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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
I have a fairly simple exercise that gets to the reason why 'ownership' is an easy, fundamental, universal concept:
If I hold out my open palm in front of you, can you make my fingers close and form a fist?
I'll give you a few minutes to try, just holding out my palm.
Then after a few minutes, I'll just announce my intention to close my hand, then easily make my fingers close into the fist.
The point of this demonstration:
"I" am in control of the matter that composes my body. You are not. And vice versa.
If we can agree on that basic premise (and avoid debating what "I" am, I'll stipulate that I'm just a brain which is itself composed of matter, I'll exclude the concept of souls for this conversation), then we can say that I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes.
And everything else can build out quite naturally from that basic point.
I use 'my' body to extract resources from the world, and because I own my body, I likewise have a claim to resources I gained control of using my body, and my claim is inherently stronger than any 'second-comers.'
These facts about the world are easy to observe and thus a solid foundation upon which to build the 'social construct' of private property.
We don't have to get philosophical to agree "I can exclude YOU from my body, and you can exclude me from yours."
Humans are not a hivemind species. We can talk about egregores and social dynamics, but every human is, fundamentally, identifiable as an individual unit that 'controls' their actions. So 'control' of one's own body is something most of us can accept as a premise.
Ownership and Control are mostly coextensive as concepts. If we grant that 'control' of our bodies grants something resembling 'ownership,' then that's like 80% of the argument right there.
Can you explain why people don't 'own' their own bodies, or can you present an answer to my exercise that defeats the idea that I control my body?
Nope. You're confusing owning with being. Ownership is a right. As a right, it's not real, but an agreed convention, an abstract human construct. If I say you don't own your bike and take it away from you, you have no clear right of ownership unless you can prove that you do have the right. What if you stole it from me last week, and I'd bought it 2 months ago?
So, that's 4 working pieces: you, me, the bike, and your right of ownership. In your "I own my body" there's at most 2 working pieces. The scenarios are not comparable, even if you allow for the distinction "I" as separate and distinctly identifiable from "my body".
To compare the bike scenario, in which ownership is obviously relevant, to our relationships to our own bodies is a category error: several of them, in fact. The two are not analogous. This isn't just splitting semantic hairs: no one "owns" their body. Everyone IS their body (and mind, or even soul and spirit, too, if you like.) This isn't merely "logical" (although it is logical). How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter. On the other hand, a comparable analog to you owning your body would be the bike owning itself. You can talk that way, but it's sloppy and implies things that simply are not the case.
I guess this becomes dicey when we get close to the brain. But certainly a person exists detatched from their limbs (is amputation death?)
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Yes I can. When I taser you there is good chance you will clench your fists.
Which is actually 'proving too much' because you've just demonstrated that you have to use a physical intervention to make the thing happen.
If you don't control your body, then how could you use a taser in the first place?
Same logic if you, for example, pull out a gun and threaten me to make me close my hand.
Or tell your buddy to come over and force my hand closed.
It all presumes your own control over your body. You might be able use 'your' body to exert control over mine or someone else's, but only by actively maintaining control over your own. Demonstrating control of your own body doesn't refute "everyone has control of their own body."
By comparison, I just have my brain send a signal down my arm and the fingers start moving. Its the simplest existence proof possible.
If I'm standing in front of you I'm perfectly capable of making your fingers start moving by having my brain send a signal down my arm. Anything that happens in between those two events is just an implementation detail.
Are you?
If I don't want you to make my fingers start moving, what do you think happens next?
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
The number of "steps" isn't a well-defined concept (if I go into arbitrarily fine detail about the mechanism of a human body I can extend you "having my brain send a signal down my arm" into infinity steps) - I think the only coherent thing this idea corresponds to is how easy it is for you do it.
But there are systems where someone other than yourself could make you close your fists with just the effort of sending brain signals to their voice-box and jaw to speak. They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
Yes, threats could in theory make me close my fist against my own will.
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Seems obvious that this all comes down to having to physically interfere with 'my' body to make the thing happen, if I don't want it to happen. I'm the only one that has the actual 'entanglement' with the matter that composes my body that lets me control it with nerve impulses alone.
You can of course claim this is a distinction without a difference if defined properly. "The Universe" makes no distinction between "me" and "you."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosophizing it.
Well, then you get killed by the gangster, so in this formulation you maintain "ownership" of your body (at least before you die, then they control it)
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
I'm sure you would be happy to just allow people to do many of the things on my list, but I disagree that it is some obvious "easy, fundamental, universal concept" that no reasonable person could oppose, on the level of, say, "not torturing people to death because you like to hear them scream"
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Therein lies the real proof of ownership, really. I agree with you that it's an universal concept but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
If I want something from you and can't take it, then you own it. If I want something from you and can take it, then you don't own it.
This is physical reality and one's physical body isn't exempt from this. Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
That's just the most convenient way to demonstrate since people usually have their body present when you're discussing things with them.
I mean, I see the point. But if there's any 'person' left in the brain, unless they're the poor sucker from Johnny Got His Gun, the brain is still in control of 'something.'
And the only way people can take that control is by directly and physically interfering. Which is to say, by exercising control of their bodies and using that to incarcerate you, restrain you, or damage you.
The strongest refutation of 'self-ownership' I can think of that actually exists are the cases of conjoined twins. We've got entangled nervous systems where maybe neither person really 'controls' the parts they share. But its still way more convenient for them to agree to coexist.
Otherwise, unless there's some entity out there that can unilaterally override your brain's functions and direct how your body is used regardless of your own will and wishes (hence: a hivemind species), it seems to me there's no way to overcome the conclusion "I own myself" because any actions taken to refute it would inherently prove it true.
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So if some guy uses his body to attack me and physically obtain my possessions, what claim do I have over ownership of those items under your paradigm? He gained control of them using his body; ought I to have any recourse to regain possession of them, besides using my own body to take them back from him in turn?
Is/Ought... If you want oughts you have to start somewhere, this one starts with "self-ownership". If you're just an is guy, cool, not sure what the point of talking about it. Is there a axiomatic ought you'd rather start with?
What I’m saying is that getting from “self-ownership of my body” to “ownership of items I obtained using my body” is not a useful line of reasoning, because it doesn’t deal well with questions of why only the first person to obtain an item has eternal first priority of ownership over it, even when others expend equal effort and physical agency in order to obtain the item in turn. (It’s an especially incoherent line of reasoning when we get to talk about purchasing items at a store, wherein all of the items were harvested or built by the physical bodies of others, as as the “customer” the only sense in which my “physical body” gained “ownership” of the items is by swiping a piece of plastic acknowledging the transfer of imaginary “funds”.)
If you accept "self-ownership of my body" as a founding principal, and someone else also accepts it, you have a shared axiom upon which to build further frameworks.
If people are capable of building such agreed frameworks, then everything follows pretty directly.
If people aren't capable of building such agreed frameworks, then its a fruitless exercise/question regardless of your position.
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If he uses his body to 'attack' you (I presume I don't have to define the term, but I can) then on what possible grounds could he object to somebody also 'attacking' him to take those possessions from him?
Everyone could use their bodies to take resources from others all the time, denying that any superior claim exists, but then they can't very well assert a superior claim when somebody else comes along.
Your 'claim' to the resources is that you got them 'first.' His claim is he beat you up and took them or snatched them when you weren't looking.
We can devolve everything to the 'might makes right' rules, that is also a consistent position, but the only persons who are 'better off' are those who happen to be the strongest at the time, and even THEY have to constantly risk physical harm to maintain their claims.
Isn't it much, much easier on everyone involved if we can mutually agree "you keep what you have, I keep what I have, and we can exchange things consensually as needed" then build out a system for tracking ownership, for resolving conflicts, and for minimizing transaction costs from that agreement?
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