/philosophy/ - Philosophy

Since you said that, you do.
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Argumentation_ethics

Perhaps, easy to poke holes in?

Well you own your life, if you are a materialist AND if you accept the existence of free will - not just an illusion of free will. You can kill yourself and cease a functioning of your body. Then it depends whether you are a dualist or a materialist => if you are a pure materialist with a belief of free will then you can own your life. Soul would make the whole business complicated because owning immaterial "things" seems absurd.

But I guess the SELF is the real problem here. As a materialist you could interpret self as a sensory input processed through a brain giving a raise to the self. By suicide you could end this self and maybe then we could say you own yourself.

As other anons have mentioned: Before we even talk about free will bullshit and ethics, we need to establish what we mean when we say "own".

As I remember the classical liberal, Lockean definition of property: It is considered to be whatever one has put their work into and from this created value. Simple, classic definition - although I am certainly not giving the most thorough definition of this conceptualization of property.

As I understand the Marxist definition of private vs. personal property: Private property - what we normally think of as things we legally own - is really nothing but a relation between the 'owner' of the thing and the former owner of the thing, i.e. the "deprived"; it is an illusion and an expression of commodity fetishism to say that property is a relation between person and thing, as this is really only funneling human relations through objects. Personal property, on the other hand, are things that one uses and that they have attained 'legitimately' (outside of the capitalist hierarchy, I'd assume).

These are of course economic definitions, but we have to start somewhere in addressing this question - which also raises another potential question: Is ownership strictly an economic relation? For this post, I'll assume it is.

From the classical liberal definition, can we say that one owns themselves? Well, I'll argue that one puts "work" into themselves by doing what is required to keep themselves alive. It's a form of maintenance, let's suppose. It is necessary that every person who is alive, under this definition, puts work into themselves - but do they increase their value? This, I think, leads into an ethical question: Should someone own themselves if they do nothing to increase their value (to society, I suppose)?

Under the Marxist definition of property, I think we could say that one "uses" themselves daily in a very weird and uncomfortably self-referential definition of "use". We could say one uses their body to accomplish the ends posited by one's mind, but then this would get into mind-body problems, and it doesn't seem right to say that a body can use itself since this is self-referential. "Use" implies instrumentality, and instrumentality implies something using another thing - but it also implies intent, I would argue, and surely if there is anything that doesn't have intent, it is the cultural/historical circumstances one is thrown into and that some argue are really what determine one's actions.

Onto an ethical point I'd like to make: Whether or not someone does metaphysically own themselves or not is irrelevant, because if nothing else, shouldn't someone be allowed to own themselves? As Schopenhauer once said when talking about suicide: If nothing else, one should have the right to their own life.