Self-ownership is a problem for libertarians, part 2: Maternal appropriation
“Every Man has a Property in his own Person,” says Locke. I’ve shown one problem with this: Ownership includes the right to transfer ownership, but if one transfers ownership of oneself to another person, then one no longer owns oneself. This makes self-ownership essentially a contradictory concept.
Here is another problem: By the usual means that libertarians prescribe for appropriating things, people are appropriated by their mothers. (I recognize that there are advocates of self-ownership other than libertarians, but the main targets of this critique is Rothbardian libertarians, so please accept this shorthand.)
Libertarians typically prescribe methods such as control, transformation, improvement, and labour mixing for appropriating unowned things. Any of these methods would lead to the conclusion that all persons are initially appropriated by their mothers. While the foetus is in utero, and before it has personhood, consciousness, or the will or ability to control its body or act in any other way, its mother is using her body to transform it, improve it, and exercise control over it by containing it and excluding others from doing anything with it. By eating and breathing, she mixes her labour with the foetus.
So if human bodies are subject to ownership, and ownership depends on libertarian theories of appropriation, then people are owned by their mothers, not themselves, unless and until their mothers transfer ownership of themselves to themselves. Under Rothbardian principles, nothing compels a mother to transfer ownership of her child to itself. Therefore, people do not universally own themselves.
Of course, it is possible to introduce special rules that apply only to self-ownership. Libertarians can decree that (potentially) human foetuses, unlike any other property, may not be appropriated. Or that they may be appropriated by their mothers, but that upon achieving humanhood, title to the bodies transfers automatically to the self related to the body, whether the mother agrees or not. The theory can also specially decree that unlike all other forms of property, human bodies are inherently inalienable. Or that ownership of one’s own body is a special type of ownership that does not include the right to transfer. In short, there are many ways to avoid the contradictions that self-ownership introduces into Rothbardian ethics by contriving special rules for the purpose.
But this kind of special pleading makes for bad theorizing. The point of a theory is to explain a broad range of phenomena using the fewest possible rules. If libertarians need multiple special rules to make make the self-ownership principle work, then insisting on self-ownership is a drain on libertarian theory. To try to make the theory compelling, libertarians would need to make a very compelling case for self-ownership.
So I ask: What does libertarian theory gain by decreeing universal self-ownership?
