¹ Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper, “Against Self-Ownership: There Are No Fact-Insensitive Ownership Rights over One’s Body,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008): 86–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² This means that in virtue of people being self-owners, they have the right to sell their labor or body parts. I qualified this because not all proponents of self-ownership think that people have the right to permanently sell their labor (e.g., slave contracts) or to sell their vital organs (e.g., heart markets). The objections to self-ownership that I am considering do not require that the thesis defend slave contracts and heart markets in order to succeed, and I needn’t settle this question about self-ownership theory for my response to these objections to succeed.

³ Sobel, David, “Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership,” Ethics 123, no. 1 (2012): 32–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ On the Kantian view, it is a mistake to paternalistically prevent people from deciding what happens to their bodies because doing so would prioritize merely contingent values, like pleasure, over the intrinsic value of an autonomous person. More generally, since all autonomous people have this value, to interfere with a person’s choices about how her body is used involves a kind of contradiction in the will of the interferer, who cannot consistently assert that he has a right against interference while denying the same for other people. For a version of this argument, see Korsgaard, Christine M., The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Taylor, Robert, “A Kantian Defense of Self Ownership” Journal of Political Philosophy, 12, no. 1 (2004): 65–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Sobel, David, “Self-Ownership and the Conflation Problem,” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol 3, ed. Timmons, Mark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

⁶ David Sobel, “Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership,” 32–60.

⁷ Arneson, Richard J., “Lockean Self-Ownership: Towards a Demolition,” Political Studies 39, no. 1 (1991): 36–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Sobel, “Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership,” 49.

⁹ Cohen writes “[Dworkin] said that the principle of self-ownership is too indeterminate to pick out a distinct position in political philosophy. He reasoned as follows: to own something is to enjoy some or other set of rights with respect to that thing. But one might envisage a number of importantly different sets of rights over themselves and their own powers in virtue of which we could say of people that they are self-owners. The principle of self-ownership therefore lacks determinate content.” Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Kernohan, Andrew, “Capitalism and Self-Ownership,” Social Philosophy and Policy 6, no. 1 (1988): 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ George Brenkert cites this claim in agreement. Gorr, Michael, “Justice, Self-Ownership, and Natural Assets,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 2 (1995): 267–91;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Brenkert, George G., “Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Autonomy,” Journal of Ethics 2, no. 1 (1998): 27–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² David Sobel, “Backing Away From Libertarian Self-Ownership,” 33.

¹³ This is seemingly what the left libertarians, such as Michael Otsuka, Hillel Steiner, and Peter Valentine, try to do.

¹⁴ This is what some right libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, try to do.

¹⁵ I should note before I review the possibilities for vague self-ownership that not everyone accepts that moral vagueness is a coherent idea. Support for the possibility of moral vagueness may depend on one’s metaethical commitments, as Constantinescu argues. The following two sections will show that even if we do not accept that there is moral vagueness, boundary cases do not discredit the self-ownership thesis. Constantinescu, Cristian, “Moral Vagueness: A Dilemma for Non-Naturalism,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9 (2014): 152–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ There could be indeterminacy in the language we use to talk about the self, acceptable risk, and permissibility (semantic vagueness). Or the boundaries that define these predicates could be unknowable (epistemic vagueness). Ontic vagueness exists if indeterminacy about the predicates themselves would remain even if we used a perfect language to talk about self-ownership and knew all the relevant facts about each moral concept used in self-ownership theory and the application of that concept. Barnes, Elizabeth, “Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Noûs 44, no. 4 (2010): 601–627.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ For example, the family of Henrietta Lacks claimed that they were entitled to compensation for their ancestor’s cancer cells. The famous case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California addressed but did not conclusively decide whether people had property rights to their genetic material. Narayanan, Nithya, “Patenting of Human Genetic Material v. Bioethics: Revisiting the Case of John Moore v. Regents of the University of California,” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 7, no. 2 (June 2010): 82–89,Google Scholar McDaniels, Andrea K., “Henrietta Lacks’ Family Wants Compensation for Her Cells,” The Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2017.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Dougherty first observes that if the content of moral predicates, like permissibility, depends in some ways on our own attitudes, and if attitudes themselves can be vague (in the way that people can have vagueness-related partial beliefs about baldness), then the moral attitudes, like desire or approval, may be vague as well. Or it could be that the semantic rules for moral predicates do not specify whether and how they apply to particular situations, either because there are multiple possible linguistic conventions with different applications or because the ethical term depends on a vague descriptive term. Dougherty, Tom, “Vague Value,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89, no. 2 (2014): 352–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ On some metaethical views, people’s usage of moral terms determines the terms’ content. For example, just as on some views of jurisprudence, the conventional or expert understanding of a law, determines the facts about what a law actually says, according to some metaethicists, the conventional or hypothetical expert’s interpretation of what constitutes acceptable risk or permissible interference would determine what those terms meant. This view may be appealing for those who assert that the concept of ownership refers to ownership conventions, in which case making legal and socially acknowledged ownership conventions more precise would settle borderline questions about whether an act of seeming interference is a violation of a person’s ownership rights.

²⁰ Schoenfeild argues that the semantics of a moral concept are either shifty or rigid. If the semantics are shifty, then whether the harm involved in the confiscation of skin cells or pollution is permissible or impermissible would shift, depending on whether it was uttered by a person who thinks that it is permissible to harm people in minor ways to achieve a substantial benefit or someone who rejects that claim. If the semantics were rigid, then it would mean that in cases of indeterminacy, the indeterminacy would not shift depending on the speaker. If so, then seeming cases of semantic indeterminacy would be best explained by underlying ontic indeterminacy. Schoenfield, Miriam, “Moral Vagueness Is Ontic Vagueness,” Ethics 126, no. 2 (2016): 257–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Sobel, “Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership,” 51.

²² Citing Judith Thomson and Bernard Williams, Dougherty and Schoenfield both press this point against epistemic accounts of moral vagueness.

²³ Sorensen, Roy, “Unknowable Obligations,” Utilitas 7, no. 2 (1995): 247–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ Sider, Theodore, “Sorensen on Unknowable Obligations,” Utilitas 7, no. 2 (1995): 273–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁵ This is just one proposed meta-norm, but it has been defended extensively for cases of descriptive indeterminacy and uncertainty, and I suspect that these arguments would apply with equal cases to normative indeterminacy. For a defense of a meta-norm of caution, see Moller, Dan, “Abortion and Moral Risk,” Philosophy 86, no. 3 (2011): 425–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Guerrero, Alexander A., “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution,” Philosophical Studies 136, no. 1 (2007): 59–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Consider an analogy to legal indeterminacy. Jurisprudence is the study of meta-norms that one should adopt when faced with genuine indeterminacy in first-order legal principles. Despite this, the law still informs how people act. Similarly, there can be genuine indeterminacy in first-order moral principles, but those principles can still be action-guiding. David Plunkett and Scott Shapiro, “Law, Morality, and Everything Else: General Jurisprudence as a Branch of Metanormative Inquiry,” Ethics 128, no. 1 (2017): 37–68.

²⁷ One concern about this response is that the meta-norm that people should adopt in response to unknowable moral predicates like “acceptably risky” could also be vague as applied to cases. So, for example, the norm that people should refrain from imposing risks when they are reasonably uncertain may be accused of appealing to an unknowable threshold between reasonable certainty and reasonably uncertainty. I’m not sure how to answer this regress problem. Perhaps vagueness of this sort is unavoidable.

²⁸ Elizabeth Barnes, “Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the Perplexed,” 609.

²⁹ Sorensen, Roy A., “Moral Dilemmas, Thought Experiments, and Conflict Vagueness,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 63, no. 3 (1991): 291–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ Roy Sorensen provides an overview of arguments for and against the view that all vagueness is linguistic. Sorensen, Roy, “Vagueness,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, Edward N., Winter 2016 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016).Google Scholar

³¹ Wall, Steven, “Self-Ownership and Paternalism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 4 (2009): 399–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

³³ Kagan, Shelly, “Thinking about Cases,” Social Philosophy and Policy 18, no. 2 (2001): 44–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ Here I am responding to a view of reflective equilibrium that originates with Rawls’s method. See, e.g., Daniels, Norman, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” The Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 5 (1979): 256–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium,” 256–82.

³⁶ For evidence that ideological biases influence people’s assessment of academic work, see: Iyengar, Shanto and Westwood, Sean J., “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2015): 690–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Duarte, José L. et al., “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (2015): e130.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

³⁷ For a defense of prizing simplicity over nuance in sociological theory, see Healy, Kieran, “Fuck Nuance,” Sociological Theory 35, no. 2 (2017): 118–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁸ Kagan, “Thinking about Cases.”

³⁹ For a further defense of this and the next argument against reflective equilibrium, see McPherson, Tristram, “The Methodological Irrelevance of Reflective Equilibrium,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 652–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ Singer, Peter, “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,” The Monist 58, no. 3 (1974): 490–517;CrossRefGoogle Scholar de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna and Singer, Peter, “The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason,” Ethics 123, no. 1 (2012): 9–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴¹ Or as Kagan writes, “our moral intuition deserves considerably less respect than it is normally accorded. But it is difficult to believe that we could ever make do without it altogether. No moral argument—no claim, no theory—will ever seem compelling if it has not been subjected to the testing we provide when we think about cases.” Kagan, “Thinking about Cases.”

⁴² Godfrey-Smith, Peter, “Metaphysics and the Philosophical Imagination,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 160, no. 1 (2012): 97–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ See, for example, Dancy, Jonathan, “The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66, nos. 1–2 (n.d.): 141–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wilkes, Kathleen V., Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);Google Scholar McPherson, Tristram, “The Methodological Irrelevance of Reflective Equilibrium,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ So too, logical theories are evaluated on the basis of explanatory coherence, power, and tractability and are not necessarily undermined by paradoxes. Trafford, James, Meaning in Dialogue: An Interactive Approach to Logic and Reasoning, Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology, and Rational Ethics (Springer International Publishing, 2017), 197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁵ Gert, Joshua, “Colour, Emotion and Objectivity,” Analysis 69, no. 4 (2009): 714–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Freiman, Christopher and Lerner, Adam, “Self-Ownership and Disgust: Why Compulsory Body Part Redistribution Gets Under Our Skin,” Philosophical Studies 172, no. 12 (2015): 3167–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ Lazar, Seth, “Deontological Decision Theory and Agent-Centered Options,” Ethics 127, no. 3 (2017): 579–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁸ For example, perhaps self-ownership theory speaks to the right but not the good. Perhaps it is a political value but not a personal value in a disunities moral landscape. See Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good, ed. Stratton-Lake, Philip (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Brännmark, Johan, “Moral Disunitarianism,” The Philosophical Quarterly 66, no. 264 (2016): 481–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁹ Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, “War and Murder,” 1961.