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CONNECTED SELF-OWNERSHIP AND OUR OBLIGATIONS TO OTHERS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020
Abstract:
This essay explores the concept of the connected self-owner, which takes account of the metaphysical significance of relations among persons for persons’ capacities to be owners. This concept of the self-owner conflicts with the traditional libertarian understanding of the self-owner as atomistic or essentially separable from all others. I argue that the atomistic self cannot be a self-owner. A self-owner is a moral person with intentions, desires, and thoughts. But in order to have intentions, desires, and thoughts a being must relate to others through language and norm-guided behavior. Individual beings require the pre-existence of norms and norm-givers to bootstrap their selves, and norms, norm-givers, and norm-takers are necessary to continue to support the self. That means, I argue, that the self who can be an owner is essentially connected. Next, I ask how humans become connected selves and whether that connection matters morally. I distinguish among those connections that support development of valuable capacities. One such capacity is the autonomous individual. I argue that the social connections that allow the development of autonomous individuals have moral value and should be fostered. On the basis of these two values, I argue that we can support at least two nonvoluntary obligations, one negative and one positive, that we can ground in our metaphysical essence as connected self-owners.
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- Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2020
Footnotes
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For helpful comments and questions, I want to thank Seena Eftekhari, Kurt Blankschaen, Geoff Sayre McCord, and the audience at the 2018 PPE Society conference. I also want to thank an anonymous referee, the other contributors to this volume, and especially Bas van der Vossen and David Schmidtz.
References
1 Many libertarians appeal explicitly to this atomistic concept of self-ownership, though they may not characterize the metaphysical notion of the self explicitly in this way. It is those libertarians who argue directly from self-ownership to libertarian moral and political conclusions that fall prey to my objections. I have in mind libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, N., For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006);Google Scholar Mack, Eric, “Self-Ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism, Parts I and II,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 1, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 75–108; 237–76. See alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Vallentyne, Peter and Vossen, Bas van der, “Libertarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014 Fall Edition), Zalta, Edward N., ed., URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/libertarianism/.Google Scholar
2 The question of what is the self that owns has been taken up from the perspective of traditional theories of personal identity in Feser, Edward, “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 2 (2005): 100–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, his examination still takes for granted that there is an individual self that can be isolated from its community, the assumption which I bring into question in Ann E. Cudd, “Feminism and Libertarian Self-Ownership,” in Brennan, Jason, Vossen, Bas van der, and Schmidtz, David, eds., Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (New York: Routledge, 2018), 127–39,Google Scholar and which I intend to examine in greater depth in this essay.
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17 One might object that a computer algorithm could be programmed with a normative framework inserted into it and thus constitute a counterexample. But this just means that the normative framework is that of the programmer whose framework was socially created.
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21 I am not endorsing the assumption of a natural right to ownership, simply describing the form of the argument given by the self-owner libertarian.
22 This idea of the physical and metaphysical separability of the owned self explains why the questions of abortion rights and maternal bodily integrity are complicated for the self-owner libertarian. The pregnant woman is not fully separable from the fetus, and so if the fetus is taken to be itself a self-owner, then can the pregnant woman be taken to be a full self-owner, and if so, whose ownership rights prevail?
23 Consider Jean Hampton, “Feminist Contractarianism,” in A Mind of One’s Own, Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds., (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993) as an example of this kind of contractarian view.
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28 As we have seen, Locke embraces this way of speaking about persons. According to Richard Tuck as cited in Attracta Ingram, A Political Theory of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 18, it goes back at least to the fourteenth century.