The Homesteading principle contradicts Self-ownership

For this round I am going to return to the same issues as before while elaborating on them and showing how OreEle's view is simplistic and ultimately incorrect.C1: A Challenge on OwnershipWhat Pro demonstrates here is that people do not have direct power over every process of a constructive task and only set certain parts of it in motion. In reality, the analogy of the farmer is the same as a carpenter who uses glue but does not will it to dry. However, this distinction does not really change the point I was making, which is that the created object is the result of the creator's will. A carpenter conceives of a table or a farmer conceives of a farm in his mind and expresses his will upon the world in his action of creation. When a child is conceived, it is not the product of anyone's will, it is not anyone's idea, and it does not require anyone's skills and knowledge to exist. It is simply the result of a natural process that is ultimately outside anyone's control. One does not decide to start or stop being pregnant and no skills, ideas, or effort is required to move the process along. It is quite possible that one could have a child without actively choosing to do anything. Cheer leading the process as it goes on is not an act of creation.Describing sex as a constructive act to create a child clearly cannot work. Is anything being created at all or does anything go on that is remotely connected to the physical construction of a human being? That fact that it is possible to have sex without thinking of the possibility of pregnancy (I hope I don't need a source for this) indicates that no constructive act is really occurring. The fact that it is possible to pretend that you are creating a baby does not invalidate this; it's a bit like enthusiastically watching a tree grow and claiming you were the reason why it did.Finally, the arm analogy has difficult consequences for the Pro position. If I decide that I no longer wish to shower, do I own the air through which my stench permeates? The result of consequences of one's passive actions, even those directly resulting from his or her physical body, cannot be considered homesteaded automatically the way intentional acts of creation are. They must be homesteaded as new, unowned entities.C2: Resolving the Issue of Child OwnershipPro's first objection to this point is that I have not defined who is responsible for establishing the trustee relationship between parents and children. Ideally, parents would agree to care for their children and make limited decisions for them until their children were old enough to do this themselves. A child's rights could be ignored only insofar as it is not capable of expressing or exercising them. For instance, a baby cannot give its consent to be carried around. More harmful forms of aggression could still be prohibited.What Pro is asking for now is an outline for a legal system and not an ethical theory. They are many possible ways a system of definition and enforcement of such rights could be set up, some of which are by no means radical or incompatible with the state, that could be equal on ethical grounds or flawed on points too minute to warrant a place in this discussion. The point is that trustee ownership of something while the proper owner is in absentia does not violate either the homestead principle or self ownership and thus provides a coherent way to resolve the issue of child ownership.Pro asserts that anyone telling the mother that she had limited rights over her creation would be violating her property rights. I have stressed above in some detail why the child is not the legitimate homesteaded property of its mother, so I consider this entire claim invalid. Indeed, the child has much more to do with its own existence than the mother, who does nothing but involuntarily provide it with room and board. The fetus is the entity that creates itself in this scenario.In any case, the restriction to limited ownership is not problematic since there are already limitations on what you can do with property in a libertarian society. If a own a gun, I may not shoot it at innocent people. A farmer may not grow poisonous plants and burn them, creating a deadly fume that expands into other people's houses. In short, we may not do things that violate the rights of other people. That means that even if we 'own' a person, we may not do things to that person that violate its rights. Killing or hurting a child that we are the temporary caretaker of is a clear example of violating someone's rights since the child clearly does not consent to such a thing. On the other hand, it is still permissible to preform a lifesaving surgery on an infant because it would reasonably consent to such an agreement but by circumstance cannot.A mother's homesteaded property rights are not being violated if she is prohibited from harming her children. This is the protection of their right to self ownership. She has not created her children, and even if they are her creations she cannot own their 'selves' which are ultimately being threatened.C3: The Final Issue of Self Ownership and HomesteadingPro argues that any circumstance in which ownership is transferred from A to B without A's consent must be theft. This is a gross oversimplification of what is necessary for an act to be theft. Prohibiting a person from using drugs would qualify, though this is clearly a different offense. Likewise, picking up a lost item that was not willingly abandoned would be theft. Rather, theft requires that B forcibly remove from A what is otherwise still under A's will and rightfully his.I maintain that the ownership of an object by a person is dependent on that objects nonownership of itself. The entire purpose of property rights is to determine who shall fairly use an object that already owned, and an object claiming self ownership cannot be unowned. Pro's suggestion is equivalent to meeting a person for the first time while he is asleep, 'homesteading' him, and claiming he is your slave when he wakes up. Once an object claims ownership of itself, it cannot be owned in any other way.This is more than simply a transfer of ownership. The maturation of a child (or the coming to life of an inanimate creation) is a change in the state of a thing that makes self-owning what was previously externally owned. The ownership of objects, and indeed the possibility of ownership of objects, is ultimately dependent on their physical states. The physical state of an object may change so that it becomes self-owning.In any case, consider any possible justification of self-ownership and the homestead principle. There is no way that a discourse ethics approach could justify external ownership to a person who protested it, and natural rights arguments are clearly on the side of the child. Even a utilitarian argument like David Friedman's could not favor child slavery.There is no possible justification for the mother's ownership of the child; every approach concludes that the child has a right to own itself and that this right can only be limited in the child's interest and only insofar has it cannot be autonomously exercised. It should not be taken for granted that a mother is the rightful owner of her children, and indeed there is no reason in particular to think that this is true. Even if this is so, the natural shift of ownership from caretaker to the individual as a result of growth cannot be construed as theft under any reasonable and contextually relevant definition of the term.Those who create autonomous beings do exactly that. They create beings that are autonomous and self-owning. The fact that the creator has created them does not alter the fundamental characteristics of their being that grant them the right to own themselves.