Libertarianism, Self-Ownership, and Property Rights

Contrary to what many libertarians think, self-ownership is not, and cannot be, the ground of property rights. The following argument should make this point clear.  

P1) If one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s ownership of one’s self/body is the ground of one’s right to own property.

P2) If one’s ownership of one’s self/body is the ground of one’s right to own property, then one’s ownership of one’s self/body is logically prior to one’s right to own scarce resources.

C1) Therefore, if one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s ownership of one’s self/body is logically prior to one’s right to own scarce resources. [From P1 and P2]

P3) If one’s ownership of one’s self/body is logically prior to one’s right to own scarce resources, then one’s self/body is not a scarce resource.

For, if (a) one’s self/body is a scarce resource and (b) one’s ownership of one’s self/body is logically prior to one’s right to own scarce resources, then those who maintain that property rights are grounded upon self-ownership would be ensnarled in a vicious circle. Indeed, “Shall the earth rest on the great elephant, and the great elephant again upon the earth?”

C2) Therefore, if one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s self/body is not a scarce resource. [From C1 and P3]

P4) If one’s self/body is not a scarce resource, then one’s self/body is not capable of being owned.

C3) Therefore, if one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s self/body is not capable of being owned. [From C2 and P4]

P5) If one’s self/body is not capable of being owned, then one’s ownership of one’s self/body cannot be the ground of one’s right to own property.

C4) Therefore, if one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s ownership of one’s self/body cannot be the ground of one’s right to own property. [From C3 and P5]

P6) If one’s ownership of one’s self/body cannot be the ground of one’s right to own property, then one’s self/body-ownership cannot be the ground of one’s property rights.

C5) Therefore, if one’s self/body-ownership is the ground of one’s property rights, then one’s self/body-ownership cannot be the ground of one’s property rights. [From C4 and P6]

Reading Notes: July 25th, 2022

“We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, 219) 

“All life, everywhere, in so far as it is life, has conscious meaning, and accomplishes a rational end. This is the necessary consequence of our Idealism.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, 220) 

“Schopenhauer’s principle work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, is the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence, if one excepts Plato’s Republic.” (Royce, Two Philosophers of the Paradoxical: Schopenhauer, 166) 

“The world of our daily life, Kant had said, has good order and connection in it not because the absolute order of external things in themselves is known to us, but (as I have reworded Kant) because we are sane; because our understanding, then, has its own coherence, and must see its experience in the light of this coherence. Idealism has already drawn the obvious conclusion from all this. If this be so, if it is our understanding that actually creates the order of nature for us, then the problem, “How shall I comprehend my world?” becomes no more or less than the problem, “How shall I understand myself?” We have already suggested into what romantic extravagances the effort to know exhaustively the inner life had by this time led. Some profound but still vague relation was felt to exist between my own self and an Infinite Self….My Real Self is deeper than my conscious self, and this real self is boundless, far spreading, romantic, divine….My conscious and present self isn’t the whole of me. I am constantly appealing to my own past, to my own future self, and to my deeper self, also, as it now is. Whatever I affirm, or doubt, or deny, I am always searching my own mind for proof, for support, for guidance. Such searching constitutes in one sense all my active mental life. All philosophy, then, turns, as Kant had shown, upon understanding who and what I am, and who my deeper self is. Hegel recognizes this; but he will not dream about it. He undertakes an analysis, therefore, which we must here reword in our own fashion, and for the most part with our own illustrations.” (Royce, Two Philosophers of the Paradoxical: Hegel, 53-54)

Reading Notes: July 24th, 2022

“Mind is, therefore, in its every act only apprehending itself, and the aim of all genuine science is just this; that mind shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth. An out-and-out other simply does not exist for mind.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §377) 

“A true philosophic system is not to be looked upon as a soulless jointing of hypotheses; it is a living fabric which, with all its endeavour to be objective, must have a well-marked individuality. Hence it is not to be regarded as the special property of academic philosophy-mongers, to be hacked up by them into technical views, but is to be regarded as a form of life and is to be treated as a theme of literature of infinite interest to humanity.” (Bhattacharyya, Studies in Vedantism, ix) 

“Here is the central hypothesis of cognitive science: Thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures....A representation is a structure that stands for something by virtue of relations such as similarity, causal history, and connections with other representations. For example, a photograph of you is a representation of you because it looks like you and because photography causally links it with you. The word “cat” is not similar to cats, but there is a causal link between utterances of this word and the presence of cats, as well as relations between the concept cat and other concepts. Let us look at how individual neurons and especially groups of neurons can serve as representations….A typical neuron may fire hundreds of times per second, and we can think of it as representing a degree of presence or absence of what it represents. For example, if a unit represents the concept cat, then its firing many times per second signifies the presence of a cat. However, all natural and most artificial neural networks use distributed representations in which concepts are encoded by a population of neurons: a group of neurons represents a concept by virtue of a pattern of firing rates in all of the neurons. Thus a group of neurons, each with its own firing rate, can encode a large number of aspects of the world….A single neuron can represent a feature of the world as the result of being tuned to fire more rapidly when that feature is presented.” (Thagard, Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science, 151-152)

Reading Notes: July 12th, 2022

“As we have already noted, the semantics of representations cannot literally cause a system to behave the way it does; only the material form of the representation is causally efficacious….What actually do the causing are certain physical properties of the representation state—but in a way that reflects the representational state’s content.” (Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition, 39) 

“The states of a computer can be given many different semantic interpretations; indeed, the same symbolic states are sometimes interpreted as words, sometimes as numbers, chess positions, or weather conditions….What determines what a given (syntactically articulated) state represents? [What] causes certain mental events to have certain contents? [According to some theorists], at least some mental contents represent certain things because they resemble them. An image of X represents X precisely because the conscious mental representations, or images, look like X. Such a view probably is not far from the common notion of visual imagery. If you were to ask a group of people how they know their image of a duck actually represents a duck, rather than, say, a rabbit, they might reply that the image looks like a duck. For several reasons, however, this answer does not explain why the image is a representation of a duck. For example, even in the introspectionist approach, the image need not closely resemble a duck for people to take it as a duck since it is their image, they can take it as virtually anything they wish; after all, the word duck refers to a duck without in any way, resembling a duck. [The] image of a man walking up a hill may look exactly like the image of a man walking backward down a hill; yet, if they were my images, there would be no question of their being indeterminate—I would know what they represented. The relation of resemblance is not well defined. Whether one thing resembles another is not a physically (or geometrically) definable property; resemblance depends on what the viewer knows or believes. To me, most birds closely resemble one another, but to a birdwatcher friend they are as different as ducks and rabbits. Resemblance cannot be specified except in relation to a viewer….Resemblance provides no basis for specifying the semantic content of mental representations.” (Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition, 40-41) 

“Mediational behaviorists and certain speculative neurophysiologists take the position that a brain event can be said to represent something if that event is sufficiently like (possesses a subset of the properties of) the event that takes place when that something actually is perceived. Another, more radically behaviorist version requires that the mediational event evoke an internal “preparatory response” that is sufficiently like the response that would have been evoked by the corresponding stimulus. Neither position is satisfactory, because of the properties of representations we have already noted (for example, we can think about objects we have neither perceived nor have any disposition to behave toward, such as, perhaps, quarks). In any case, the only mechanism behaviorism provides for explicating the representing relation is that of association. Association, in turn, must be established by such principles as contiguity and evoked by the activation of other associated items (otherwise we would not have provided the naturalistic account of the semantics of the functional states sought by behaviorism). A chain of continuous events mediating between a brain state and an object, however, cannot form the basis of representation, for reasons discussed above, namely, that it is neither necessary nor sufficient that the state of an organism be linked by a series of contiguous events to the object that the state represents. Not only can I think of things to which I obviously am not in this sort of relation (for example, nonexistent things), but when I do think of X, I do not thereby think of associates of X; indeed, I need not think of properties that are necessarily coextensive with X, such as shape, size, weight, color, and so on. The basic problem is that representing is a semantic relation, that semantic relations, like logical relations, appear not to be causally definable…” (Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition, 41-42) 

“Colour perception is often associated with feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Most people have preferences for certain colours rather than for others. Indeed, the order of preference seems fairly constant among Western peoples. It is as follows: blue, red, green, purple, orange, and yellow. Intermediate colours are usually felt to be less pleasant than pure colors. But there are considerable individual variations; in particular, some people seem to prefer bright colours, others softer and less saturated ones. Again, particular colours may give rise to particular emotional reactions: red to excitement or anger, blue to calm pleasure, black and grey to sadness or depression.” (Vernon, The Psychology of Perception, 71-72)

Reading Notes: July 11th, 2022

“Those who identify what is generally called objective or transcendental idealism with subjective idealism or mentalism do but scanty justice to the profound conception of objective thought which, since Hegel’s masterly analysis of knowledge, has remained as one of the valuable achievements of idealism. In several well-known, but much misunderstood, passages Hegel warns that the term “thought” may be either used in the sense of “a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, such as perception, conception and will, with which it stands on the same level,” or it may be used in its objective meaning as nous. It is in this latter sense that man is said to be a being that thinks, and, as a thinker, he is universal. Green is equally emphatic that the idealist’s contention about the foundational character of the thinking subject would be “an absurd impropriety” if thought is taken to be a faculty; and this accounts for the contemptuous tone in which he condemns the undergraduate’s conception of idealism….Green has remarked that the subject-object relation is the most generic element in our definition of the knowable universe because “matter,” in being known, becomes a relation between subject and object; mind, in being known, becomes so equally. It is incorrect, therefore, he continues, to speak of the relation between “matter” and “mind” as if it were the same with that between subject and object. “A mode of the latter relation constitutes each member alike of the former relation.” Once the confusion between the subject-object relation with the inter-objective relation is cleared, the term “thought,” as used in the idealistic analysis of knowledge, can no more stand for the subjective process of mind.” (Radhakrishnan, History of Philosophy: Eastern and Western, Vol. II, 301-302) 

“Since in philosophy, we must think, how is possible to transcend thought without self-contradiction? For theory can reflect on, and pronounce about, all things, and in reflecting on them it therefore includes them….If thought asserted the existence of any content which was not an actual or possible object of thought certainly that assertion would contradict itself….Everything, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, and must be called intelligible.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 175-176) 

“Stout holds that material events and conditions cannot produce mental events. In other words, Stout holds that material events and conditions could never completely explain a mental event….We must agree that there is no character which is specified both in is conscious and has an extensive quality; there is no highly generic character of which both these are species….But, if consciousness were to result from the movements of brain molecules, there would be no generic resemblance between cause and effect….If one situation S explains another S’, then S and S’ must be manifestations of specific forms of the same generic qualities and relations. This may be restated in our vocabulary as follows: If a set of facts, S, is the cause of a set of facts, S’, then the components (the qualities and relations) in the set S must specify the same generic characters as are specified in the components of the set S’. If we call generic characters and variables and their specific forms their values and completely generic characters supreme variables, then we can express this principle conveniently as follows: If S explains S’, then they must be manifestations of the same supreme variables. This may be called the Principle of Generic Resemblance….If we accept the principles of resemblance, we must reject the view that mental events are produced by material situations. For consciousness, as we have admitted, would be a supreme new variable. And even if we accept only the milder principle of continuity, we must reject the doctrine of production unless we are prepared to say that every material event produces a mental event. For the material events which happen in a brain when it is stimulated do not differ in kind, but only in complexity, from those which take place elsewhere, for example, in your kettle when it boils. They therefore, by the principle of continuity, cannot have some entirely new kind of effect.” (Wisdom, Problems of Mind and Matter, 86-95) 

Reading Notes: July 7th, 2022

“Though it would be unwarrantable to resolve a thing, as some have done, into a mere meeting-point of relations, yet it is perhaps as great a mistake to assume that it can be anything determinate in itself apart from all relations to other things. By the physicist this mistake can hardly be made: for him action and reaction are strictly correlative: a material system can do no work on itself. For the biologist, again, organism and environment are invariably complementary. But in psychology, when presentations are regarded as subjective modifications, we have this mistaken isolation in a glaring form, and all the hopeless difficulties of what is called “subjective idealism” are the result. Subjective modifications, no doubt, are always one constituent of individual experience, but always as correlative to objective modifications or change in the objective continuum. If experience were throughout subjective, not merely would the term subjective itself be meaningless, not merely would the conception of the objective never arise, but the entirely impersonal and intransitive process that remained, though it might be described as absolute becoming, could not be called even solipsism, least of all real experience.” (Ward, Entry on “Psychology” in The Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), 549) 

“No amount of objective physiological research can tell us anything about the real nature of a feeling, or can discover new feelings. Granting that neural processes are at the basis of all feelings as of all mental activities, we can infer nothing from the physiological activity as to the nature of the psychic process. It is only such feelings and elements as we have already discovered and analyzed by introspection that can be correlated with a physical process. Nor can we gain much light even if we suppose—which is granting a good deal in our present state of knowledge—that there exists a general analogy between nerve growth and activity, and mental operations. If relating, i.e., cognition, is established on basis of inter-relation in brain tissue, if every mental connecting means a connecting of brain fibres, we might, indeed, determine the number of thoughts, but we could not tell what the thoughts were. So if mental disturbance always means bodily disturbance, we can still tell nothing more about the nature of each emotion than we knew before. We must first know fear, anger, etc., as experiences in consciousness before we can correlate them with corporeal acts.” (Stanley, Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, 6-7) 

“It is obvious enough that no feeling can be revived into a representation of itself, but no more can any cognition or any mental activity.” (Stanley, Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, 6-7) 

“Sense and thought, both are realizations of the aboriginal potentialities of the real. They are capable of grasping reality because they are the realizations of the powers of the real to know—and to know is to know reality. Further, the bodily organs are neither channels of knowledge nor instruments of knowledge, much less causes of knowledge. The eye does not see; nor do we see with the eye. The eyes are only external expressions of the realization of the power of sight, which is totally a spiritual activity. They are only its symbols. The same is true of the brain. It is only an external expression, an indication, a symbol of the realization of thought. Sense and reason directly apprehend reality; the changes in sense-organs and brain are modifications of prior realizations indicative of the realization of sensing and thinking. If these modifications are obstructed, the obstructions are indicative of obstruction in the realization of sensing and thinking. The real has railed to work the changes in former realizations which must be made along with the realizing of new powers.” (Hasan, Realism, 18-19) 

“But that the real is not in its realization bound down to any definite physical conditions, is brought out by the daily experience of adaptation. It is its yearning to realize itself which brings about the necessary changes in the organs of the body. Its power of sight will realize itself; the eye is not in the proper condition; that power exerts itself to its demands and puts it in the proper disposition. This, even when the eye is not quite normal. Some portions of the brain are removed, others are made to function as indications of as indications of the realization of mentality. Indeed, the physical apparatus, e.g. the visual, is incapable of giving all we see. We see distance and volume, which this photographic camera does not and cannot convey. The “impressionists” in art base their case on these facts and call the former art mechanical. They give objects as we actually see them; while the “mechanical” art produced them as they would be for a photographic camera—it had to train the eye (the sight) to look at things as they would look to a photographic camera.” (Hasan, Realism, 19) 

“This view of the process of the real would seem to be in consonance with the view that human consciousness takes of sense and thought. On the one hand, it affirms the external objects and attributes to reality the qualities which the unsophisticated man attributes to it; and, on the other, it holds the directness of perception and keeps it free from physiological complications which make perception representation and are the chief stumbling-block in the way of its directness. Moreover, it pointedly brings out that sense is activity and not passivity. It is clear that according to the view suggested above sense-organs are not causes, but are, on the contrary, effects of sense. They are modifications wrought in the organism as by-products by the power of sense-perception in the process of its realization. Strictly speaking, they are not even instruments with which the sense works. Sense does not work by means of them. They are concomitant with the realization of sense, and are therefore only external expressions, indications, symbols of its realization. They do not play any part in perception. They only indicate to the external observer that it is taking place.” (Hasan, Realism, 19-20) 

“But a concomitant variation does not necessarily mean causation. It may simply be an inseparable accident. Indeed, the sense-organs are in no case constitutive of sensa. They and their conditions are simply indicative of the effective or defective realizations of sense-powers. Only in the former cases, sense apprehends reality. What it apprehends in the latter cases are partly its own creations like the after-images. The objection of the relativity of sensa to sense-organs, applies in fact, mutatis mutandis, in all its stages equally to thought. The abnormalities, temporary or permanent, of brain are accompanied by abnormalities in thinking. But, it is not contended on that account, that thought is relative to brain and that conditions of brain are constitutive causes of the objects of thought. Apparently, the reason is that in the case of sense we seem directly to experience that sense-organs and their conditions are connected with sensing and sensa, while we do not similarly observe the connectedness of brain and thought. But that is no vital difference. In both cases the relation is not that sense-organs are causes of sensing or sensa, and brain the cause of thinking or thoughts. On the contrary, it is rather sense that is the cause of sense-organs and thought that of brain—and the physical organs are only external expressions, indications, symbols of the realization of sense and thought.” (Hasan, Realism, 25-26)