Self-ownership

Self-ownership is the thesis that each person holds the exclusive right to control his own body. The right is of the same kind an owner holds over any other scarce resource. It is the first premise of the Rothbardian system: every other property title is derived from it, and with it the non-aggression principle and the anarcho-capitalist conclusions that follow.

The claim is about title, not about capacity. A sleeping, drugged or restrained person does not lose his self-ownership by losing control, any more than an owner loses title to a car that has been taken from him. The two are routinely conflated, and most puzzle cases raised against the thesis turn out to trade on the conflation.

The argument from alternatives

Rothbard's central argument is that the question of who owns a person admits only three answers, and that two of them are untenable.

• Each person owns himself.
• One class of persons owns another. This is the rule of a master over a slave, and it cannot be a

 universal ethic, since it states a different rule for two kinds of human being and offers no
 principle to say which kind anyone falls into.

• Everyone owns an equal share of everyone else. This is universal, but it makes every act require

 the permission of all mankind, which cannot be obtained; a rule that no one can comply with
 cannot be a rule of conduct.

Only the first survives, and it applies to everyone in the same terms. The argument is comparative rather than foundational: it does not show self-ownership to be self-evident, it shows the alternatives to fail as ethics.

Praxeological and argumentation-based derivations

A related line runs from action rather than from ethics. Every action employs scarce means to reach an end, and one of the means employed is always the actor's own body, over which he is exercising exclusive control at the moment he acts. Anyone deliberating about whether he owns himself is already using himself in the deliberation.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe made this into a formal justification. Since argument is itself an action requiring scarce means, and since the parties to any argument must presuppose each other's exclusive control of their own bodies for the exchange to be an argument at all, denying self-ownership in the course of arguing is a performative contradiction. See Argumentation ethics for the argument and its critics, whose main reply is that what argument presupposes is control while arguing, which is not yet ownership afterwards.

The praxeological version faces a version of the same objection: that a person acts through his body is a fact about action, and the step to a right that others must respect is the step that has to be justified. See Natural rights for how that gap is handled in the wider debate.

Locke and the theological premise

John Locke is the source of the phrase, holding that every man has a property in his own person. His justification is not the modern one. For Locke men are the workmanship of one maker and sent into the world on his business, which is why no one may harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions, and it is also why Locke denies that a man may destroy himself. Later writers kept the conclusion and replaced the premise, and much of the difficulty in the literature comes from the replacement rather than from the conclusion.

From self-ownership to external property

The step most often challenged is not self-ownership but what is drawn from it. The Lockean chain runs: a man owns himself, therefore he owns his labour, therefore he owns what he mixes his labour with. The third link does not follow from the first two on its own, and the usual objection is that mixing something owned with something unowned might as easily lose the labour as gain the resource.

The Austrian reconstruction argues the case from conflict rather than from mixing. Scarce resources admit incompatible uses, so some rule must determine whose use prevails or the matter is settled by force. The first user has an objective link to the resource that any later claimant lacks, and every alternative rule either names an arbitrary claimant or makes use impossible by requiring universal consent. On this reading, original appropriation is not an extension of the body but a second application of the same principle that settles the body's case. See Property and Principle of non-aggression.

Disputed cases

The thesis is easier to state than to apply, and the boundaries are contested inside the tradition rather than only from outside it.

• Inalienability. Rothbard held that a person cannot alienate his will, so that a contract

 selling oneself into slavery is unenforceable even though the sale of one's labour services is
 not. Walter Block has
 argued the contrary, that consistent self-ownership permits a genuine voluntary slave
 contract.

• Children. A self-owner who cannot yet exercise the right leaves the question of what a

 guardian may do and when guardianship ends. Rothbard's treatment, which grants the child ownership
 of himself on running away, is among the most disputed parts of The Ethics of Liberty.

• Life and liberty. Whether self-ownership yields only a right not to be attacked, or also a

 right against having one's action restricted short of attack, is argued both ways and affects
 cases from restraint to manipulation short of fraud.

• Punishment. What a self-owner forfeits by aggressing, and how much of it, is the question

 behind proportional restitution and confinement.

• The body after death. Whether title persists, lapses, or is disposed of by prior contract

 bears on organ transfer and on bequest generally.

See also

• Natural rights
• Principle of non-aggression
• Aggression
• Property
• Argumentation ethics
• Ethics
• Contract
• Slavery
• Anarcho-capitalism