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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020
The idea of self-ownership has played a prominent role in justifying normative conclusions in moral and political philosophy. I argue that whether or not we are self-owners, there is no such role for it to play. Self-ownership is better thought a conclusion of moral and political arguments rather than their source. I then begin to explore an alternative idea—that the self is morally significant—that provides what those who rely on self-ownership ought to be looking for.
1 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, II, 4.
2 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 167–74.Google Scholar
3 Otsuka, Michael, Libertarianism Without Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 See, especially, Steiner, Hillel, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).Google Scholar
5 See Peter Vallentyne, “Left-Libertarianism and Liberty,” in Christiano, Thomas and Christman, J., Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy (Chichester: Wiley, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 See van Parijs, Phillipe, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
7 See, further, Tadros, Victor “Independence Without Interests?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 31, no. 193 (2011) for an argument against the Kantian view about this.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 See, especially, Ripstein, Arthur, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 See Bennett, Karen, Making Things Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Sometimes constituting is treated as an instance of the more general class of grounding relations. This is just a matter of terminology, but I find it more natural to use grounding in the more restrictive sense and building or dependence to capture the more general class.
11 Jurisprudential debates are a standard example of a debate about grounding relations—hard positivists believe that only social facts ground laws where anti-positivists disagree. See, for example, G. Rosen “Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction” in Hale, Bob and Hoffmann, Aviv, Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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14 As Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka acknowledge. See “Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant,” 207. See, also, Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality, 12–15.
15 See Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality, 15.
16 See Fried, B. “Left-Libertarianism: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (2004): 66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 See, for an especially influential discussion, Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), chap. 12.Google Scholar
18 The view that physical continuity of the brain matters to egoistic concern is defended in McMahan, Jeff, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),CrossRefGoogle Scholar chap. 1. I am sympathetic to the significance of physical continuity, but doubt that it is only continuity of the brain that matters.
19 See Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Ibid., 243–44.