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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"
Yes you've proven that if someone is willing to use their control of their body to enact violence on yours, you can 'lose' control of your body.
On the other hand, the gangster can't very well object if I pull out a gun and use my body to enact violence on his, thereby maintaining control of my own.
Willingness to do violence to defend your own body is a helluva deterrent.
This gets to why having a framework of ownership, and via ownership exclusion is useful!
Nudists can have spaces where they are nude all day and they can exclude prudes who would be upset by this. Everyone else can have spaces where they exclude nudists.
We've already seen that its possible to exclude people on basis of vaccination status.
Likewise, you can exclude people with 'ugly' tattoos or require them to cover up (but now you've smuggled in the topic of aesthetics which, hoo boy).
"Society" can be built on a framework of people agreeing to respect property boundaries and agreeing to abide by rules set by the owners under penalty of exclusion.
And this is strictly superior to the scenario where everyone fights constantly over every single matter because there is no set framework for delineating boundaries for who controls what.
I agree with your point about ownership, and generally just being allowed to "control your own body" being a useful social construct in most cases. I just disagree with your claim that it is some kind of elegant "natural" law, because actually we all live in a shared reality and all of our actions effect other people, and vice-versa (but often the externalities are so negligible, we can just use the approximation of "live and let live" - e.g. pseudononymous users arguing about politically incorrect topics on an obscure web forum)
How do you interpret the nudists not being allowed in public spaces? Is it that you see the public spaces as being owned by the government, so it is the government's right in this case (not as specially privileged actors, but just as the group that happens to own this particular space) to exclude the nudists?
(If that is what you think, can we not just remove people's rights in practice by using the loophole of "excluding" everyone who does(n't) do X from using any kind of public space - "let the transphobes/communists/Catholics construct their own parallel society, without any help from the existing one of course, where they can be transphobic/communist/Catholic all day long")
But do you think this is morally okay? (why can't the anti-vaxxers "control their own body"?)
From public? I haven't heard of any such laws, not even laws requiring people to cover up tattoos in public (I've certainly seen people walking around with tatoos!)
I didn't mean to smuggle in aesthetics. But even if we allow for the sillier tattoos as having some kind of artistic value, I can think of deliberately shocking and obscene tattoos that I think almost everyone would find "ugly", in the sense it would upset them to see it (perhaps a hyperrealistic image of a penis being split apart by a modified pear of anguish in the urethra)
It can (it could also be built on a framework of "equality of outcomes", or "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, or even "we should minimise suffering, so we should sterilise everyone and start encouraging people to OD on heroine), but why? I don't see how this framework handles anti-social behaviour that harms society as a whole (like not vaccinating yourself, loitering in public spaces, public nudity, public drug use, etc)
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