against self ownership

Against Self-Ownership:There Are No Fact-InsensitiveOwnership Rights overOne’s Body

KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN

i. introduction

Libertarians endorse:

The Self-Ownership Thesis: Each person enjoys moral ownership ofhimself or herself (his/her body and mind).

On this view, persons own themselves in the same way that they have(legal or moral) private ownership of things and in the same way that aslaveholder can have (legal) private ownership of a complete chattelslave.1 At the core of the self-ownership thesis is the moral control-righta person has over the use of his or her body and mind. Other rightsincluded in full ownership over oneself include the right to compensa-tion if someone uses one’s body or mind without permission, the right toprevent violation of one’s self-ownership, the right to recover compen-sation if someone uses one in a way that violates one’s self-ownership,the right to transfer one’s rights over oneself to others (e.g., by way ofsale), and immunity from nonconsensual loss of one’s self-ownership.2

Clearly, self-ownership places moral constraints on what can be donepermissibly to individuals. Warren Quinn puts it thus: “A person is

I thank Johan Bränmark, Nir Eyal, Cécile Fabre, Frits Gåvertsson, Nils Holtug, KarstenKlint Jensen, Anders Gorm Nissen, Michael Otsuka, Thomas Søbirk Petersen, WlodekRabinowicz, Peter Vallentyne, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for veryhelpful comments on previous versions of this article.

1. Peter Vallentyne, “Critical Notice of G. A. Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom, andEquality,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28.4 (1998): 609–29, p. 611; G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 68.

2. Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, “Why Left-Libertarianism IsNot Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried,” Philosophy & Public Affairs33 (2005): 201–22, at pp. 203–4.

© 2008 by Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 1

constituted by his body and mind. They are parts or aspects of him. Forthat very reason, it is fitting that he have primary say over what may bedone to them—not because such an arrangement best promotes overallhuman welfare, but because any arrangement that denied him a saywould be a grave indignity.”3 In this article I want to rebut the libertarianself-ownership thesis, understood as a freestanding, fact-insensitivemoral principle. (I shall shortly explain what I mean by that.)

Libertarians divide into left- and right-libertarians. Both partiesendorse self-ownership, but “they differ with respect to the powersagents have to appropriate unappropriated natural resources. . . .Right-libertarianism holds that typically such resources may beappropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes herlabor with them, or merely claims them. Left-libertarianism, by contrast,holds that unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone inan egalitarian manner.”4

Among recent proponents of the self-ownership thesis, the mostprominent is the right-libertarian Robert Nozick. Nozick famouslyrejected end-state and patterned principles of justice, as well as the‘redistributive taxation’ often needed to implement them, because they“institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions andlabor. These principles involve a shift from the classical liberals’ notionof self-ownership to a notion of (partial) property rights in otherpeople.”5 Nozick himself defends a minimal state as the only statecompatible with proper respect for self-ownership.

Left-libertarians find themselves more or less in agreement withNozick’s assertion of self-ownership. In a rich exposition of his left-libertarian position, Michael Otsuka accepts a libertarian right of self-ownership that is “less than full” because it does not prohibit all

3. Warren Quinn, Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),pp. 170–71.

4. Peter Vallentyne, “Libertarianism,” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/,p. 1.

5. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 172. Ihave put the term ‘redistributive taxation’ in quotes to cancel the unquoted term’s sugges-tion that a ‘free market distribution’—I use quotes again for a reason similar to the onebeing expressed in the present sentence—has a morally privileged status relative toother market rules and resulting distributions. A similar reservation applies to talkabout the redistribution of bodily parts. Having flagged these reservations I shall omitthe quotes henceforth.

87 Against Self-Ownership: There Are NoFact-Insensitive Ownership Rights overOne’s Body

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism

incursions upon one’s body. This right does not, for example, prohibittrolley-case-like infringements necessary and sufficient to minimize thenumber of innocents killed. Nevertheless, it remains stringent, becauseit “encompasses the following two rights: (1) A very stringent right ofcontrol over and use of one’s mind and body that bars others fromintentionally using one as a means by forcing one to sacrifice life, limb,or labour, where such force operates by means of incursions or threats ofincursions upon one’s mind and body (including assault and battery andforcible arrest, detention, and imprisonment). (2) A very stringent rightto all of the income that one can gain from one’s mind and body (includ-ing one’s labour) either on one’s own or through unregulated anduntaxed voluntary exchanges with other individuals.”6 Being a left-libertarian, Otsuka rejects the right, analogous to (2), to income gainedthrough the use of external resources.

Although right- and left-libertarians disagree over what moral powersagents have to appropriate external resources, they agree that:

The Asymmetry Thesis: Ownership of external resources is intrinsicallydifferent, morally, from ownership of one’s mind and body.

6. Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003), pp. 15, 19. Otsuka formulates the first right as one “. . . that bars others fromintentionally using one as a means. . . .” Hence, the first right of self-ownership would notbe violated by someone who uses another person as a means unintentionally, e.g., by abystander who pushes what he takes to be a mannequin but is in fact another persondressed to look like a mannequin into the path of a runaway trolley to bring it to a halt,thereby saving five others. Yet this case certainly seems morally different from one in whicha bystander diverts a trolley from a track, on which five innocents are trapped, onto asidetrack on which there is what the bystander takes to be a mannequin, but is in fact aperson. For instance, it would seem permissible for a third party to harm the bystander toprevent him from pushing the person (whom the bystander mistakenly believes to be amannequin) into the path of the trolley, but not permissible for a third party to harm thebystander to prevent him from diverting the trolley in the latter case. Note further that thefirst self-ownership right does not bar others from “forcing one to sacrifice life, limb, orlabour” as an end in itself. Nevertheless people who believe that intentions matter typicallythink that harming someone as an end (as when the bystander diverts the trolley, not tosave the five, but to harm one whom he dislikes) is no less problematic than harmingsomeone as a means. In response to these two observations, Otsuka might want to say thatthe scope of self-ownership goes beyond the two rights he describes it as encompassing inthe quoted passage. In response specifically to the first observation, I suggest he mightwant to omit the qualification “intentionally” in his statement of the first right encom-passed by self-ownership. I thank Michael Otsuka for clarification here.

88 Philosophy & Public Affairs

For example, each person enters the world owning himself or herself, butownership of external resources is acquired through personal exercise ofthe moral power to acquire such ownership.

Nozick’s subscription to the asymmetry thesis is evident in his admit-tedly rather sketchy, but broadly Lockean, account of how one canbecome the owner of an unowned external object, for he offers no com-parable account of how one can become the owner—morally speaking—of one’s own—nonmorally speaking—mind and body.7 Absent specialcircumstances, such as organ theft, one simply starts owning oneself.Similarly, Otsuka thinks that ownership of external things is conditionalupon the satisfaction of an egalitarian proviso enjoining equal opportu-nities for welfare;8 he assumes that ownership of oneself is not condi-tional in this sense.

This agreement about the asymmetry thesis means that one can takeissue with libertarians in three importantly different ways. First, onemight deny that there is any moral asymmetry between ownership ofone’s mind and body and ownership of external objects, but agree thatone enjoys libertarian ownership rights over oneself as well as over exter-nal resources. For example, it might be held that, initially, one enjoys thevery same stringent property rights over one’s body and the physicalspace it occupies. Second, one might deny the asymmetry thesis as wellas the libertarian notion of ownership rights altogether. Utilitarians andliberal egalitarians contest libertarian thinking in precisely this way.Finally, one might accept the asymmetry thesis, but disagree with liber-tarians over the absolute or relative weights assigned to self-ownershipand ownership of external resources. For example, it might be suggestedthat we enjoy initial ownership of the physical space in which our bodiesare located, but no initial ownership of our bodies themselves; or thatthere are certain parts of our bodies (e.g., nonessential bodily parts) ofwhich we enjoy no initial ownership, but which we can acquireownership of in exactly the same way that we can acquire ownershipof external resources.9

7. Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 174–82; Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 226.

8. Otsuka, Libertarianism, pp. 22–29.9. The latter possibility is compatible with a restricted version of the asymmetry thesis

that applies to essential bodily parts only.


The self-ownership thesis (and the asymmetry thesis) can be held as afact-insensitive or as a fact-sensitive moral principle (or claim).10 In thelatter possibility the right of self-ownership is derived from a combina-tion of nonmoral facts about (say) the relationship between a person andhis or her body and mind and one or more basic moral principles. Thelatter will then explain how self-ownership is grounded in the relevantnonmoral facts.11 According to views exploiting this possibility, in aworld in which people’s relation to their mind and body is different fromours—e.g., one in which people are constituted by their bodies but theirwelfare is best promoted by people starting life as owners of particularexternal resources—people might have no self-ownership. Equally, in aworld different from ours people might be related to parts of the externalworld in such a way that they have rights that are comparable in strin-gency to those rights of self-ownership that we have in our world overour own bodies. This might be so, for example, because people in theimagined world are emotionally attached to those parts in the same wayas we in fact are emotionally attached to our bodies. Given my presentpurposes, I do not need to establish that self-ownership is (or is not) aderivative moral principle. However, I shall argue later that it is moreplausible to assign self-ownership derivative status than it is to assign itnonderivative status; I shall also suggest that libertarian proponents ofnonderivative self-ownership may be trafficking in moral intuitions thatreally only bear on the derivative case.

For present purposes I assume, like Otsuka and most others, thatself-ownership partly consists in nonderivative ownership of one’sbody.12 However, Peter Vallentyne helpfully suggests that whether

10. G. A. Cohen, “Facts and Principles,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 211–45.11. E.g., Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University

Press, 1988).12. According to Jeremy Waldron, “most others” does not include John Locke. Locke

claims that we own our persons, but given his psychological criterion of personal identitythis is not to claim that we own our bodies: see Jeremy Waldron, The Right to PrivateProperty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 177–83. In this article I set aside the issue ofownership of one’s mind, although I suspect some of the arguments I present below applythere as well. Just to indicate the sort of issues involved, imagine that we remove part of oneperson’s brain and graft those parts onto another person’s brain, thereby modifying thecontents of these people’s minds, e.g., their memories or intentions. Self-ownershipimplies that, even setting aside the issue of self-ownership over one’s brain, a person has aright not to have the contents of his mind modified in this way without his consent (evenif it does him no harm and benefits the other person greatly). I would suspect that,


self-ownership implies ownership of our (entire) bodies “depends onfacts about personal identity. If, for example, agents are purely mentalbeings that can, but need not, voluntarily occupy and leave bodies,then bodies (in their initial state) are simply (external) naturalresources, just like tracts of land.”13 In the quoted article, as well aselsewhere, Vallentyne leaves it an open question what the relevant factsabout personal identity are.

On Vallentyne’s interpretation of it, the self-ownership thesis poten-tially loses the support of some of the considerations most commonlyoffered in its favor. Thus for those accepting a nonreductionist accountof personal identity like the one entertained by Vallentyne in the passagejust quoted and, for that matter, for most reductionists (e.g., for materi-alists who think that we are our brains and hence only parts of thehuman organisms we inhabit), considerations about the injustice of acompulsory eye redistribution scheme become irrelevant to self-ownership. Incidentally, Vallentyne himself appeals to such intuitions inhis reasoned rejection of theories that conjoin self-ownership and puristegalitarian views on the ownership of natural resources.14

The self-ownership thesis draws a sharp distinction between thoseobjects in the relevant initial state of the world that are, or are part of, aperson and those that are not. Although labor and the fruits thereof areoften understood to fall under the scope of the self-ownership thesis, it isclear that, strictly speaking, they are different from, and not part of, one’sbody and mind, even if both involve or result from the use of one’s bodyand mind. Hence, the self-ownership thesis does not imply that oneowns one’s labor or the fruits of one’s labor; indeed it falls short of

generally speaking, the reasons favoring not interfering with someone’s mind are muchstronger than the reasons favoring not interfering with someone’s body.

13. Vallentyne, “Critical Notice,” pp. 613–14n. It is not clear what role Vallentyne ascribesto voluntary occupancy of one’s body. Suppose agents are indeed purely mental beings,but (oddly enough) have no choice as to which body they occupy. Why would this have anygreater tendency to render their particular body different from an external resource thanthe tendency of the fact that Robinson Crusoe did not occupy his remote island voluntarily(for quite some time) has to render that island, for him, something other than anexternal natural resource?

14. Ibid., p. 623; Peter Vallentyne, “Self-Ownership and Equality: Brute Luck, Gifts,Universal Dominance, and Leximin,” Ethics 107 (1997): 321–43, at p. 324. What I say here isconsistent with the view that the principle that a person owns himself is highly plausible initself, i.e., independently of what concretely it is that a person owns when he owns himself.


implying this even where one makes no use of external resources. Insofaras libertarians affirm these further claims, then (and, as witnessed byOtsuka’s statement of the principle quoted above, they do), they must bedrawing on additional principles, for example, the principle that if oneproduces an object, such as a memorable tune or a valuable chemicalformula, using no resources other than those one owns in virtue of self-ownership, one owns this object as well. Here I shall largely set aside theissue of ownership of labor and the fruits of labor, including laborincome, to challenge the self-ownership thesis in what many take to bethe core case: ownership of one’s body.

Self-ownership comes in degrees. Full self-ownership “is the logicallystrongest set of ownership rights that one can have over one’s personthat is compatible with someone else having the same kind of ownershiprights over everything else in the world.”15 I take it that the fullness ofrights of this sort has two dimensions. The first dimension is the range ofself-ownership rights persons have. These would include control rightsover one’s body and mind, the right to compensation if someone violatesone’s control rights, the right to prevent violations of one’s self-ownership, and so on. The second dimension is the stringency of thoserights, by which I mean what it takes for self-ownership rights tobe permissibly infringed.

Many libertarians stop short of endorsing full ownership. Otsuka, forinstance, thinks that one’s self-ownership over nonessential parts ofone’s body, such as one’s hair, may permissibly be infringed to save thelives of others.16 Similarly, Nozick seems to think that in some casesself-ownership rights may permissibly be infringed provided the self-owner is fully compensated.17 If persons have just one of the self-ownership rights that are included in the catalogue of full ownershiprights (e.g., a right against bodily intrusions), and if this ownership right

15. Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka, “Why Left-Libertarianism,” p. 205.16. Presumably Otsuka would endorse a similarly lax view of inessential incursions on

essential parts. (I owe this observation to an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs.) Thisgrading of ownership over bodily parts according to the importance they have for theowner is surprising if what makes them fall within the scope of a nonderivative principle ofself-ownership is that they are, or are part of, the owner. However, it is easily explained ifthe self-ownership principle is derived from those basic concerns that determine thegrading of self-ownership rights.

17. Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 72–73; Otsuka, Self-Ownership, p. 19. For other exceptions tofull self-ownership, see Vallentyne, “Libertarianism,” p. 1.


can be permissibly infringed in a wide range of cases (e.g., to prevent twosimilar violations of the rights of others), persons own themselves in aminimal sense. To qualify as a libertarian, one has to defend what I shallrefer to as substantive self-ownership rights, that is, a package of self-ownership rights that, as Otsuka describes them in the quotation above,are much stronger than minimal self-ownership. Or to put things meta-phorically, in the way Quinn does: persons need a primary say over theirlives, not just a say and not necessarily a veto. It is rarely assumed that wecan demonstrate that we enjoy self-ownership in an interesting sensesimply by showing that there are moral rights. Admittedly, my notion ofsubstantive self-ownership is vague, but any attempt at stating a precisedefinition will be tremendously complicated and have a somewhat arbi-trary outcome. Fortunately, for the purpose of my arguments againstsubstantive self-ownership below this vagueness is unproblematic.

In this article I shall argue that substantive self-ownership, under-stood as a fact-insensitive principle, is false. In the course of doing so, Ialso offer reasons to reject the Moral Asymmetry Principle. In Section IIand Section III, I tackle the two most influential arguments offered insupport of self-ownership. These appeal, respectively, to moral intui-tions about the impermissibility of a compulsory eye redistributionscheme and to some kind of moral rationale for self-ownership, e.g., anautonomy-based one. In the latter case I argue that the rationales inquestion defend self-ownership, in effect, as a derivative moral principle,and typically fail to explain why one has moral ownership of a particularthing (one’s body) rather than ownership of the means required toachieve or enjoy the moral status or capacity that purportedly rational-izes self-ownership, e.g., a body no worse than one’s own. I also considera number of hypothetical and real-life cases that cast doubt on the thesisof self-ownership. In Section IV, I move on to a more general level andconsider the possible moral significance of the properties in virtue ofwhich an object might be considered part of one’s body. I survey twocriteria for the individuation of human bodies and show (1) that theyhave rather surprising results given the standard interpretation of theself-ownership thesis; and (2) that it is hard to see how the mere fact thatsomething is part of one’s body can have moral significance. Finally, inSection V, I indulge in some philosophical fantasy that is designed tobring out the counterintuitiveness of the claimed moral asymmetrybetween ownership of our bodies and ownership of external objects.


Generally speaking, my strategy is to disentangle the many factors thatappear to motivate the belief that people enjoy substantive ownership oftheir bodies. I try to erode the plausibility of this belief by testing ourmoral intuitions about nonstandard cases in which the only factor moti-vating the view that one owns one’s body is the nonmoral fact that itis one’s body.

It might be helpful if I locate the present article in relation to theexisting literature attacking self-ownership before I proceed further.Criticisms of self-ownership largely fall into three main kinds. The firstsubmits that the very concept of self-ownership is incoherent. Kantfamously made an objection of this sort when he argued that only thingscan be owned, that owners are persons not things, that nothing can beboth a thing and a person, and hence that the idea that a person ownshim- or herself is incoherent.18

The second kind of criticism alleges that the notion of full self-ownership is indeterminate, and that it can acquire determinate contentonly through appeal to independent moral principles or intuitions. In arecent article Barbara Fried pushes an objection of this kind.19 From abroadly functionalist conception of property rights, she argues that,once we set aside a few easy and noncontroversial cases such as theforcible extraction by the state of one of your eyeballs to transplant to theblind, the notion of full self-ownership is compatible with a very large setof contrasting packages of rights. As the disagreement among libertar-ians attests, we cannot, Fried submits, tell from the notion of full self-ownership whether self-owners have a right to, say, sell themselves intoslavery, bequeath their property to their heirs, or blow smoke intosomeone else’s face.20 Obviously, if the thesis of self-ownership is thus

18. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. L. Infield (New York: Harper and Row,1963), pp. 165–66; see also Brian Barry, “You Have to Be Crazy to Believe It,” Times LiterarySupplement (October 25, 1996), p. 28.

19. Barbara H. Fried, “Left-Libertarianism: A Review Essay,” Philosophy & Public Affairs32 (2004): 66–92. See also Michael Gorr, “Justice, Self-Ownership, and Natural Assets,”Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 267–91, at pp. 268–70; Vallentyne, Steiner, andOtsuka, “Why Left-Libertarianism,” pp. 201–15; Barbara H. Fried, “Left-Libertarianism,Once More: A Rejoinder to Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33

(2005): 216–22; and Richard Arneson, “Lockean Self-Ownership: Towards a Demolition,”Political Studies 39 (1991): 36–54, at p. 39.

20. Fried, “Left-Libertarianism,” pp. 77–78. Fried argues, convincingly, to my mind, thatone cannot helpfully fix the content of full self-ownership by appeal to the notion of


indeterminate, we cannot say, in a determinate way, how well it coheres,or fails to cohere, with our considered moral beliefs.

Rejecting this indeterminacy, those who make the third kind of criti-cism urge that the self-ownership thesis can be seen to fail to mesh withour considered moral beliefs, either because of its counterintuitiveimplications, or because it fails to imply any of our considered moralbeliefs, or because it cannot be grounded in underlying moral prin-ciples.21 John Christman’s and G. A. Cohen’s writings on self-ownershipfall within this category. Cohen believes that the self-ownership thesishas coherent, relatively determinate content and holds considerableintuitive appeal, but that this appeal is to some extent due to itsbeing confused with other conditions, such as our not being slaves toother people.22 Similarly, Christman argues that self-ownership is bestregarded as involving two components: control rights over one’s bodyand life and various income rights. He suggests that proponents of self-ownership often fail to distinguish clearly between these, only the formerof which has a solid foundation in moral intuitions.

This article contributes to the third strain of criticism, in particularpressing the counterintuitiveness objection. I assume arguendo that thenotion of full self-ownership is coherent and has determinate content,i.e., content the intuitive appeal of which I test below. Friends of theincoherence and indeterminacy objections might want to view the argu-ment I present as a second line of defense for their rejection of self-ownership showing that even if the full self-ownership thesis werecoherent and determinate, it would be counterintuitive. Construed thisway, the line of argument offered here is simply orthogonal to thatoffered by friends of the incoherence and indeterminacy objections infavor of the same self-ownership critical conclusion.

permissible uses of oneself, because when one attempts to do this the issue of indetermi-nacy simply reappears as the (generally, in the absence of appeal to other moral principlesthan self-ownership) unsettled issue of which uses of oneself are permissible: see Fried,“Left-Libertarianism, Once More,” pp. 216–19.

21. Nagel’s remark that Nozick “has left the establishment of the moral foundations [ofhis libertarianism] to another occasion” can be seen as a gesture at a complaint of the lastsort: see Thomas Nagel, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” in Thomas Nagel, OtherMinds: Critical Essays 1969–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 139.

22. Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 213–17, at p. 230.


What does the present article add to existing literature canvassing thecounterintuitiveness objection? Cohen thinks that although the self-ownership thesis is false, it is not demonstrably false.23 If he has in minda demonstration that the thesis is logically inconsistent (as Kant seems tothink) or inconsistent with other theses that are self-evidently true, hemight well be right. However, on a less stringent understanding of whatit is to demonstrate the falsity of a thesis, such as the kind one finds in thewritings of moral theorists working with a framework of reflective equi-librium, I think one can show the self-ownership thesis to be incorrect.To do this, however, we have to control assiduously for factors thatinfluence moral intuitions, and that are ‘deeply’, but only contingently,associated with self-ownership. The main contribution of this article, asI see it, lies in its exploration of what can be inferred given steadfastexertion of this kind of control, i.e., what follows if we insist that theself-ownership thesis is insensitive to each and every contingent factabout the way in which we are related to our bodies.

ii. the eye redistribution intuition

Theorists wanting to bring out the intuitive force of the claim to self-ownership often appeal to the case of compulsory redistribution ofeyes.24 Suppose half the population is born with two eyes and the otherhalf eyeless. Transplantation technology has improved. It would be veryeasy, perfectly safe, and, let us suppose, entirely costless to transplantone eye from each person with two eyes to another person with no eyes,that is, to share the eyes out. Hence, no objections to an eye redistribu-tion scheme could derive from these non-self-ownership concerns.From the point of view of equality, as well as the point of view of welfare,a state in which everyone can see with one eye is better than a state inwhich half the population is binocular and the other half blind. Yet, sothe argument goes, compulsory transplantation of this sort would bemorally impermissible. The self-ownership thesis explains this. For in

23. Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 230, 240. It is not clear whether Cohen thinks thisbecause he takes no putatively fundamental moral principle to be demonstrably false.

24. Nozick, Anarchy, p. 206; Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and theMinimal State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 7–8; Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 70,243–44; John Christman, “Self-Ownership and Property Rights,” Political Theory 19 (1991):28–46, at p. 40.


the absence of consent, such a scheme would violate the donors’ self-ownership. This supports the self-ownership thesis.

Obviously, this is not a decisive argument for self-ownership. First,we may find other implications of the self-ownership thesis counterin-tuitive. Thus, it has been claimed that we have enforceable duties notto treat ourselves in certain degrading ways and enforceable duties tohelp others when the costs of doing so are tiny and the gains of thebeneficiaries are great.25 These duties are incompatible with the self-ownership thesis. Second, some observers, such as those with strongconsequentialist leanings, may insist that the eye redistributionscheme is morally permissible, or even morally required; so the factthat self-ownership implies that the eye redistribution scheme isimpermissible speaks against, not in support of, the thesis.26 Third,moral principles other than, and perhaps more specific than, the self-ownership thesis may explain resistance to the eye redistributionscheme. For instance, G. A. Cohen suggests that “hostility to severeinterference in someone’s life” or a right against unwanted bodilyincursions might explain the impermissibility of the eye redistributionscheme. The first explanation here invokes a concern different from theself-ownership thesis. The sudden departure of one’s spouse mayamount to a severe intervention in one’s life. However, this interven-tion by one’s spouse would be fully compatible with one’s self-ownership. The second explanation appeals to a specific component ofthe self-ownership thesis, since self-ownership includes a right againstunwanted bodily incursions (besides much else).27 Hence, we wouldneed to refine our description of the eye redistribution scheme if wewanted to use it to support substantive self-ownership.

Let us briefly pursue three such refinements.First, we could recast the case of eye redistribution so that it involves

violation of components of self-ownership other than the right against

25. Daniel Attas, “Freedom and Self-Ownership,” Social Theory and Moral Practice 26

(2000): 1–23, at pp. 4–6; Samuel Freeman, “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Nota Liberal View,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (2001): 105–51, at pp. 110–11, 131; Arneson,“Lockean Self-Ownership,” p. 54. Arguably, self-ownership is compatible with a moral,nonenforceable duty not to treat oneself in various degrading ways: see Robert S. Taylor, “AKantian Defense of Self-Ownership,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12.1 (2004): 65–78.

26. John Harris, “The Survival Lottery,” Philosophy 50 (1975): 81–87.27. Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 70, 244.


unwanted bodily incursions, but also involves neither of the other puta-tively morally objectionable features that Cohen suggests may eachaccount, on its own, for the hostility to compulsory eye redistribution,i.e., severe intervention in someone’s life and a violation of the rightagainst unwanted bodily incursions. In this vein, let us consider an eyeredistribution scheme in which half the population is born with twopairs of eyes and the other half with no eyes. In sighted individuals, onepair of eyes is located normally and fulfills the usual function. The otherpair is located inside the human body, say, in the shoulder. Although thislatter pair would enable those who have them to see if they were surgi-cally moved to the eye sockets, they play no role where they are. Indeedthey cannot perform any visual or other bodily function without beingmoved. Suppose further that the body of a person born with two pairs ofeyes will expel the spare pair when that person reaches twenty years ofage. The pair can then easily be reabsorbed into the shoulder of itsowner, or the owner can transfer his spare eyes to a blind person.28

Typically people will feel alienated from their spare pair of eyes in thesame way that the main character in Sartre’s Nausea, Antoine Roquen-tin, feels alienated from his hand when he perceives it as a crab lying onits back moving its legs and claws. As it happens the state implements acompulsory redistributive scheme in which whenever a person’s bodyexpels a nonoperative pair of eyes, these are appropriated and trans-planted into a blind person, giving him normal sight.

Here, nobody’s right against unwanted bodily incursions is violated,nor is there severe interference in anyone’s life. Yet on the assumptionthat I own parts of my body even when they are reversibly locatedoutside my body, there is a violation of self-ownership. On the otherhand, I doubt many people would regard this redistributive scheme asmorally wrong, and surely everyone will feel very differently about thisredistributive scheme from the way they felt about the original one. Tothe extent that this is so, resistance to the original scheme is notexplained by substantive self-ownership. Either considerations differentfrom those involved in the self-ownership thesis or a specific right

28. This case raises the issue of whether something analogous to Locke’s ‘no-wastecondition’ on ownership over external resources applies to one’s body: John Locke, SecondTreatise of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965),chap. 5, §§31–32, 37–38. Self-ownership so conditioned would avoid the present objection.


among the large cluster of rights that one’s right over oneself is taken toamount to underlies the hostility to compulsory eye redistribution.

To make the point that factors other than self-ownership partlyexplain our resistance to the eye redistribution scheme, I need not claimthat the scheme is wholly unobjectionable. For my own part, I am happyto make the stronger claim that the present case is no different, morallyspeaking, from a case in which the state appropriates pairs of function-ing eyes that were never part of anyone’s body from people who, throughsheer good luck, happened to be the first to stumble across them andmake a claim to them. It might be insisted that a larger number of recipi-ents are needed in the former case than in the latter for the redistributivescheme to be permissible. I suspect, however, that the difference innumbers will not be held to be that great. If this is correct, the exampleshows that the mere fact that something is part of a person does not givethat person a very stringent ownership right over that thing.

For the benefit of those who favor real-life cases, note that my spareeyes example is really only a purified variant of the situation we are inwith regard to many of our bodily parts (“purified” because often, inthe real-life cases, the bodily parts have to be extracted in ways that arepainful or otherwise unpleasant and are not functionally redundant).We have two kidneys and two corneas. In each case, one organ can beredistributed at some cost to the owner. We also have eggs and sperm,bone marrow and blood that can be extracted and used for the benefitof others with little cost to the owner. Where items of the second kindare concerned, it is noteworthy that the courts have become involved.In Moore v. Regents of the University of California, the plaintiff, JohnMoore, sued because while he was being treated for hairy-cell leukemiahis spleen was removed, in accordance with standard medicalprocedure, but afterwards, without his permission, samples from it,together with additional samples of his blood and bone marrowextracted on later occasions, were used to develop a unique and valu-able stem cell line that, it was hoped, could be used to develop anti-cancer drugs.29 The doctor’s team patented the cell line in the nameof the University of California. Moore (unsuccessfully) asserted owner-ship over the samples and a proprietary interest in the products that

29. Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 793 P.2d 479 (Cal. 1990).


resulted from the use of them.30 Or consider this: when we cease toexist we no longer need our organs; their extraction will not discomfortus at the time of extraction (although the anticipation of that extractionprior to death may well do so); their being redistributed will not disruptany (postmortem) plans of ours. There are, then, plenty of real-lifecases of actual or feasible redistribution schemes for bodily parts. Tothe extent we feel schemes such as using already extracted bloodwithout the patient’s consent differ from the initial case of forcible eyeredistribution appealed to by libertarians—and I think we do—self-ownership is not what explains the difference.

Most libertarians take the objects of self-ownership to include bodilyparts that have been separated from one’s body as well as the morecommon intact parts of one’s body.31 However, the present argument,unlike the two further arguments discussed in Section II, will cut little icewith those who take the minority libertarian view that once a body partis detached it is no longer a part of you, and thus no longer somethingyou own in virtue of your self-ownership.32 On the minority view, if youown a detached body part at all, you own it in virtue of a specific prin-ciple of resource ownership that assigns ownership of a body part to youwhere that part was once part of you and where various other conditions(e.g., that you have not voluntarily transferred the part away, and havenot lost your ownership rights to it through past wrongs) are satisfied.Those who take this view, and who share my response to the case ofa spare pair of eyes, should reject the specific principle of resource

30. Moore v. Regents raises the issue of whether one has the right to sell parts of one’sbody for money. Many think that this right raises a whole set of problems in addition towhatever problems the right to use one’s body in ways other than selling it for moneyraises. I bracket those issues here.

31. Michael Otsuka is representative in stating that self-ownership “extends beyond aright against the sorts of painful and invasive incursions upon (other parts of) one’s bodywhich might be necessary in order to force [donations of body parts]. For suppose that inorder to preserve the functioning of one of one’s eyes or kidneys it must be temporarilyremoved and then reimplanted after it has been treated. One would still have a strong rightof control over the disposition of that organ between the point of removal and reimplan-tation” (Otsuka, Liberalism Without Inequality, p. 15, n. 18).

32. Peter Vallentyne holds the minority view (personal communication). Similarly, anappeal to the (in moral terms) relatively unproblematic redistribution of organs from deadpeople will have little argumentative force against libertarians who think that once youcease to exist, your body, like everything else you might have owned, immediately becomespart of the commonly owned pool of external resources (or something similar).


ownership, not the self-ownership principle. Ultimately, I doubt thatwhether an object is attached (or can be reattached) to one’s bodymatters. Suppose the extra pair of eyes in my example cannot reattach tothe body of the owner once detached, or that it never detaches by itself,that, in the absence of some kind of intervention, it remains attached tothe body of the owner by a small lump of skin or nail tissue. Can thecutting of a nail or small piece of skin tissue really constitute asignificant moral difference?

The first argument may not convince people who, unlike libertarians,think that self-ownership rights are neither full nor substantial. Nor mayit convince libertarians who think that self-ownership rights vary instrength such that my ownership rights to the pair of eyes, in virtue ofwhich I can see, are, unlike my ownership rights to my superfluous eyes,full or at least substantial. On the latter view, ownership over one’s extrapair of eyes can permissibly be infringed in the case I have described, butone still has some kind of not very stringent ownership over them, whichmeans that their status is different from what it would have been hadthey just fallen from the sky as a pure natural resource. For instance, therelevant view concerning nonstringent self-ownership rights over super-fluous bodily parts might imply that others may appropriate and useone’s extra pair of eyes without one’s consent provided that they supplysuitably compensating benefits in return. Libertarians, however, whomaintain that although two items may equally be a part of me, my own-ership rights over one of the items is nevertheless much more stringentthan ownership over the other, must explain why this is the case. Oneexplanation is that the ground of my ownership over myself is not simplythe fact that I am myself, but some other fact, e.g., that I badly need thepair of eyes thanks to which I can see, but have no need for my extra pairof eyes, except (say) as a source of income. This suggestion, however,raises a further question. If the degree to which I need some part ofmyself can determine the stringency of my self-ownership rights, whycannot the mere fact that I need some external resource ground my rightto it? I see no satisfactory way to answer this challenge. I therefore thinkit would be problematic for the libertarian to claim that the stringency ofself-ownership rights over bodily parts varies with factors such as theparts’ importance in pursuing one’s plans of life and hence that oneenjoys only very nonstringent self-ownership rights over the extra pair ofeyes in my four-eye hypothetical example.


I now turn to the second refinement of the eye redistribution schemeto test if the original example really supports substantive self-ownership.Let us suppose that the eye redistribution involves not a violation ofsubstantive self-ownership, but either a violation of a right againstunwanted bodily incursions or severe interference with the donor’s life(or both) comparable to that involved in the original compulsory eyeredistribution scheme. Consider an eye redistribution scheme involvingsmall children who are not yet autonomous and thus not yet self-owners,half of whom have two functioning eyes, the other half of whom havenone.33 It can be stipulated that, due to unavoidable early death, thesechildren will never mature into autonomous beings.34 Accordingly,imposing an eye redistribution scheme on these children will, howevermorally problematic this may be, not involve a violation of the self-ownership rights of present or future self-owning persons. To the extentthat eye redistribution, where one eye is removed from infants with twoeyes and given to infants with no eyes, is judged no less objectionable inthis case than it was in the original example, as seems likely, self-ownership is not what explains resistance to the original scheme.

Libertarians assume that “each autonomous agent initially fully ownshimself.”35 This is consistent with assuming that some nonautonomousagents are partial or full self-owners, e.g., because they have some, butnot all, of the properties in virtue of which an agent is autonomous andthus a self-owner, or because there are bases for (partial) self-ownershipother than being (partially) autonomous (say, being sentient). Theformer claim might enable libertarians to explain why the present eyeredistribution scheme is morally objectionable, albeit less objectionablethan a similar scheme involving full self-owners. Still, as indicated it isunclear that we really do find the present redistributive scheme lessmorally objectionable than the original one and, in any case, infantsare not even partially autonomous, so the explanans entertained doesnot extend to their case. The latter claim about bases for (partial) self-ownership other than autonomy raises the huge issue of beings with (ornormally thought only to have) intermediate moral status. I cannot deal

33. Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), pp. 245–46.34. We can suppose the children are orphans to avoid the complications raised by

parental ownership rights: see Hillel Steiner, “Choice and Circumstance,” in Ideals ofEquality, ed. Andrew Mason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 95–111, at p. 105.

35. Vallentyne, “Libertarianism,” p. 6.


adequately with this issue here.36 However, to the extent that libertariansdo not want to ascribe full or partial self-ownership rights to non-autonomous, nonhuman animals—I take it that few libertarians (or,for that matter, nonlibertarians) would object to an eye redistributionscheme involving such beings—and to the extent that they want to avoida speciesist insistence on the intrinsic moral relevance of being Homosapiens, they better deny that infants are full or partial self-owners.

Third, and finally, compare the first scheme that consists in a redis-tribution of detached eyes from self-owners with the second redistribu-tive scheme that involves children, who are not self-owners. It seemslikely that to the extent people think these differ, morally speaking, theywill think that eye redistribution of the latter sort is more wrong than thatof the former sort. If so, our resistance to the original eye redistributionscheme is explained either by just one of the rights over oneself thatsubstantive self-ownership involves (the right against nonconsensualbodily incursion) or a right unrelated to self-ownership (a right to be freeof severe interference with one’s life), and not by any broad notion ofself-ownership of one’s (present or past) bodily parts.37 (In fact, since thefirst case involved removing two eyes, not just one, it arguably involveda more serious violation of self-ownership.)

The conclusion to draw from these tests is that substantive self-ownership does not provide the best account of our resistance to thecompulsory redistribution of eyes. This overturns the main supportbased on moral intuitions about concrete cases offered for the self-ownership thesis. As indicated, I think the hypothetical cases consideredsupport the stronger conclusion that, morally speaking, we do not reallyenjoy self-ownership over our bodies.

By way of further support for the latter claim, consider another case,which is often appealed to in the libertarian literature and in which the

36. Vallentyne briefly sets out some of the possibilities in his excellent introduction inLeft-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, ed. Peter Vallentyne andHillel Steiner (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), p. 12. As he notes elsewhere, a plausibleposition on these matters has yet to be “developed adequately”: see Vallentyne,“Libertarianism,” p. 6.

37. I am not suggesting that the right against unwanted bodily incursions is best seen asa component of self-ownership. Arguably, intrusion by others upon one’s body requiresfree and informed consent, not just consent, and prior consent can be revoked at any time.These two features distinguish the right against unwanted bodily incursions from standardownership rights. I thank Nir Eyal for helpful comments on this matter.


assertion of self-ownership seems implausible when the case is suitablypurified to eliminate the influence of non-(self-ownership) factors, thecase of forced labor. When people discuss forced labor, they assume,understandably, that forced labor involves a disruption in the laborer’spursuit of his or her plans and goals. To see the relevance of this, con-sider a modified version of one of Otsuka’s thought experiments, whereforced labor induces a compensating increase in the laborer’s capacities:“Imagine a . . . society of two strangers, each of whom will freeze todeath unless clothed. Unfortunately, the only source of material ishuman hair, which can be woven into clothing. One of the two is hirsuteand capable of weaving, whereas the other is bald and incapable ofweaving. The weaver would, however, prefer to weave only one set ofclothing for herself and none for the other person.”38 Suppose, however,that if anyone were to force the weaver to make clothes for the otherperson, this would result in an unwilled increase in the weaver’s psychicenergy, e.g., she would need much less sleep and be much better atmultitasking. For example, the weaver’s need for sleep would be so dras-tically reduced that she would have no less spare time, no less opportu-nity to pursue her own projects and aims, and so on. Suppose also thatthe weaver’s being made to work for someone else’s benefit will notplace any other burdens on her; she does not, for example, abhor thethought of her being made to work for the benefit of others without herprior consent. In short, then, her being forced to labor would make nodifference to her ability to live her life as she pleases, except of course inrespect of the work she is forced to undertake to ensure the survival ofthe bald stranger.39

This case nicely illustrates the way in which the alleged right againstforced labor looks much less convincing when that labor involves noburdensome interference with a person’s life. To deny that the weaverhas an enforceable duty to save the life of the bald stranger because thatduty would violate the weaver’s self-ownership strikes one as extreme.

38. Otsuka, Self-Ownership, p. 18.39. Even if she is compensated for the forced labor, the weaver will still need to make an

effort to produce an extra set of clothing out of her hair. By contrast, no effort is involved inproviding someone else with a spare pair of eyes in my first example. Hence, to the extentthat efforts matter to ownership rights in the libertarian perspective, the weaver’s claim tothe extra set of clothing is stronger than the four-eyed person’s claim to her extra set ofeyes, all other things being equal.


Otsuka agrees, but adds: “I believe that the libertarian gains the upperhand when the opponent goes so far as to claim that a tax may beimposed on the weaver not merely in order to ensure that the non-weaver does not freeze to death or is able to enjoy a certain amount ofcomfort, but in order to ensure that the non-weaver end up with a ward-robe that is no less luxurious than the weaver’s.”40 We might, of course,disagree about the desirability of equality, but let us set that aside, partlybecause this is a different issue, and partly because Otsuka himself sub-scribes to equality (of opportunity for welfare). The point is that if the taxon the weaver would not interfere with the weaver’s life, and if equality ofopportunity is desirable, then I do not see how a right to self-ownershipcould plausibly be said to render taxation of the weaver morally wrong. Ibelieve that the motivation for Otsuka’s view that self-ownership defeatsthe case for equality-restoring taxation in his ingenious weaving examplederives largely from something like an independently justified agent-prerogative. Within limits, agents have a right to pursue their ownprojects in ways that might bring about outcomes which are less thanoptimal from an impersonal point of view, and from the point of view ofsuch a prerogative it is hard to see how the tax would be objectionable inmy example. Again, it might be replied that people own themselves butthat their self-ownership right against forced labor is much less stringenthere than it is under normal circumstances, i.e., circumstances in whichforced labor does disrupt people’s lives and capacity to flourish. Thisreply implies that the ground of self-ownership rights is not just the factthat ‘This is me’, but this fact together with the fact that these rightsprotect something important in one’s life. But if it is conceded that thefact that some good is important in one’s life can be part of the completeground for one’s enjoying ownership over it, there is a need for thelibertarian to explain why this fact cannot on its own ground ownership.To be sure, the fact that ‘This is me’ is not the complete ground for(self-)ownership rights does not entail that it is not a necessary part of

40. Otsuka, Self-Ownership, p. 19. The case brings out nicely why Otsuka merely claimsthat “the conflict between libertarian self-ownership and equality is largely,” i.e., notentirely, “an illusion”: see Self-Ownership, p. 11. In worlds very much unlike ours—i.e.,worlds where almost all production involves no use of external resources and where indi-viduals possess very different amounts of internal resources—despite being a left-libertarian, his position commits Otsuka to regarding the resulting highly unequaldistributions as being just provided the stated sufficientarian proviso is satisfied.


the complete ground. If, say, we think that I can enjoy self-ownershiprights over a bodily part that is part of me and has a tiny role in myexecution of my life plan, we must say something about why one cannotenjoy ownership over a good that is not part of me but overwhelmingly isimportant to the execution of my life plan (and not similarly important toothers).41 It is logically possible that one’s need of something to carry outone’s life plan can ground ownership in some contexts but not in others.Yet in view of the insignificance of the mere fact that some physicalobject or substance is part of one’s body (see Section IV), I doubt that anyplausible account will supply the needed argument.

Examples like the ones considered in this section seriously erode theplausibility of the claim that we enjoy substantive self-ownership of ourbodies. To the extent that parts of our bodies are functionally irrelevant,even dysfunctional, and less well integrated with the rest of our bodies,and to the extent that a certain use of our bodies does not involve bur-densome interference with our lives, we have no substantive right ofself-ownership. This renders the ownership rights we do have over ourbodies sensitive to a range of nonmoral facts. To be sure, this conclusionis compatible with the ascription of weak or even minimal fact-insensitive self-ownership rights. Note, however, that libertarian retreatto this position comes at a cost. First, the feebler self-ownership rightsare, the weaker will be the constraints they impose on the pursuit of othervalues. It is doubtful whether nonstringent self-ownership can in factaccount for the constraints normally endorsed by libertarians.42 Second,the flip side of the claim that it is hard to construct cases providing a solidbasis on which to rule out the possibility that a factor has some (if onlyslight) moral relevance is that it is similarly hard to construct cases dem-onstrating clearly that some factor makes a slight moral difference.People are unlikely to have definite, unanimous intuitions, for example,about the claim that the moral permissibility of redistributing eyes in my

41. Note that parts of one’s body can be as important to others as to oneself. This isshown by a case of Siamese twins where one twin is functionally dependent on a kidneylocated in what we will consider to be the other twin’s body.

42. For instance, from a left-libertarian point of view, if self-ownership rights are quiteweak, they are quite unlikely to be what grounds “constraints on the admissible means ofpromoting equality” (Vallentyne, “Critical Notice,” p. 617). Yet some left-libertarians taketheir theory to be “promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands ofmaterial equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality”(Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics, ed. Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, p. 1).


four-eye person’s example depends on the anticipation of marginallygreater benefits than does the moral permissibility of redistributing sparepairs of eyes from lucky finders to blind persons.

iii. autonomy and self-ownership

In the previous section I argued that moral intuitions about the kindsof cases, such as the eye redistribution scheme, to which libertariansappeal, do not support fact-insensitive self-ownership. When we controlfor factors that are only contingently connected with violations of one’sownership rights over one’s body (e.g., well-being and autonomy), ourintuitions do not favor self-ownership. However, the libertarian case forself-ownership is not based solely on appeals to our intuitions aboutconcrete cases. Deeper arguments for self-ownership, including the fol-lowing, have been pressed into service: that our not having the moralstatus of slaves requires us to be self-owners,43 that self-ownership isnecessary for the rightful exercise of autonomy,44 and that self-ownership reflects “the Kantian principle that individuals are ends notmere means.”45 At their core these arguments assert (a) that self-ownership is necessary for a particular kind of moral status or capacity(e.g., nonslave status, autonomy, or a status as an end); and (b) thatpersons enjoy that moral status or capacity. It is concluded from this(c) that persons enjoy self-ownership, an unobjectionable inference,needless to say. In this section I strengthen the case against self-ownership by showing how these considerations fail to supportthe self-ownership thesis.

Let me set aside (b) and focus on (a). In my view, (a) is problematicwhichever of the three kinds of moral status I have mentioned is at stake.Self-ownership secures a person’s rights over a particular entity, i.e., hisor her own body. Yet, for each of the kinds of moral status appealed to, itis possible to imagine situations in which a person’s ownership of anentity functionally equivalent, or even functionally superior, to his ownbody is sufficient to furnish the owner with possession of that moralstatus. Someone who has the right to a body no worse than his own, but

43. Nozick, Anarchy, p. 172.44. Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 34, 48–51; Christman, “Self-Ownership,” p. 40.45. Nozick, Anarchy, p. 31. For a thorough critique of these three kinds of argument that

differs from that presented here, see Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 230–43.


no right to his own body, has a moral status that is different from, andmuch better than, that of a slave.46 Also, by abstaining for non-instrumental reasons from violating such a right, one treats its possessordifferently from—perhaps very differently from—the way in which onetreats a mere means. Admittedly, in respecting someone’s right to a bodyof a certain quality one will not necessarily treat its possessor as an end,because that would demand more, in one’s attitude to this person, thana mere noninstrumental concern not to violate his negative rights.However, this point cannot be pressed as an objection in the presentcontext, because whether someone violates another person’s self-ownership is not a matter of his attitude to this person. But then suchrights cannot be grounded in a principle that is, essentially, a matter ofthe agent’s attitude to those his conduct affects.47

Finally, and more elaborately, take John Christman’s suggestion thatif the subset of the full package of self-ownership rights that is comprisedof control rights over one’s body “are to be justified at all,” they must begrounded in agents’ autonomy and individual liberty, and that agentsare autonomous and exercise individual liberty when they “control andplan [their] own life.”48 Surely, in our world many forcible interventionsin one’s (use of one’s) body (e.g., regular, forced donations of blood and

46. In some cases, a body part not worse than one’s own may mean a body part not toodissimilar from one’s present body parts. E.g., if one is tied to one’s present looks, anextreme makeover of one’s face may not lead one to have a better face in the relevant senseeven though one would agree that another person with one’s post-makeover looks is morehandsome than a third person with one’s present looks. Even when this point about howthe quality of a body (part) is linked to its being similar to one’s present body (parts) isgranted, it might still be suggested that while someone with a right to a body no worse thanhis own has a moral status that is more elevated than that of a slave, that status is still lowerthan that of a self-owner. In reply, note first that this suggestion does not conflict with myargument in the present context. I am simply addressing an argument in favor of self-ownership that appeals to the fact that our moral status is different from that of slaves, andI am not making any positive claims about our moral status. Second, the present sugges-tion strikes me as immensely more controversial than the point that our moral status isdifferent from that of slaves—and, accordingly, as immensely less promising as a rationalefor self-ownership.

47. Cohen, Self-Ownership, p. 240.48. Christman, “Self-Ownership,” pp. 30, 39. Christman does not think that the subset

of the rights of full self-ownership comprising income rights can be grounded in a person’sautonomy and individual liberty; accordingly, he rejects this subset of self-ownershiprights, as opposed to control rights over one’s body and life: ibid., p. 30; John Christman,The Myth of Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 125–84. The presentline of argument can be seen as an extension of Christman’s general view of self-ownership


hair samples announced well in advance, and taxation of incomeobtained only through the use of one’s body and mind) are compatiblewith this underlying concern. Surely, also, these interventions and (say)forced sacrifice of an income obtained through the use of externalobjects relate to the underlying concern in the same, or a very similar,way.49 Moreover, it is possible to imagine worlds in which forced dona-tions of one’s organs need in no way undermine one’s ability to controlone’s life. We can even imagine possible (although evolutionarily impos-sible) worlds in which people’s bodies are such that they have no abilityto control their life and in which the forced donation of most of a per-son’s body will actually enhance his autonomy. Suppose, for instance,that people are born with huge bodies they can barely move, bodies withtwo hundred legs and arms. At any given moment, they can at best senseand control 1 percent of their bodies, although they can readily deter-mine which percent that is. Since their bodies heal very easily, theirability to control their lives is promoted best if 99 percent of eachbody is removed in such a way that these abnormal individuals end upwith what are, for us, normal human bodies. Christman’s concern aboutautonomy obviously cannot ground self-ownership for these people,although it might ground a right over a fraction of one’s body (or a rightto a body no worse than that fraction necessary for the exercise ofone’s autonomous agency).

It might be objected that in very special cases, in which people’s plansconcern their own bodies, a person will plan, not merely to have a bodyof a certain sort, but to make his or her body a body of a certain sort.Although it might be true that the absence of self-ownership preventspeople from realizing such plans, it does not prevent them fromcontrolling and planning their lives in general, and this is what matters.It can hardly be an objection to a moral view that in a world inwhich this principle is respected some people will be prevented from

showing that even limited control rights over one’s body can at best be grounded inautonomy and individual liberty given certain contingent truths about the way in which weare related to our bodies.

49. For the latter point, see Nir Eyal, “If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re SoInegalitarian about Your Body?” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2006):299–310, at p. 301 n 7. See also Richard Arneson, “The Shape of Lockean Rights: Fairness,Pareto, Moderation, and Consent,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22.1 (2005): 255–85,at p. 283 fn.


realizing certain plans they have, since this will be true of virtuallyany moral principle.

Note that nothing in this argument rules out the notion that, as amatter of fact, autonomy and the like require ownership of one’s ownbody. Thus, if autonomy implies we have a right to enjoy control of abody that is at least as good as our own, it may well be that, given thedeficiencies of transplants, artificial limbs, and so on, the only way torespect this right is to respect people’s right to their own body, since anysubstitute would in fact prevent us from controlling and planning ourown lives. However, this is neither here nor there for the moment,because at present we are concerned with the self-ownership thesisunderstood as a fundamental moral principle, not a principle withderivative status that reflects the fact that, owing to technological limi-tations, we are currently heavily, and unavoidably, dependent on theparticular bodies that we happen to be stuck with.50

iv. when is something a part of one’s body ?

In standard cases, it may seem that the distinction between physicalobjects that are part of someone’s body and physical objects that are notought to be accorded moral significance. However, when we considernonstandard cases we are forced to wonder what makes a physical objectpart of someone’s body; and when we try to answer this question we mayfind that, on reflection, the mere fact that some object is initially part ofsomeone’s body is not inherently morally relevant. (This finding is, ofcourse, compatible with an acknowledgment that physical parts of one’sbody have derivative moral significance because people tend to be emo-tionally tied to, and dependent on, their bodies.) Moreover, the mostplausible criteria determining when an object is part of one’s body mightlead to doubts about the self-ownership thesis.

50. In this section, I along with Christman have understood the concern for autonomyas the concern that people are able to control their own lives. Brenkert suggests that theconcern for autonomy should be understood differently: see George Brenkert, “Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Autonomy,” Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 27–55, at p. 41. Roughly, itis the mere fact that people are able to control their own lives that makes it fitting that theyown themselves. Their self-ownership is not something they enjoy because, if they do so,their ability to control their own lives is enhanced. For present purposes I do not thinkBrenkert’s understanding makes a difference. The fact that one has the ability to controlone’s life can hardly make it fitting that one owns a huge body of which one can at any giventime control only a fraction.


The question of criteria here is large and not one I can adequatelyaddress in the present article. What I shall do instead is to considerthe self-ownership thesis in the light of two leading accounts of bodilycriteria. The first, which, following Eric T. Olson, I shall call theCartesian account, says:

X is Y’s body or a part of Y’s body, if and only if X is a material objectthat (i) Y can “be aware of without being aware of anything else”; or (ii)Y “can move intentionally without intending to move anything else.”51

This account captures well the view that the body is the vehicle of agencyin, and awareness of, the world. It implies, for example, that since I amnormally aware of my hands without being aware of anything else—I donot have to notice the location of my arms to infer their location—and Ican normally move them just by intending to do so, my hands are partsof my body.52 However, it has some rather surprising implications initself and poses a threat to the self-ownership thesis.

Consider, first, a person with a numb and paralyzed limb. On theCartesian account, this limb is not part of the person’s body and accord-ingly he does not enjoy self-ownership over it. It can be appropriated bysomeone else, or perhaps it should be considered collectively ownedproperty. Again, consider my internal organs. Certainly I cannot movethem directly, nor am I aware of them. On the Cartesian account, thissuggests that they are not part of my body and yet ownership of one’sbody is normally understood to include ownership of the internalorgans. Consider next cases of people with high-tech artificial limbs withwhich they can perform basic actions and through which they sense theworld. The Cartesian account implies that these are parts of one’s body.However, this seems rather strained in some cases; it would seem morenatural to say that the artificial limb is attached to one’s body. Further-more, it is clear that even when an artificial limb was initially part of mybody, and when, thanks to some complicated electronic device, I havealways been able to sense through and move the artificial arm, this initself would give me no special ownership over the artificial limb. I wouldnot be entitled to resist its use by others in a predicament like mine to ahigher degree than I would be entitled to resist the appropriation, by

51. Eric T. Olson, The Human Animal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 145.52. Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 22.


others, of some other external resource that I am accustomed to usingand that they need for reasons similar to mine.

Some of these counterintuitive implications of self-ownership underthe Cartesian account might be avoided if we focus instead on the factthat our body is a human organism. A numb and paralyzed leg is no lessa part of the human organism to which it is attached than a functionalleg. For example, they are involved in comparable metabolic processes.Also, artificial limbs—at least, when they are inorganic, as athlete andamputee Oscar Pistorius’ carbon-composite Cheetah legs are—are notparts of the human organism to which they are attached. This supportsthe Human Organism account:

X is Y’s body or a part of Y’s body, if and only if X is or is part of “thelargest living [human] organism,” which, or parts of which, (i) Y can“be aware of without being aware of anything else”; and (ii) Y “canmove intentionally without intending to move anything else.”53

The self-ownership thesis remains unattractive under this account.Consider a scenario in which half the population is born with no eyesand, due to some freak event, the other half is born with two nonbiologi-cal eyes in their eye sockets. These pairs of eyes are not part of the humanorganism in which they are located (i.e., no metabolism takes placebetween the eyes and the human organism in which they are located),and although they enable the person in whose body they are located tosee, like a pacemaker, they do not form any complex organic unity withthis person’s body. On the Human Organism account of body parts,these eyes, unlike organic eyes, can presumably be legitimately redistrib-uted; but this asymmetry is very implausible. Suppose that we found outto our great surprise that the eyes of half of those people who actuallyexist are not parts of their bodies, but inorganic seeing devices implantedin their eye sockets by some cosmic accident soon after conception.Would we infer from this that appropriating their eyes would be morallyless problematic than appropriating those of the other half?

Some might think that if the inorganic seeing devices are located inpeople’s bodies from a time soon after conception and enable people tosee, it is not really clear that they are not parts of the relevant bodies. On

53. This account needs refinement to accommodate the case of Siamese twins.Presumably, we would not say that the first twin’s body includes all parts of theother twin’s body.


this view, the comparison between the inorganic and organic eyes has noimplications for the asymmetry thesis. However, I think it is clear that,like a pacemaker, an inorganic eye is not part of a human body. Theconcept of the human body is the concept of a particular kind of organ-ism. Even if this is denied, I would want to insist that there is no morallyrelevant difference between the two kinds of eyes. Hence, there wouldstill be a problem for the asymmetry thesis.

Just as there are cases of nonbodily parts whose possession seems tomerit no less moral protection than similar bodily parts, there are casesof bodily parts whose possession seems to merit no more moral protec-tion than the possession of similar nonbodily parts. Consider a case of aperson born with a dysfunctional organ that is connected to the rest ofhis body by no more than a small lump of skin. Even if this organ weretreated as part of his body, I suggested, to invoke a stringent right ofself-ownership in this case would not seem plausible.

Note, finally, that if we look at the arguments people have offered forthe self-ownership thesis, none seems to explain why the mere fact thatsomething is part of the organism that is a human body should have anyspecial moral significance. Consider the three rationales discussed inSection III. Let us suppose, arguendo, that in order not to have the statusof slave one has to own something. For philosophers such as Hegel,owning something is intimately connected with the possession of highmoral status, and it may simply seem obvious that if one is to ownsomething, one’s body is the prime candidate. As Judith Jarvis Thomsonputs it: “people’s bodies are their First Property, whereas everything elsethat they own—their houses, typewriters, and shoes—is their SecondProperty.”54 Now suppose, however, that each person’s brain is con-nected to a silicon replica of a human body through an electronic trans-mitter, and that this enables the person to control the replica body.Suppose, moreover, that due to high levels of toxic material in the atmo-sphere, people are born unable to move or sense with their own non-artificial bodies. Surely, the people living in a world in which everyoneowns a silicon body, but does not own his or her natural body, no morehave slave status than people in our world. Slavery, as we have knownit throughout history, in fact involved some people owning, in a legal

54. Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1990), p. 226.


sense, other people’s bodies. The world as we know it fills just a tiny spotin the space of what is possible, however, and when we consider the fullrange of possibilities, we see that the concern that no one suffers beingreduced to slave status has no necessary connection with the concernthat people own their own bodies.

Consider next the appeal to the Kantian means principle. Unless wegrant, implausibly, that we simply are our bodies,55 it seems that if we usepeople as mere means, or something close to being mere means,56 whenwe appropriate an eye of theirs that is part of their body and use it for thebenefit of others, we also use people as mere means when we appropri-ate an inorganic eye of theirs, which, as in the example above, is not partof their body but simply located in their body, and use it for the benefitof others. While the Kantian means principle certainly militates againstcertain uses of bodily parts, it seems unable to distinguish such uses andotherwise comparable uses of nonbodily parts.

Let us turn, finally, to the concern about autonomy. The body is, formost people, the vehicle of agency in, and awareness of, the world.However, we can easily imagine worlds in which large parts of people’sbodies are irrelevant to their agency in, and awareness of, the world. Theworld described two paragraphs back is like this. Now in worlds like thisparts of a person’s body—even if that body is what the person is or isconstituted by—are of much less concern from the point of view ofautonomy than external resources such as the replica body that theperson controls or even the person’s income.57 Some libertarians thinkthat “full self-ownership is the most appropriate reflection” of our statusas “self-directing beings with full moral standing.” They assert that self-ownership explains or grounds “the intuitive wrongness of various forms

55. Most of those who have considered the matter concede that if someone were toextract my brain, destroy my body in the process, and implant my brain into another bodywith an empty skull resulting in a person with my psychological features, I, and not theperson previously occupying the body with the empty skull, would be the survivor. If so, Iam not identical to my body: see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1984), p. 253. Consideration of the extremely rare, but real-life, case of dicephalictwins supports the same conclusion. Dicephalic twins are two different persons even if theyshare the same body from the neck and below: see Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 35–39.

56. Derek Parfit, Climbing the Mountain, chap. 5 (forthcoming).57. For the latter point, see Cécile Fabre, “Justice and the Compulsory Taking of Live

Body Parts,” Utilitas 15 (2003): 127–50, at pp. 136–37; Cécile Fabre, Whose Body Is It Anyway?(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 113–18.


of nonconsensual interference with bodily integrity.”58 But surely thisgrounding relation can be made out only to the extent that one’s body,and not something else, is under one’s self-guidance. So if self-ownership really is a reflection of our status of self-directing beings withfull moral standing, then, to the extent that we can manifest our capaci-ties as self-directing beings through external, artificial bodies, the self-ownership thesis had better explain the wrongness of nonconsensualinterference with such devices.

From this examination of two accounts of bodily criteria I draw twoconclusions. (1) It is not obvious that any account will actually providefriends of the self-ownership thesis with an understanding of the bodythat enables them to retain all of the intuitions they want the self-ownership thesis to capture. (2) It is in any case unclear why the merefact that something is part of one’s body should in itself make asignificant moral difference.

v. the counterintuitiveness of the asymmetry thesis

It might be urged in spite of all that has been said so far that interven-tions in people’s bodies really do seem morally different from interven-tions in external resources. G. A. Cohen observes that: “Jean-JacquesRousseau described the original formulation of private property as ausurpation of what should be freely accessible to all, and many havefound his thesis persuasive, but few would discern a comparable injus-tice in a person’s insistence on sovereignty over his own limbs.”59 Let usgrant Cohen that, as a matter of fact and in a certain range of cases,people do indeed detect greater injustice in an insistence upon sover-eignty over external objects than in the insistence upon sovereignty overone’s own limbs. It is, however, a further question whether it is self-ownership that explains this asymmetry. As Cohen acknowledges, it ispossible that the judgments, to which he refers, are influenced by factorsthat are only contingently related to the distinction between what is andwhat is not a part of one’s body.

58. Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka, “Why Left-Libertarianism,” p. 209.59. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 71; quoted approvingly by

Otsuka, Libertarianism, p. 21 n 27. Compare Mathias Risse, “Does Left-Libertarianism HaveCoherent Foundations?” Politics, Philosophy, & Economics 3.3 (2004): 337–64, at p. 338.


To test whether this is the case, suppose that limbs are easily replace-able, but that persons are able to use their limbs only in particular physi-cal spaces, and that the physical spaces, or areas, are not in the relevantrespect replaceable. Thus, if someone, say, appropriates and removesmy arm, this is no big deal. I will suffer no pain and a new one willimmediately appear and replace the old one. (Note, incidentally, that it isnow possible to extract liver lobes for the use of others. Normally, thedonor’s liver rejuvenates in a matter of weeks. Again, this is only animpure, real-life version of the hypothetical example, since extractioninvolves risks, is time-consuming, and can be unpleasant.60) However, ifsomeone appropriates the small area of land where I enjoy a functioningbody and evicts me, this will lead my body to malfunction. In this philo-sophical fantasy we are, in an important respect, related to particularareas in the same way that we are actually related to our bodies: we aredependent on a particular area for our survival and well-being, but notdependent on our body. To screen out irrelevant factors that may influ-ence our intuitions we should also imagine that we are emotionallyattached to the relevant areas in the same way that we are emotionallyattached to our bodies in the real world, e.g., we feel shame or pride inthem. We also need to assume that we are emotionally indifferent to ourbodies in the same way that, generally speaking, we are to physical areasin the real world.

Now, in such a world, I take it that a moral asymmetry reversing thatpropounded by Rousseau will appear attractive. Having sovereignty overthe external resources (e.g., a piece of land) necessary to enjoy a func-tioning body will seem more important than having sovereignty overone’s limbs, and the injustice of insisting on the former concomitantlyless serious than the injustice of insisting on the latter. This suggests thatthe special claim one has is not to one’s own body, but to any resource,whether internal or external to one’s self, on which one’s life depends.This explains why people in the real world have a right to their ownbodies, because in our world people’s lives do depend on their ownbodies but not on particular external physical objects. In the fantasyworld I have described, people’s lives do not depend on the particularlimbs of which their bodies consist, but they do depend on the particularphysical spaces in which they can have functioning bodies. On this

60. Fabre, “Justice,” pp. 136–37.


proposal the asymmetry thesis is false, except when read as a derivativemoral evaluation applying to our world only.

The point generalizes beyond the present particular example, to allresources that are essential to one’s life. It extends to particular physicalspaces or objects that are essential to one’s life for reasons other thanthat they are necessary for one to have a functioning body. This would bethe case if, for example, people came into existence deeply emotionallyattached to particular places, so that to wrench them out of those placeswould be to diminish the value of their life substantially. And it would bethe case if we were the purely mental beings that Vallentyne entertainsthe thought of our being, except that we can be conscious only if ourbodies are located in a particular space. In all these cases, there arereasons for our insisting upon ‘sovereignty’ over those essential re-sources. But in all these cases, just as in the case of one’s body parts,those reasons are derivative of contingent facts about the functionalimportance of those resources to our lives.

vi. conclusion

We have good reasons to reject substantive self-ownership as well as theasymmetry thesis. At a fundamental level, we do not own our bodies orown them in a way that involves more stringent rights than those wehave over external objects. Although these are important conclusions, itis nevertheless worth ending with some words of caution. First, as I haveindicated along the way, some of my arguments do not decisively dem-onstrate that weak claims of self-ownership are false. I hope that thosewho are inclined to retreat to these claims will at least agree that thepresent article serves to clarify the issues at stake. In particular, I hopethe discussion has helped isolate the issue of ownership of one’s bodyfrom a number of contingent facts about our relationship to our bodiesand to external objects, and the way in which these facts generate deriva-tive self-ownership rights. Second, the considerations I have presentedfall short of showing that we lack derivative rights over our entire bodies.Obviously, most people have had their organs naturally since beforebirth, and for good reason (such as the fact that many of them are vitaland cannot easily or not at all be replaced) they care about them a greatdeal; this provides some reason to give people a legal right protectingthem from unwanted interventions in their bodies. Third, whether


people have self-ownership is a question often raised in discussions ofdistributive justice, often in the justification of some or other kind ofinequality. If this article is correct, self-ownership cannot play this kindof role to any significant extent. However, this does not rule out thepossibility that the moral principles which have been mistakenly taken,in my view, to rest on the self-ownership thesis—e.g., the right againstsevere interference in one’s life, or the right to a dominant say in how tolive one’s life—similarly restrict (or, for that matter, underlie) the claimsof distributive justice.61 I take it that from the point of view of moraltheory, the truth and status of the self-ownership thesis is no less inter-esting than its implications, or the implications of its rejection.

61. Gorr, “Justice, Self-Ownership, and Natural Assets,” pp. 267–91.


against self ownership

Documents