UF (14) — Understanding Freedom: The Question of Self-Ownership

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Understanding Freedom — The Question of Self-Ownership

In my previous blog entry Natural Law: What Could It Mean? I had not yet looked at the way in which the “axiom” of self-ownership is derived by its supporters – notice the incongruous idea of deriving an axiom.
 

I had confined myself to pointing out that such a right cannot possibly exist in any absolute sense. Human beings are permanently compelled to renegotiate the package of rights that they can practicably exercise. They do this in order to deal with unforeseen circumstances or to gradually improve their position – in the most multifarious ways, to wit, ranging from an honest effort at persuasion, benefiting from natural authority, a charming way or the radiance of a sincere yet flawed argument to dodging, deception and violence.
 

The Anarcho-Capitalist (AC) idea of a set of indubitable, unequivocal, and unalterable rights that are supposed to be rigidly built into human nature and man’s conditions of interacting with his environment cannot be reconciled with the abundance of evolving concepts and practices concerning ethical conduct among human beings. The rationalist ambition of this school to create an organon capable of deriving ethical norms of indisputable truth and validity ignores the turmoil and turbulences, the equivocality, contradictoriness, and imperfection so prominently evident in the ongoing vicissitudes of law and other ethical practices over the course of time.

Exponents pursuing this rationalist ambition seek to establish apodictic certitude by offering the following pivotal argument. In view of the author’s exceptional incisiveness, we refer below to a quote from J.-G. Hülsmann’s collection of essays “Anarchie und Ordnung” (“Anarchy and Order”) available only in German – specifically the essay entitled “Naturrecht und Liberalismus” (“Natural Law and Liberalism”) p. 13:

Every argument presupposes that the person conducting the argument is a self-owner (for otherwise there would be no acting individual that could advance an argument), and every conversation rests upon the mutual recognition of the self-ownership that each participant partakes in. For I can only believe without contraditction that I “argue” or that I “lead a conversation,” if I not only presuppose but also recognise that my interlocutor is in a position to concur with my argument or to reject it. But this quite simply means that every discussant presupposes that there is a right of private ownership, whose essence consists in the self-ownership of each and every person concerning himself and his body.” 

(Emphasis in the original. My translation. I.U.)

The decisive proposition is to be found in the last sentence of the quote. It allows us to pinpoint the fundamental error – a subtle shift of meaning – in the argument advanced.
 

The flaw is due to the fact that concepts of equal or very similar meaning on a certain level (“ownership, “self ownership, “private ownership”) are first marshalled to refer to rather different connotations, only to be merged later as if they had been referred to from the outset as having the same meaning.
 

The term “self-ownership” is first introduced in an anthropological sense, and then used in a very different sense, namely in its legal connotation. However, the all-important difference of meaning only appears to vanish when suddenly terminological usage switches from “self-ownership” to “private ownership,” as if the terms were synonymous.
 

It is helpful to introduce another term for “self-ownership” in order to render plain what the term initially is meant to stand for. Thus, let us refer to “features of irreducible personal autonomy” – rather than “self-ownership”. Every human being, even the Neanderthaler, betrays “features of irreducible personal autonomy.” What does that mean? To put it in rather an earthy way: when a man senses nature’s call, he cannot ask another person to do the requisite job for him. Nobody can breathe, swallow, cough, look out of my eyes, digest the food I have ingested in my stead. These features of irreducible personal autonomy make the individual an “in-dividual” – an “undivisable,” a being incapable of sharing certain aspects of its self with other beings, incapable of divesting or ceding them to someone else.

Incidentally, “self-ownership” may be onerous, unpleasant, and hence give rise to the (often only frustrated) desire to get rid of “possessions” to which one is literally condemned, say, such as extremely short stature.
 

Private ownership is a concept completely distinct from self-ownership. Private ownership is a legal concept which is in no way prejudged, predetermined or peremptorily established – practically or deductively – by the very general anthropological invariant of irreducible personal autonomy.
 

The very core of the self-ownership argument advanced by AC is based on those subscribing to it being taken in by a false semantic appearance. The false argument runs like this: all human beings are self-owners, therefore all human beings are by nature holders of private property [- a perfect non-sequitur, I.U.]. Self-ownership is a demand of nature herself, a demand of natural law. He who violates natural law acts contrary to nature, contrary to natural law. The false argument goes on like this: Since the state curtails the right of self-ownership, the state is contrary to nature, contrary to natural law. Freedom requires that human beings can live according to their right of self ownership; hence it is necessary to abolish the state if freedom is to prevail.
 

Note that restrictions of the absolute right to self-ownership are not confined to acts of the state but are regularly effected between private persons. Moreover, the state may be viewed as a creation of compromise that comes into existence when private persons negotiate restrictions that are binding to all members of society, e.g. restrictions that are more efficacious, efficient and more economical to carry out via general fiat rather than ongoing bilateral negotiations. 

AC also overlooks that in populous communities ( = modern societies), certain legal norms take a long time and a roundabout approach before they eventually get inscribed into the permanently revised social contract – consider, for instance, the decades, even centuries it took before only by the beginning
of the 19th century the modern system of property rights became established in the USA to the benefit of a population that for a long time had consisted of lawless squatters, from the point of view of the then prevailing formal law.

All economic action by human beings amounts to just just one, unending, compromising process of restricting rights that at least in theory or by personal conceit could be conceived of as being of an absolute nature. Even outside the scope of economic action, by which I confront my unlimited desires with my limited means, humans are incessantly engaged in negotiating amongst themselves restrictions to their respective rights, both established and envisioned – for instance, when a husband refrains from attending a football match so as to please his wife.
 

In conclusion, let’s summarise the fundamental error underlying the AC’s self-ownership argument in one sentence:
 

From the fact that human beings reveal features of irreducible personal autonomy does not already follow which property rights prevail, which property rights are desirable or may be looked upon as desirable, or which property rights can feasibly be established given the historic conditions.
 

Private property of the form that according to the AC interpretation of natural law must be regarded as a compelling consequence of logic and moral reasoning has not existed, not even in a remotely similar form, during 99.99% of the time occupied by human history.
 

There are good grounds to assume that private property was quite simply an infeasible proposition prior to the introduction of sedentary agricultural during the Neolithic era 10 000 years ago. Well into the modern era, one frequently observes cases where no transition occurs from a system of communal property to one of private property, simply because the cost-benefit relations do not justify such a conversion.

Proponents of AC may simply conclude that humankind has been living under immoral conditions – and, in fact, continues to live under such conditions to this day, as the presence of the state precludes, in their view, a regime of true natural law. However, such a moral maximalism fails to grasp reality, being incapable of providing insight into the (conditions of the) genesis, the functions, the idiosyncrasies and consequences of the institutions of human ethical order as they actual exist and existed, or are likely to exist; not to mention that AC is based on fundamentally flawed reasoning.

Written in June 2013

German twin post.