A Case for Divine Ownership
Against Atheistic Right-Libertarian Self-Ownership
In a previous post, I outlined my position as a Libertarian in the Lockean tradition, that is, a libertarian who grounds natural rights not in self-ownership, but in divine ownership. Here I plan to argue for my position by showing the inconsistency of the self-ownership position. I will put forward five propositions that, while true for the consistent anarcho-capitalist, cannot all be accepted.
- Parents have authority over infants and children.
- People have authority over their property.
- Children are the responsibility of the parent.
- Self-Ownership is a Right.
- The social contract is invalid.
The contradiction heavily plays out between premises 1 and 4. For if my authority over my children is conditional, this creates some problems. Are not children also persons? Do they not have an ability to choose? If a child should wander out into traffic, and ignore their parents wishes, nay, even defy them with improper reasoning, shouldn’t the parent respect their right of choice? It is here that the anarcho-capitalist might object and say since children lack the proper faculty of reason, they do not have any capacity to exercise such a choice.
The problem is, why is it that the parent is the one with such authority, if not for the lack of choice the child possess? Children are not the property of parents. Children, like all human beings, are not mere objects that can be possessed. They have a right to be protected just like any and everyone else, they have a right to life, liberty, and property. Why is it that an accident of birth makes someone the guardian of your life?
Some might use the social contract, which would mean there is an implicit understanding, but I’m not aware of many libertarians who accept the idea. Rothbard rejected that idea, saying,
The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the times pan of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers [1]
Rothbard isn’t the only one to reject the social contract, David Hume gave some decent argumentation against it as well.
Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her [2]
Moving forward, if not from the social contract, where does the guardianship of the parent over the child come from? Some might say that since the child is brought forth by the parent, the parents then implicitly become the guardians. Yet, how is this a not social contract? If anything it’s worse than a social contract, because a society of people does actually exist, and has arguable manifestation in the state. The child is yet to be born. We don’t make any obligation to the non-existent.
Further, since I didn’t exist when my parents conceived, why should I owe anything to their authority? Even if I don’t have a rational faculty yet, why should it be them that make my choices. There are plenty of people better suited to be parents than others, if they were to come in and give a child orders, what is it about childbirth over reason that grounds the parent’s choice over a child from that of a stranger? We might have pragmatic or consequential reasons to prefer parental care, but for the anarcho-capitalist to argue individuals must comply with a norm on a non-voluntary basis would be anathema. They would want leave the prudential reason up to the individual. Since rights over one’s self are a thing, a person has a right not to cecum to what is merely prudential.
The only other option is, as what some anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard argue, that
the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive [3].
In effect, Rothbard argues that parents have only negative responsibilities. That is to say, while I cannot hurt my child, I don’t have to do anything for them like feed them [4].
However, if parents do not have an obligation to not do things for their child, why do they get the control over the child (or even the children of others)? Some, joining Rothbard, might jump at the 2nd proposition and argue that the child is property. Rothbard argues,
Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. Superficially, this sounds monstrous and inhuman. But closer thought will reveal the superior humanism of such a market. For we must realize that there is a market for children now, but that since the government prohibits sale of children at a price, the parents may now only give their children away to a licensed adoption agency free of charge.10 This means that we now indeed have a child-market, but that the government enforces a maximum price control of zero, and restricts the market to a few privileged and therefore monopolistic agencies.
The result has been a typical market where the price of the commodity is held by government far below the free-market price: an enormous “shortage” of the good. The demand for babies and children is usually far greater than the supply, and hence we see daily tragedies of adults denied the joys of adopting children by prying and tyrannical adoption agencies. In fact, we find a large unsatisfied demand by adults and couples for children, along with a large number of surplus and unwanted babies neglected or maltreated by their parents. Allowing a free market in children would eliminate this imbalance, and would allow for an allocation of babies and children away from parents who dislike or do not care for their children, and toward foster parents who deeply desire such children [5]
Now, let’s leave out the fact that parents that don’t want their children don’t necessarily bother looking into the best parental care, nor do the parents looking for demand over children necessarily have the most altruistic desires behind them. How is it that children can be both property and a group of self-owners? Sure, we can add that their self-owners in potency, but why does that even grant them a right in the first place? If a right comes from self-ownership, this means that we are also rights holders in potency, as much as we are self-owners in potency.
Appealing to children as both property to get control over the child, while self-ownership for the grounding of human rights, is ham-fisted at best, or incoherent at worse. Unless someone can justify why potential self-ownership of human beings is the grounding of rights, there is no point in appealing to it. With it out of the way, the parent has neither positive or negative responsibilities to their child.
The libertarian will have to reject one of the five premises. They could accept the social contract, but that would mean providing a potential basis for government. They could give up on parental responsibility , but that would mean disregarding one of our most basic instincts. They could reject private property rights, but that would mean becoming a socialist of some kind. They could give children a right of self-ownership, but that would mean 5 year old children could consent to running into traffic in explicit disregard of their parent’s commands. Or, they could reject self-ownership and use only consequentialist arguments for libertarianism.
Lastly, one could invoke the divine and claim that self-ownership in both its potential and actual sense is just short-hand of the authority we have on our bodies given to us by the creator, the true owner, our God. Hence, admitting God would mean that by taking control over our children and that of others in a societal context, we are defending the property rights God has over all of us, equally as humans made in his image.
End Notes
[1] Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, 16
[2] Hume, On the Original Contract, link
[3] Rothbard, Children and Rights, Link
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
