitions I have checked, few actually help this debate because I’d say they all imply two entities and you would probably disagree. But some definitions say that the act of ‘owning’ something must be over an object (apart from in the case of ‘intellectual property’). An object by definition is independent from ‘you’ or ‘yourself’.
As for the last paragraph, you can’s exercise a use right over something already in use.
> You could just as well declare that everyone who posts on here must in fact have a dog, and then say that anyone who argues against that as ‘proving your point valid by posting’.
This does not follow at all and is in no way analogous to the point I am making. I am saying that every individual legitimately exercises control over themselves. You had to do this in order to post. To deny this yet again would further prove it.
> You proved my point by being unable to comprehend anything but ‘owning’ of humans. I’m saying that humans aren’t ‘owned’ at all.
Ownership as I am using it means the exercise of legitimate exclusive control. Are you saying that no one exercises legitimate control of themselves? To say this you would have to exercise control over yourself. I understand that legitimate is a normative concept, but it is implied by the action. If in posting to this blog you are not doing anything illegitimate, then you would have to be doing something that is legitimate. Would you make a post that said it was illegitimate for you to make blog posts? It seems that you would have to in order to continue with your point.
> As for the last paragraph, you can’s exercise a use right over something already in use.
OK, then presumably it would be fine to slip her a roofie and then rape her. She is unconscious and not using her body so someone else can just make use of it however they see fit. She has no right to it that extends beyond the ability to use it, so there is nothing wrong with this. Right?
> You cannot logically have anything ‘over’ yourself, because you are yourself, always on an equal footing.
Dude, you just used the word equal to describe your relationship to yourself. The word equal far more than the word ownership necessarily means at least two. There are necessarily two sides to an equation.
People regularly use language that implies two to describe their relationship to themselves. I just did it again. It’s hard to escape it. Think about phrases such as “Control yourself!” or “Get a grip on yourself!” or “I hurt myself.” or “I raised my hand in class.” Do you also object when people use these phrases that they are being logically incorrect? Do you tell people that it is logically impossible for them to hurt themselves or to raise their hand? Do you tell them that it is not really their hand, or that there is no reason that it should be their hand? In order to be consistent it would seem that you would have to.
I don’t even need to use the word over in the definition of ownership. It can be omitted and the definition is exactly the same. The exercise of legitimate control of my body. Who does this? Me. If you were to argue otherwise you would actually have to type into your computer (or rather — according to your ideology — a computer that you are currently using and that happens to be in a room that you are currently occupying) that you do not control your own body. Go ahead and do it.
But I’m really not interested in debating semantics with you any further. Your attempts to twist logic and language to fit your preconceived ideology is just a complete failure, and I think this will be obvious so to other readers of the blog. That was my purpose in arguing with you, and it has been achieved. I will not be responding to you again. If you really think that you do not legitimately control your own body then prove it by not posting any more comments.
Mike said, ” If you really think that you do not legitimately control your own body then prove it by not posting any more comments.”
But in fact, by NOT posting any more comments, one DOES prove legitimate control!
That’s right Steve. Either way Alex will be exercising the legitimate exclusive control over his own body. Looks like he really argued himself into a corner here.
‘This does not follow at all and is in no way analogous to the point I am making. ‘
How so?
‘I am saying that every individual legitimately exercises control over themselves.’
Again, OVER. My body is part of me, not distinct from me.
‘Are you saying that no one exercises legitimate control of themselves? To say this you would have to exercise control over yourself.’
If I move my arm, it’s not something I ‘control’. It’s just something I do.
‘If in posting to this blog you are not doing anything illegitimate, then you would have to be doing something that is legitimate. ‘
You’re assuming the existence of ‘legitimacy’. If there were no laws, would you say that because nothing is ‘illegal’, that everything is ‘legal’, when in fact it’s just that there is no concept of ‘legality’.
‘She is unconscious and not using her body’
She still would be as she’d be using it to remain alive. Besides, in making her unconscious you’d be violating the original use-ownership right.
As to the equal thing, true, but there’s nothing against putting the exact same thing on both sides. It isn’t logically wrong to say 6=6. Equal isn’t a synonym for ‘same’ but that doesn’t mean all equal things must be different.
‘Think about phrases such as “Control yourself!” or “Get a grip on yourself!” or “I hurt myself.” or “I raised my hand in class.”’
With the exception of control, none of these imply two entities. Control does because it is control OVER.
Again, the actions of your body are not something that you ‘control’. It’s just something you do. Based on your premise you might as well say that every single thing in existence has ‘self-ownership’. Everything can ‘excercise control over itself’ to the extent of physical possibility. According to your logic, what’s the difference?
‘But I’m really not interested in debating semantics with you any further. Your attempts to twist logic and language to fit your preconceived ideology is just a complete failure, and I think this will be obvious so to other readers of the blog. That was my purpose in arguing with you, and it has been achieved. ‘
Wow, normally I only get this level of arrogance and self-righteousness from arguing with religious fundies. As for me trying to ‘fit a preconceived ideology’, you’re the one arguing that humans can be ‘owned’, and so presumably traded like a commodity (i.e. slavery) to fit in with an ideology centred around commodities and people selling themselves!
‘I will not be responding to you again.’
Fine. Do what you will. If you want to believe in nonsense, go ahead. When I disagree with something, I voice it.
“If I move my arm, it’s not something I ‘control’. It’s just something I do.”
So you have no control over your arm then?
Apparently Alex has tourettes or something. But this actually underscores my point. Some functions of the body are in fact involuntary. Some of them you have to consciously control. Your heartbeat is not the same as moving your arm. Your heartbeat is something you just do, but your arm is something you control.