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OWNERSHIP AND THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SELF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2020

Victor Tadros*
Affiliation:
Criminal Law and Legal Theory, University of Warwick

Abstract:

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2020 

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References

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

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7 See, further, Tadros, VictorIndependence Without Interests?Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 31, no. 193 (2011) for an argument against the Kantian view about this.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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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.