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Self-Ownership, Autonomy, and Property Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

Alan Ryan
Alan Ryan
Affiliation:
Politics, Princeton University
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Extract

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 241 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1994

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References

1 See, e.g., Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar; Rothbard, Murray, The Ethics of liberty (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Lloyd-Thomas, David, In Defense of Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).Google Scholar

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