"Self-ownership" under the microscope of What's Possible

Dynamix:

"Owning" refers to being able to rightfully exclude others from the use of a given thing. This is an ontological concept which requires no foreknowledge for its existence, i.e., we may say that we have a "right" to exclude dogs from biting our legs whether or not the dog is aware of these rules (which would be an epistemological, not an ontological, issue).

The point I'm trying to get across is that if say, Allah, exists, and he wants to use my body as he sees fit, and this is not to be understood as an immoral thing for Allah to do (which is true if we are to accept Islamic theology, and we are presupposing this already if we accept Allah's existence to begin with), then it is no way in my right to try to exclude Allah from using my body. And if I do not have this right, it must be because I do not have the right of exclusive control of my body, i.e., I am not self-owned.

I'm not saying the dog is innocent because it is unaware of ethical principles.  I'm saying that it doesn't matter if the dog is aware of them or not - because it is a dog.

My problem with this chain of argument is where you say "this is not to be understood as an immoral thing for Allah to do".  I'm saying the categories, "ethical" and "unethical", "moral" and "immoral", in the sense they are commonly used, can only be applied to human actions.

I do not see where you have justified the characterization of non-human actions as moral or immoral.

There's a very easy way to resolve this question - the one that I believe. God does own His creation by virtue of His being its Creator. But He doesn't exercise his right to control it all the time.

The analogy is imperfect - but consider this. You invite someone onto your property. You then have the full right to make them do whatever and exactly what you want, to make them into an automaton, acting exclusively in accordance to your desires - or remove them from your property.

Is that how you treat your guests?

Stipulating that the Christian God is the God, He didn't make mindless automatons. He made mankind in His image - meaning that we have something of His nature. We share His creativity, His capacity for reason, His self-awareness, and His self-autonomy. We own ourselves, by a Rothbardian analogy to Biblical reasoning, not because God doesn't have just title, but because He bestowed the title of ownership of each individual person upon that person.

Jon Irenicus:

I understand your argument, but my point is why should the remote possibility of all these things being true (that is, those that cannot simply be ruled out as logically impossible, e.g. an omniscient and omnipotent deity) detract from something being self-evident?

I suppose we've been playing word games (or at least I have!). I limit references of "self-evidence" to tautologies, as they provide "evidence" for their acceptance from within the proposition itself, or, the "self" (so, "self-evident"). Any other propositions (ignoring momentarily the a priori / synthetic so as to get through this in less than four hours) must not be "self-evident," as they refer to, rather than the self, things other-than-self, therefore: "other-probable," or "other-improbable," or some such designation.

Anyway, on a totally different note, I'm not so sure that the existence of any deity can be "improbable," or even be "probable" or "somewhat probable," for that matter. Probability implies quantification (measurement of some sort, at least), and quantification implies observability, and as deities, if they exist, cannot to be observed, they cannot be quantified and, thus, cannot be said to have any probability associated with their existence. This is also why I refer to "possible" deities, and I leave out any reference to probability. I think a deity's existence must be just as likely as unlikely, which is to say that "likely" and "unlikely" are unmeaningful terms in reference to it.

Do you mean to say that self-ownership is not an instance of a truth that is analytic a priori, or for that matter that no self-evident truth can be anything other than truths that are analytic a priori?

-Jon

tgibson11:

I'm saying the categories, "ethical" and "unethical", "moral" and "immoral", in the sense they are commonly used, can only be applied to human actions.

Why must this be the case? Are we to say that, if Satan were to exist, the fact that he was a non-human moral agent means that anything he may have done must be amoral? Even though some consider him to be the most evil being in existence?

I do not see where you have justified the characterization of non-human actions as moral or immoral.

I was operating under the assumption of the truth of a monotheistic religious worldview, in which there would be--and would have been--many non-human moral agents who did both good and evil.

MacFall:

You invite someone onto your property. You then have the full right to make them do whatever and exactly what you want, to make them into an automaton, acting exclusively in accordance to your desires - or remove them from your property.

I disagree. The Christian does not have the right to make an individual do "whatever and exactly what [he wants]," because the Christian has the prior positive obligation to act toward that individual in a loving way, which shrinks the teleological sphere of opportunity drastically.

The Christian may say that he has the positive ability to do to them whatever he likes, but so does the leopard. For a Christian to say that he also has a normative right to do whatever he wants to the other person is to blow the positive obligation toward love clean out of the water.

We own ourselves [...] because God [...] bestowed the title of ownership of each individual person upon that person.

Again, if you own yourself exclusively, then you have a normative right to exclude all others from the use of your body, and if someone were to make that infraction, we would say that he or she was acting unethically. But if you own yourself outright, God cannot own you, and if God does not own you, he may not use your body for any purpose against your will. Do you really believe that it would be immoral of God to use your body for his purposes against yours? Is it possible for the Christian God to be immoral? I sincerely believe that it is not, and I believe that he may do anything at all that he wishes, and would not be found immoral when compared to the ethical standard because he would be that very standard.

Jon Irenicus:

Do you mean to say that self-ownership is not an instance of a truth that is analytic a priori

Yes. Because if I have not misread everything I thought I understood, tautologies are the only category within the analytic a priori. And if the proposition, "I own myself" isn't tautological (and it isn't), then it likewise isn't analytic a priori.

or for that matter that no self-evident truth can be anything other than truths that are analytic a priori?

According to my definition of self-evident, yes. I don't want to leave any lingering semantic loopholes, so, yes. For me, the "self-evident" is the "analytic a priori" because tautologies are the only propositions which give "evidence" from the "self" (again, ignoring the issue of the synthetic a priori).

Have I overlooked something?

Why must this be the case? Are we to say that, if Satan were to exist, the fact that he was a non-human moral agent means that anything he may have done must be amoral? Even though some consider him to be the most evil being in existence?

You are conflating general morality with the specific ethic of just title and right to control. That is fallacious.

Dynamix:

The Christian does not have the right to make an individual do "whatever and exactly what [he wants]," because the Christian has the prior positive obligation to act toward that individual in a loving way, which shrinks the teleological sphere of opportunity drastically.

First of all, that has nothing to do with my analogy. Secondly, Christians don't have obligations in the Kantian sense you are describing. Third, you are conflating "rights" with "morals." That is a false premise.

Again, if you own yourself exclusively, then you have a normative right to exclude all others from the use of your body, and if someone were to make that infraction, we would say that he or she was acting unethically. But if you own yourself outright, God cannot own you, and if God does not own you, he may not use your body for any purpose against your will. Do you really believe that it would be immoral of God to use your body for his purposes against yours? Is it possible for the Christian God to be immoral? I sincerely believe that it is not, and I believe that he may do anything at all that he wishes, and would not be found immoral when compared to the ethical standard because he would be that very standard.

As someone pointed out earlier, you are trying to ascribe natural ethics, and the rights that are their function, to a supernatural entity. If God were a human, then you would be correct. But because God is God, and not human - and because rights, postive and normative deal exclusively with man's relationship to man, it cannot be done. You might argue that man doesn't own himself because he doesn't control nature, and be wrong because ownership deals only with human beings. And you would be all the more wrong to apply the same reasoning to something that is not only non-human, but non-natural.

Your argument requires one to accept definitions for "ownership", "God", and "man" that are incorrect.

O woeful correction! Thank you.

Your post caught me in the middle of what Alfred Korzybski would call "a semantic disturbance," as the words that I have been using to describe what Korzybski would also describe as "the un-speakable objective level" were incorrect given their structural dissimilarity.

So now I have to fundamentally retool the way I describe the ideas that I've had so as to make them presentable (in fact, even coherent). The rust on my Aristotelian paradigm is still kicking its heels.

My apologies.

Also, to those interested, the book that I'm referring to when mentioning Korzybski's ideas is called Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Some say his non-aristotelian system was just as revolutionary as the non-euclidean and non-newtonian systems that replaced their respective forebears. After becoming familiar with his ideas, I'm inclined to say, without much reservation, that they are correct. Korzybski denies the "law of identity," which leads to very interesting conclusions, the full meaning of which I've--obviously--yet to get a hold of.

I'm working on typing out an abridged version in a PDF so I can share it en masse, but it's taking some time. The actual book itself is a $40, 825-page Behemoth, so I don't expect many to buy it on only the weight of my recommendation. Thus my Herculean effort...

Dynamix, would you agree with this?

No one has the right to control anything (or anyone) he or she doesn't own. Even if god has joint-ownership over every individual, that doesn't give any individual the right to control another.

Ego:

Dynamix, would you agree with this?

No one has the right to control anything (or anyone) he or she doesn't own. Even if god has joint-ownership over every individual, that doesn't give any individual the right to control another.

Yes, if we assume those things, I would agree with that conclusion.

Now that I'm thinking about it, though (and this has nothing to do with your post, so please don't feel like I'm trying to rebut you...I'm just going on a tangent), I'm not even sure that such a concept as ownership is even coherent outside of a vacuum (like the Austrian ERE). I won't bother trying to explain because I'm only barely grasping the idea on an intuitive level, but as soon as I can bring it to the verbal level I'll try to sort it out. It does have to do with Korzybski's non-aristotelianism, though, and I'm thinking that a large group of seemingly-disarrayed concepts may be much more cohesive than I had once thought. Not in a Wittgensteinian kind of way where we say, "it was all just in your head / in the language!" but something more drastic and fundamental. Hmm.

You all surely think I'm insane. ;)

Ownership is an odd and easily misleading concept ("public ownership"!?). That's why I feel the best definition of "ownership" is "the right to control and transfer control to others".

That isn't what self-evident usually means, but alright, what you're driving at is that it's not a tautology. As for denying the law of identity &c., forgive me if I take such attempts but with a grain of salt. I'll check out the fellow's work anyway though.

-Jon

Well, from my point of view, the self-ownership derives from a pretty easy to grasp fact. You can not control the actions of a human being. What you can do is take away options, or means if you like, so achieving his self-determined ends are harder to achive. Yet, in no way can another person, or entity, force someone to do something. You might kill someone, you might carry someone from A to B, but you can not make him do something. Actually you can not force a slave to work for example. You can set consequences before him, like if you don't I am going to beat, kill, imprison you. But, there is no way to make him do what you want.

Bottomline, ultimate control is always individual and therefor you own yourself, as you are the only one that can decide how to act under the current circumstances and with the current means available to you.

"You can take a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink"

Before you dismiss that approach, try to think some minutes about a way some third entity could possibly make you act without your consent.

Have a great day

Smiles, if I remember it right, it was Korzybski that stated " the map is not the territory"? And, that basically brought me "back" to liberalism, in the classical sense, as being european, I still call myself a liberal :-) )

nhaag:

Smiles, if I remember it right, it was Korzybski that stated " the map is not the territory"?

That's the one! That's the classic example of his denial of identity. I was introduced to Science and Sanity through Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, which a friend recommended. How did you find him?

Now I see what you're trying to do; look at self-ownership under hypothetical situations involving omniscient and omnipotent entities. Well, I see some of your scenarios, but I don't get everything about them. When you bring in other dimensions with a God or different versions of that God, you start getting into a larger framework.

Now, to be scientific, that framework has to be well-defined and constructed logically in such a way that we can reach an apt conclusion. Can you be more specific about each scenario you want us to examine? Like I saw that you mentioned in the Jewish belief, God has negated our self-ownership, yet in Christianity, we have full or partial self-ownership.

Also, in these situations, do we say that nature is part of God's will and deny free will? Or does God only have some influence over physical events and not anything mental (assuming dualism)? If you could lay each hypothetical situation out and give me the conditions, I could tell you the conclusion of each as far as ethics would be concerned.

P.S. I see my Opera browser doesn't let me use this advanced text editor app for my posts. Now that I'm in IE, I can finally add paragraph breaks so my text doesn't look like a huge block.