Self Ownership Theory

Turn up your volume - my mic is sub par. I had a few spare minutes so I decided to throw together this little explanation of the self ownership theory. The volume is a little messed. Gimme a break - it's my first video haha.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• self
• ownership
• liberty
• libertarian
• anarcho-capitalist
• capitalism
• capitalist
• republican
• democrat
• rights
• Ron
• Paul

[eboyd32]

you begin the video with an incorrect assumption. you draw a false dichotomy between the mind and body. philosophy and science are finding more and more by the day that mind-body dualism is incorrect and therefore you cannot have ownership over your mind, nor can you have ownership over your body. you are your body/mind. it is one fluid substance. this refutes your argument off the bat.

[iSTOLEyourPOPE]

@eboyd32 Even if that were accepted, that all both mind and body are one, how does that take away my self ownership? And who do you posit owns me?

[eboyd32]

@iSTOLEyourPOPE i guess it really depends on your definition of ownership. i feel the definition of ownership implies a dichotomy; in other words, an object cannot own itself. what it owns has to be distinguishable from it. for example, let's just say, for the sake of argument, we allow inanimate objects to have ownership claims. can a rock own itself? if we go by this definition, which i would venture is one that most people could agree upon, then no, a rock cannot own itself...

[iSTOLEyourPOPE]

@eboyd32 And I don't think there needs to be two parts to something in order to own something. If you chose to split mental and physical, that is fine. But the mental is a byproduct of your physical self. I would say inanimate objects are unclaimed until someone owns it. People have mental capacities to acknowledge themselves and life/death & cause/effect. I still maintain that I can own myself w/out the dichotomy. Hence self-ownership and not partial-self or mind-over-body ownership.

[eboyd32]

...self-ownership.

[iSTOLEyourPOPE]

@eboyd32 Oh, I didn't see all the replies. I'm off to work, but when I get the chance to review everything, I'll post. ^_^

[ryan84160]

@iSTOLEyourPOPE To own something, a self must be able to possess( or have) it. In the same way it does not make sense to say that you have a brain, it does not make sense to say that you own your brain. But lets but assume for a moment that a brain could be in possession of itself, all you can demonstrate here is possession. Possession is a descriptive term, while ownership is a legal and normative term.

[eboyd32]

@iSTOLEyourPOPE haha, yeah, i have a hard time confining my comments to 500 characters :D i'm looking forward to your commentary :)

[eboyd32]

...it. the only issue i see is a moral one. i do not justify slavery by any means, and, as i said in another comment, i am opposed to anyone who uses self-ownership to justify the selling or renting of one's body, "labor power", etc., even voluntarily with the promise of a wage in return, no matter what the wage is.

[eboyd32]

...would strongly disagree, one could make an argument that ownership doesn't imply a dichotomy and there would be no possible logical argument to counteract that because that is simply your definition of ownership. i disagree only because defining it as such complicates your perception of reality a bit (ie: if i own my body and i am my body, then am i moving, or is the body i own being willed to move? how can i say the two are one in the same? etc.), but i see no actually logical issue with...

[eboyd32]

@iSTOLEyourPOPE i would think most people would disagree with you here. the majority people, i venture, are either of the opinion that 1. there is some sort of dichotomy (body and soul, body and mind, etc.) and based on that dichotomy, the intangible owns the tangible (the body), or 2. (the school i subscribe to) the existence of the intangible is contingent upon the tangible and so, being one substance, the body cannot own itself. again though, this is simply an issue of syntax. though i...

[eboyd32]

...even since John Locke this has been the case. Locke felt that because on had ownership of one's self, through his concept of the Labor Theory of Property, one could also sell his labor into what was basically nothing more than a voluntary slavery, and the new owner of that person's labor would reap the benefits. in his Second Treatise he states, "the Grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg'd... become my Property". this is what i am oppose to, not...

[eboyd32]

...commodifies us -- what would be your response to such a notion? i think this is the essence of freedom; the antithesis of slavery, not self-ownership. and i realize now that this argument is one that is very semantic in nature, and so i do not mind when people claim to own themselves as long as they do not use their self-ownership to justify selling the one's self and/or one's "labor power" (which is a mere extension of the self), but the problem is that this is exactly the case far too often