Self-ownership doesn’t solve any problems

For all the problems with the Self-Ownership Principle — the principle that all people always own themselves — it is not clear what work it does. This is important. If self-ownership solved some problem that could not be solved by a better-motivated principle, it would be worth considering, notwithstanding its problems. As it does not appear to solve any problems, I see nothing to recommend it.

Here are the two candidate problems that I’ve considered:

1. That morally, one may exclude others from using her body without her consent.
2. That morally, one may use her own body.

Self-ownership is not needed to exclude others from your own body

Self-ownership is not necessary to explain why people have the moral right to exclude others from their own body. This is easily accounted for by the Harm Principle, the bedrock of every legitimate theory of liberty. According to the Harm Principle, people can do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. As expressed in the French Constitution:

Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others

Or as expressed more poetically in the Wiccan Rede:

Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will

If one accepts the Harm Principle — as undoubtedly one does if one is any kind of liberal — then one already accepts that one may not use or invade the body of another person without their consent. Such use or invasion is harmful, and therefore violates the Harm Principle. Adopting the self-ownership principle is not necessary.

Self-ownership is not needed to let you use your own body

The second problem that might motivate the self-ownership principle is that it solves the problem of why people may morally use their own bodies. The underlying assumption is that people may only use what they own. Let’s call this principle the Human Inaction Principle (HIP).

Does anyone take this position? I think Murray Rothbard does. In The Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 8, Rothbard declares that there are only three positions that one can logically take with respect to self-ownership:

1. Self-ownership: Every person owns themself.
2. Communism: Everybody owns everybody equally.
3. Class rule: Partial ownership of one group by another.

There is an obvious fourth position: Nobody owns anybody, including themselves. This was pointed out to him by one Professor George Mavrodes. Rothbard rejects this position, stating,

since ownership signifies range of control, this would mean that nobody would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.

The charitable interpretation of Rothbard’s statement is that he assumes the Human Inaction Principle, and argues that if nobody owns anybody, including themselves, they would have no moral right to control themselves. (The less charitable interpretation is that Rothbard is interpreting Mavrodes’ position as a factual statement about people’s degree of actual control over bodies, not a moral statement about people’s rights over bodies. It is not so implausible that Rothbard would interpret a statement like “Nobody owns anybody, including themselves” as a factual statement, since his work is full of such confusion. Of course, this interpretation would not get Rothbard what he wants — to rule out the moral position that nobody owns anything.)

Rothbard’s argument fails for three reasons. The trivial one is that he’s simply wrong that it is not logically possible to take a position whose consequence is the end of the human race. The other two reasons concern problems with the Human Inaction Principle: it contradicts the Harm Principle, and it makes Rothbardian appropriation absurd.

The Human Inaction Principle contradicts the Harm Principle

Recall the Harm Principle, and the Human Inaction Principle.

Harm Principle: People can do whatever they like, as long as it does not harm anyone.

Human Inaction Principle: People may only use that which they own.

It is easy to see that these contradict each other in any nontrivial model. If a person can use something that she does not own in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, then she has violated the Human Inaction Principle but not the Harm Principle. So her action is morally prohibited by the Human Inaction Principle but morally permitted by the Harm Principle. As the Harm Principle is fundamental, this indicates that the Human Inaction Principle is incorrect.

The Human Inaction Principle makes Rothbardian appropriation absurd

Rothbard believes that by natural law, nature is originally not owned by anyone, but that individuals can come to own parts of the world by appropriating them from nature. The method of appropriation of objects is transformation and use: a person must transform a natural object and use it in order to own it. He gives the examples of Robinson Crusoe, marooned on an island on which nobody owns anything, fashioning an axe and chopping down trees, which establishes ownership of the axe and the trees.

The reason that this is absurd is that the Human Inaction Principle prohibits Crusoe’s actions. He does not own the island or anything on it, so he is prohibited from using found materials to build the axe, and prohibited from chopping down the unowned trees. The HIP morally prohibits appropriation. But the result of appropriation is the legitimate ownership of property. So for Rothbard, the only legitimate way to acquire property is by action that is illegitimate according to the HIP.

Summary

The Self-Ownership Principle is not useful, since it does not accomplish anything that is not already accomplished by the Harm Principle, a more fundamental principle.