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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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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.'

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.

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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