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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020
This essay explores the concept of the connected self-owner, which takes account of the metaphysical significance of relations among persons for persons’ capacities to be owners. This concept of the self-owner conflicts with the traditional libertarian understanding of the self-owner as atomistic or essentially separable from all others. I argue that the atomistic self cannot be a self-owner. A self-owner is a moral person with intentions, desires, and thoughts. But in order to have intentions, desires, and thoughts a being must relate to others through language and norm-guided behavior. Individual beings require the pre-existence of norms and norm-givers to bootstrap their selves, and norms, norm-givers, and norm-takers are necessary to continue to support the self. That means, I argue, that the self who can be an owner is essentially connected. Next, I ask how humans become connected selves and whether that connection matters morally. I distinguish among those connections that support development of valuable capacities. One such capacity is the autonomous individual. I argue that the social connections that allow the development of autonomous individuals have moral value and should be fostered. On the basis of these two values, I argue that we can support at least two nonvoluntary obligations, one negative and one positive, that we can ground in our metaphysical essence as connected self-owners.
For helpful comments and questions, I want to thank Seena Eftekhari, Kurt Blankschaen, Geoff Sayre McCord, and the audience at the 2018 PPE Society conference. I also want to thank an anonymous referee, the other contributors to this volume, and especially Bas van der Vossen and David Schmidtz.
1 Many libertarians appeal explicitly to this atomistic concept of self-ownership, though they may not characterize the metaphysical notion of the self explicitly in this way. It is those libertarians who argue directly from self-ownership to libertarian moral and political conclusions that fall prey to my objections. I have in mind libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, N., For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006);Google Scholar Mack, Eric, “Self-Ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism, Parts I and II,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 1, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 75–108; 237–76. See alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Vallentyne, Peter and Vossen, Bas van der, “Libertarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014 Fall Edition), Zalta, Edward N., ed., URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/libertarianism/.Google Scholar
2 The question of what is the self that owns has been taken up from the perspective of traditional theories of personal identity in Feser, Edward, “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 2 (2005): 100–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, his examination still takes for granted that there is an individual self that can be isolated from its community, the assumption which I bring into question in Ann E. Cudd, “Feminism and Libertarian Self-Ownership,” in Brennan, Jason, Vossen, Bas van der, and Schmidtz, David, eds., Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (New York: Routledge, 2018), 127–39,Google Scholar and which I intend to examine in greater depth in this essay.
3 Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Sally Haslanger describes what she calls an analytical approach to defining a concept, which seeks to define a concept for a particular project or purpose. I am specifying the purpose of the concept as providing an adequate foundation for a political philosophy. See her “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” in Haslanger, Sally, Resisting Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 221–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Vallentyne and Van der Vossen, “Libertarianism.”
6 Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, Macpherson, C. B., ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980 [1690]), 19.Google Scholar
7 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard and J. T. Buckingham, 1813): chap. XXVII. Accessed on 21 April 2018 at https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding.html?id=pDNIAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Eftekhari, Seena, Constructivism and the Liberal Dilemma (University of Kansas: PhD Dissertation, 2018), p.123.Google Scholar He is discussing here the work of Waldron, Jeremy, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 177–80.Google Scholar
9 Vallentyne and Van der Vossen (“Libertarianism”) argue that self-ownership provides a starting point for a theory of justice. Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen argue that self-ownership provides a foundation for rights. See Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Rasmussen, Douglas B., “Self-Ownership,” The Good Society 12, no. 3, Symposium: Natural Law and Secular Society (2003): 50–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Daniel Dennett discusses and defends six necessary conditions for moral personhood: rationality, intentionality, the ability to attribute intentionality or take an intentional stance toward the purported person, the capacity for reciprocity, the ability to verbally communicate, and self-consciousness. In this essay my arguments concerning the metaphysics of the self-owner concern aspects of at least the first five of these. See Daniel C. Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 175–96.Google Scholar
11 Bettcher, Talia Mae, “Full-Frontal Morality: The Naked Truth About Gender,” Hypatia 27, no. 2 (2012): 319–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bettcher, Talia Mae, “When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation,” Journal of Homosexuality 61, no. 5 (2014): 605–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
12 Bettcher, Talia Mae, “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 2 (2014): 383–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Witt, Charlotte, The Metaphysics of Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Persons with disabilities may be unable to fully master language or communication, but if conscious at all, most are able to respond to communicative cues and body language in regular ways that can be seen both as norm-guided and as norm-guiding.
15 This point has been made persuasively by, among many others, Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1927]);Google Scholar Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); andGoogle Scholar.Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
16 Peter Vallentyne offered this view in his commentary on my presentation of “Towards a Feminist Libertarian Metaphysics: A Critique of the Self-Ownership Thesis,” Central APA Division Meeting, Kansas City, March 1, 2017.
17 One might object that a computer algorithm could be programmed with a normative framework inserted into it and thus constitute a counterexample. But this just means that the normative framework is that of the programmer whose framework was socially created.
18 Jen, Gish, The Girl at the Baggage Claim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).Google Scholar
19 Ibid., chap. 3.
20 Westlund, Andrea, “Rethinking Relational Autonomy,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (2009): 26–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 I am not endorsing the assumption of a natural right to ownership, simply describing the form of the argument given by the self-owner libertarian.
22 This idea of the physical and metaphysical separability of the owned self explains why the questions of abortion rights and maternal bodily integrity are complicated for the self-owner libertarian. The pregnant woman is not fully separable from the fetus, and so if the fetus is taken to be itself a self-owner, then can the pregnant woman be taken to be a full self-owner, and if so, whose ownership rights prevail?
23 Consider Jean Hampton, “Feminist Contractarianism,” in A Mind of One’s Own, Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds., (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993) as an example of this kind of contractarian view.
24 Sobel, David, “Backing Away from Self-Ownership,” Ethics 123 (2012): 32–60, 35. See alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Railton, Peter, “Locke, Stock, and Peril: Natural Property Rights, Pollution, and Risk,” in his Facts, Values, and Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),187–225, at 219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Naturally, I would point to my own theory, presented in Analyzing Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) to fill this gap.
26 Taylor, Robert S., “Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism,” Social Theory and Practice 31, no. 4 (2005): 465–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 See Ryan, Alan, "Self-Ownership, Autonomy, and Property Rights," Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1994): 241–58; alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Patemen, Carole, “Self-Ownership and Property in the Person: Democratization and a Tale of Two Concepts,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no.1 (2002): 20–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 As we have seen, Locke embraces this way of speaking about persons. According to Richard Tuck as cited in Attracta Ingram, A Political Theory of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 18, it goes back at least to the fourteenth century.