Self-ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights

Abstract

A POWERFUL WAY OF EXPRESSING the principle of individual liberty is to claim that every individual has full over her body, skills, and labor. The view is that those rights, liberties, and powers that are associated with the ownership of property comprise the rightful sovereignty that each person has over herself within the proscription of harm to others. In short, people own themselves. This principle of self-ownership is also a difficult sticking point for egalitarians who must acknowledge the force of this principle but also see that individuals are born with different talents and skills. Hence allowing individuals to exercise their talents freely an implication of self-ownership -implies, under most conditions, that severe material inequalities will arise. Some egalitarians, in pointing out the moral arbitrariness of differential talents, simply deny self-ownership by assuming the public ownership of skills.' Others in the tradition are more troubled by the conflict between equality and the undeniable intuitive force of the self-ownership postulate.2 In this essay, I want to illuminate this problem by supplying an analysis of ownership and by introducing a thesis concerning the structure of property rights. I will argue that there are two importantly different aspects of ownership which must be considered separately and justified according to crucially contrasting considerations. I will explicate and defend this thesis as a general claim about the ownership rights associated with private property (of any kind) and then return to the arena of self-ownership. Once the distinction I defend concerning the structure of property rights is made clear, I hope to show that the essence of self-ownership can be preserved while instituting mechanisms designed to maintain equality of condition.