Self-Ownership Libertarianism

I thank barebels for this debate and I welcome him/her to DDO. I hope they're enjoying the site. At this time, I will offer a constructive case. Just so no one accuses me of plagiarizing myself, I am going to excerpt arguments I've made elsewhere on the site.P1. SELF-OWNERSHIPSelf-Ownership-based Libertarianism, hereafter referred to as SOL, cannot be sufficient if self-ownership is a flawed theory.SP1. Treating People as Self-Owners with "inviolable" Rights to Themselves as Property leads to Absurd Moral Dilemmas"Self-ownership conflicts with Pareto-Optimality...[S]ince self-ownership is construed by libertarians as an absolute right, it follows that it cannot be violated even in small ways and even when great benefit would accrue from doing so. Thus...absolute rights of self-ownership seem to prevent us from scratching the finger of another even to prevent the destruction of the whole world. And although the real objection here seems to be to the absoluteness of self-ownership rights, rather than to self-ownership rights as such, it remains unclear whether strict libertarianism can be preserved if rights of self-ownership are given a less than absolute status." [1]SP2. Self-Ownership Rewards Luck, Not Hard Work or Autonomy"Recognizing rights to full self-ownership allows individuals' lives to be objectionably governed by brute luck in the distribution of natural assets, since the self that people own is largely a product of their luck in receiving a good or bad genetic endowment, and being raised in a good or bad environment." [1]SP3. Treating People as Property is Morally ProblematicProperty is something that can be sold or exchanged. If I own myself, then can I not sell myself? There are some who might be desperate enough for money or to escape their situation that they might sell themselves in exchange for food, money, clothing, shelter, etc. This leads to three issues:---SP3.A. Coercion is present. If I choose to sell myself into slavery because my situation is so dire that slavery is the only viable way to escape it, I have been coerced by my circumstances to take an action I would otherwise never even contemplate. The absence of a reasonable alternative negates choice. For instance, if my options were to (a) starve to death and (b) to sell myself into slavery, I haven't been given a meaningful choice, and have been coerced by my circumstances to sell myself to slavery. Now, Pro might respond that I could have chosen option (a), but that response raises additional concerns. If I was kidnapped by slave traders, I could probably be defiant enough that they would just kill me rather than sell me, so I have that same choice again: die, or become a slave. Surely, Pro is not going to say that I wasn't coerced if I gun was pointed to my head and I was told to do something. Similarly, it is absurd to say I wasn't coerced if that gun was instead starvation. In other words, selling myself into slavery is not necessarily un-coerced, and thus violates self-ownership.---SP3.B. Selling myself into slavery, even if it wasn't uncoerced, still invalidates self-ownership. Self-ownership is the idea that we inherently own ourselves and are always our own owners. I cannot give up my self-ownership, because it is innate within me. If I always own myself, than no one else can own me--my right to self-ownership is inviolate. Therefore, I cannot sell myself into slavery because to do so would be to say that someone else can own me, which they cannot. So, I always own myself. But, what I own, I should be able to sell. This creates a logical contradiction within the theory: if I own myself, I can sell myself, but yet, self-ownership says I can't do that.---SP3.C. Slavery undermines autonomy. Even if you don't buy (SPA) or (SPB), the idea that I can choose to give up so much autonomy seems to undermine the very point of libertarianism. The idea of self-ownership is that it maximizes autonomy, but yet, with slavery, one decision (the choice to sell myself) prevents me from ever making autonomous choices again. That seriously minimizes autonomy, and seems to undermine the very principle on which self-ownership rests. In other words, this example shows how self-ownership cannot achieve its very own objective, and is thus self-defeating.SP4. SOL will disenfranchise some humans of their rights.SOL is rooted in the idea that rational agents have rights. "the answer [to the question as to what grounds rights] is connected with that elusive and difficult notion: the meaning of life.” Nozick went on to say that the ability of one to shape his life in accordance with some sort of life plan is the very way one brings meaning to his life. This offers another perspective from which we can understand why human life is uniquely valuable. Only beings with the rational capacity to shape their own lives can have or even pursue a meaningful life." [2] Therefore, non-autonomous, non-rational humans (e.g. babies, the mentally handicapped) will not be permitted self-ownership, and thus would be denied rights under a SOL framework.SP5. Being reliant on Property rights to Ground Freedom is DangerousSuppose that freedom is the absence of coercion, or, as Kant frames it, being independent of another's will. "If we take this definition of freedom then the amount of freedom a person has is the extent to which they can act without being coerced to do (or not to do) something against their will. In a libertarian society you cannot (legitimately) do anything with another's property if they don't want you to, so your only guaranteed freedom is determined by the amount of property you have. This has the consequence that someone with no property has no guaranteed freedom, and that the more property you have, the greater your guaranteed freedom. In other words, a distribution of property is a distribution of freedom, as the libertarians themselves define it. Thus...the libertarians are saying that the best way of promoting freedom is to allow some people to have more of it than others, even when this leads to some having very little or even none." [3]P2. HUMAN RIGHTSHuman rights provide another way we can negate this resolution. SOL asserts we have three, perhaps just one, basic right: the right to property (and life and liberty). If we have other rights, then a government should do what is necessary to meet those rights-based needs. What makes a right? We get rights because we have fundamental interests in those things--we have fundamental interests, for instance, in liberty, property, and life. More than that thought, these fundamental interests are things we can reasonably claim ought to be ours; by this I mean that these are things that should not be wantonly abridged. We should have a presumption against interference with these interests. All of this hold for the three key rights of SOL. But what if we have other things that fit this description. It seems like health, education, and similar values, many of which are reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [4], also fit these. They are fundamental interests and they are things which shouldn't be arbitrarily interfered with or violated by others. If that is the case, we have rights to these things. Now, Pro my counter this by asserting that a SOL state could enforce these additional rights as negative rights and still not violate SOL. He would need to make a case for why this is so, but even so, there is not much difference between negative and positive rights on an ethical level. A government will need to enforce both. "[I]n the context of citizens' rights to state enforcement, all rights are positive. Moreover, the point is often made that the moral urgency of securing positive rights may be just as great as the moral urgency of securing negative rights. Whatever is the justificatory basis for ascribing rights--autonomy, need, or something else--there might be just as strong a moral case for fulfilling a person's right to adequate nutrition as there is for protecting that person's right not to be assaulted." [5] "[T]o use a grim example, most would agree that a mother who intentionally starves her healthy child should not be dealt with...any differently than the mother who intentionally poisons her child. Surely, no one would argue that the first mother is less morally culpable simply because starvation is an act of omission." [6]P3. SOURCES1 - http://www.iep.utm.edu...2 - http://www.iep.utm.edu...3 - http://web.archive.org...4 - http://www.un.org...5 - http://plato.stanford.edu...6 - http://www.qcc.cuny.edu...