Martin Elson
Self-ownership is the first premise of most right-libertarian argument. Each person owns themselves, so they own what they make and what they trade for, and no one may lay a hand on them uninvited. The conclusion it reaches for is right: no one is anyone’s property. The premise is the trouble. It gets there by calling a person a kind of property, and whatever can be owned can be sold.
The case for self-ownership
John Locke gave the idea its classic form in 1689: every man has “a Property in his own Person,” and by mixing his labor with what lies in common he makes it his own. Murray Rothbard made it an argument by elimination. In For a New Liberty (1973) he lists the alternatives. Either some class of people owns the rest, which no universal ethic can allow, or everyone owns an equal share of everyone, which would leave no one able to move without the whole world’s consent. Only self-ownership is left.
Jason Brennan gives the modern version, and it is harder to wave away. Self-ownership, he argues, is not a strange relation between you and yourself. It is a bundle of claims against other people: to control your body, use it, keep others out of it, and be compensated when they intrude. Most liberals already hold most of these. Consent to surgery, the right to refuse sex, the ban on forced organ donation: each is a piece of the bundle. On his reading, self-ownership is not a controversial premise but an uncontroversial conclusion.
G. A. Cohen, a Marxist, took the idea seriously enough to spend a book on it. The left, he argued, can’t simply dismiss it, because its own charge of exploitation leans on something like it: if the worker’s labor is taken, it must first have been his. And denying self-ownership seems to license what nearly everyone recoils from, such as a lottery that takes one healthy eye from the sighted to give to the blind. Nor is the premise the right’s alone. Left-libertarians such as Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne and Michael Otsuka keep full self-ownership and add that natural resources belong to everyone equally. The objections below hit their version as much as Rothbard’s.
Where it goes wrong
The word. Ownership is a relation between a person and a thing, held against other people. Turned on oneself it splits a person in two: an owner who commands and a body that is commanded. Alex Strekal, writing as brainpolice, made this point, and so did François Tremblay, each on his own, before I did. Kant had made it two centuries earlier: a person can’t dispose of himself, because he is not a thing, and so he is not his own property. Brennan’s bundle is the right reply: the claims run against others, not against yourself. That rescues the claim from the grammar. It doesn’t rescue it from what follows.
The circle. Self-ownership is offered as the ground of property, but it is itself a property claim. Either property comes first, and persons are one more kind of property, or self-ownership comes first and can’t borrow its meaning from a property theory that is supposed to come after it. Strekal called it the chicken and the egg.
Fact and right. You control your body; that is a fact. No one should interfere with it; that is a claim. Defenders slide between the two. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that anyone who denies self-ownership refutes himself, since he must use his own body to make the argument. But what you do can’t show what others ought to do; that is Hume’s point, and it holds here. Hoppe gets a full hearing in What Counts as Aggression.
The sale. This is the one that decides it. If you own yourself the way you own a bicycle, you may sell yourself. Robert Nozick said a free system would allow it. Walter Block defends voluntary slavery contracts outright. Rothbard refused: the will can’t be handed over, so a contract to obey a master is void. Stephan Kinsella refuses too. But they refuse by bringing in a fact about persons that has nothing to do with ownership. Once that fact is admitted, it does all the work, and the ownership language is idle. Block is consistent and wrong; Rothbard is right and inconsistent. Locke himself agreed with Rothbard: a man, he wrote, cannot enslave himself to anyone, because he hasn’t that power over his own life. His property in his person was never the kind you could sell. Rousseau, Hegel and Mill drew the same line. To renounce your liberty, Rousseau wrote, is to renounce being human; Hegel counted personality and freedom of will among the goods no one can sign away; and Mill held that freedom can’t include the freedom to give it up. David Ellerman takes the fact to its end. Responsible agency can’t be transferred, which is why a hired killer hangs with the man who hired him. None of this needs free will in any deep sense. Hume thought every act was caused and still held people answerable for what they did, because what matters is whose act it was. What can’t be sold for a lifetime can’t be rented by the hour either; Property, Labor and Equality makes that case, and What Rights Are builds the floor on it. Carole Pateman pushes further: property in the person, she argues, is a fiction that lets subordination pass as contract, at work and in marriage.
The false menu. Rothbard’s elimination leaves out an option. Strekal caught it: the communal option passes his universality test as well as his own does, so universality can’t choose between them. And there is a fourth he never weighs: no one owns anyone. Not a class, not everyone, not you. That is the answer this site gives, and it needs no property in persons at all. Roderick Long reaches it by another road: he grounds rights in Locke’s equality of authority, the fact that no one is by nature anyone’s master, rather than in ownership.
The child. The hardest test is the person least able to answer for themselves. Rothbard faced it in The Ethics of Liberty(1982) and held that parents have no enforceable duty to feed their children: they may let a child starve, and he looked forward to a free market in children. That is where owning persons leads when it is followed without flinching. Turn the debt around. No one consents to being born. Life is imposed on every child by someone else’s choice, so the debt runs from parent to child, not the other way. Seana Shiffrin argues the same from law: bringing someone into existence imposes burdens they never agreed to, and that creates a duty of care. David Graeber rejected the old idea of a primordial debt we owe our parents, our gods or our society for being alive, but stopped short of reversing it. The child is the clearest case of a person used as an input who can’t leave. The debt is repaid by raising someone who can.
David Benatar takes the same premise further: if existence is imposed, the honest course is not to impose it. His argument deserves more than a paragraph, and this page doesn’t settle it. But it turns the imposition into a reason to stop. The view here treats it as a reason to answer for what you started.
The strongest case against
Cohen’s eye lottery is the best argument self-ownership has. Without it, what stops the majority from claiming your kidney? The answer is the floor from What Rights Are. No one may use you as an input, and that right can’t be signed away. “Nobody owns you” forbids the eye lottery as firmly as “you own you” does, and it doesn’t let you sell yourself.
The second defense is softer: it’s only a word. In a world where people and animals are still owned and rented, shouting “I own myself” is a fair way to say “hands off.” As a slogan against masters it does good work. As a premise it carries the master in with it. Giving up the word may be as hard as getting Americans to go metric. Fine: measure carefully. Shawn Wilbur adds that the gap between “I am myself” and “I own myself” is where the idea first gets interesting.
The New Mutualist Manifesto tries a third way: agree with Rothbard, then agree harder. Keep Locke’s mechanism, but notice that the self is never finished; it is always becoming. An unfinished self can never mix its labor once and for all, so property can rest only on continuing possession. The conclusion lands close to the mutualists on Property, Labor and Equality. But it keeps the word, and the word still carries the sale.
Where this lands
No one owns you, you included. Not because you are your own property, but because a person isn’t property at all. A self is not a thing to be grasped but an activity, always in the making. I am not property; I am action. What self-ownership was invented to protect, the claim to be left alone in your own body, stands without it, on the floor in What Rights Are. It stands better there, because a claim that doesn’t rest on ownership can’t be sold. Who owns you? Not me, and not you either.
Sources
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), ch. 4 §23 (no one can enslave himself) and ch. 5 §27 (property in one’s person). Public domain.
- Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (Macmillan, 1973), ch. 2. The argument by elimination.
- Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Humanities Press, 1982), ch. 14 (children: no enforceable duty to feed) and ch. 19 (the will is inalienable).
- Jason Brennan, “Self-ownership: An uncontroversial conclusion among liberals, not a controversial premise” (Bleeding Heart Libertarians, November 2012). Self-ownership as a bundle of claims. original
- G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Why the left can’t simply dismiss self-ownership; the eye lottery.
- Alex Strekal (as brainpolice), “Why I Reject Self-ownership Redux” (Polycentric Order, 2009). Dualism, chicken and egg, fact and right. archived · copy here
- Alex Strekal (as brainpolice), “Universality Isn’t Enough” (Polycentric Order, August 2009). Rothbard’s menu and the missing fourth option. archived · copy here
- François Tremblay, “Self-ownership is a meaningless concept” (2008) and “The confusion of self-ownership” (2010). 2008 · 2010
- Edward Britton, “Who Owns You?” Ownership as control. copy here
- Anonymous, “On Lockean Self-Ownership and the New Mutualist Manifesto.” The split subject; property as continuing possession. original · copy here
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), p. 331. A free system would allow selling oneself into slavery.
- Walter Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability” (Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2, 2003). Voluntary slavery defended.
- Stephan Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability” (Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2, 2003). Why a slave contract is void.
- David Ellerman, “Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice” (Law and Philosophy 29, 2010). Agency can’t be transferred. See also “‘Inalienable’ Means Inalienable Even With Consent.” copy here
- Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm” (Legal Theory 5, 1999). Procreation imposes unconsented burdens.
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011), ch. 3. Against primordial debt.
- David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford University Press, 2006). Imposition as a reason not to procreate.
- Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth. On “I am myself” and “I own myself.” site
- Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Collins notes; lectures of the mid-1770s, transcribed 1784–85), ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge University Press, 1997), section on duties to oneself. A person is not a thing and so not his own property. Kant scholars still argue over how far he meant it; see Enzo Solari, “Self-ownership in Kant” (2023).
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), bk. 1, ch. 4. Renouncing liberty is renouncing being human. Public domain.
- G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), §66. Inalienable goods of personality.
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 5. No freedom to sell one’s freedom. Public domain.
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), and “Self-Ownership and Property in the Person” (Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 1, 2002).
- Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Blackwell, 1994), and Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds., Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics (Palgrave, 2000).
- Roderick T. Long, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal” (Mises Institute, 2001). Rights from equality of authority.