On the matter of owning ourselves
We in fact do, but we can make right and wrong choices regarding our self-ownership
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Columnist and George Mason University economist Walter Williams represented the best of what the libertarian component of the fusionist formulation contributed to the conservative vision as it coalesced in the second half of the twentieth century. No one made a more compelling case for just what freedom, in all its dimensions, is.
Here’s the way he framed it in a 2005 piece:
To posit a distinction between civil or human rights on the one hand and property rights on the other reflects little understanding. Let's look at it.
My computer is my property. Does it have any rights — like the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are there any constitutional guarantees held by my computer? Anyone, except maybe a lawyer, would agree that to think of property as possessing rights is unadulterated nonsense.
So where do property rights come in? Property rights are human rights to use economic goods and services. Private property rights contain your right to use, transfer, trade and exclude others from use of property deemed yours. The supposition that there's a conflict or difference between human rights to use property and civil rights is bogus and misguided.
Let's go back to my computer example. Suppose someone steals my computer. Hasn't he violated my rights to my property and hence, my human or civil rights? Or, alternatively, if I throw my computer through your window, it's not my computer that's violated your human rights; it's I. Why? Because I've used my computer in a fashion that infringes on your human rights to your property.
That it's bogus to make a distinction between human, civil and property rights can be seen in another way. In a free society, each person is his own private property; I own myself and you own yourself. That's why it's immoral to rape or murder. It violates a person's property rights. The fact of self-ownership also helps explain why theft is immoral. In order for self-ownership to be meaningful, a person must have ownership rights to what he produces or earns. A good working description of slavery is that it is a condition where a person does not own what he produces. What he produces belongs to someone else. Therefore, if someone steals my computer, he's violated my ownership rights to my computer, which I earned through my labor and therefore my human or civil rights to keep what I produce.
With all due respect to the late Professor Williams - and an enormous amount is due him - that’s not the end of the matter, though.
We didn’t spring into existence out of nothing. We were created. Pretty much all cultures throughout human history have intuited this. Hence religions.
We know that some religions have had a more accurate take on how a deity brought the universe and ourselves into existence, with the most accurate take of all being the witness borne by those who saw the Word made flesh dwelling among us. You can’t get much more accurate than getting the explanation straight from He who brought us into being, who is before Abraham was.
There’s a whole body of commentary that has arisen in response to our culture’s insanity of the last few years, and it’s mightily welcome. By losing sight of the fact that we are creatures who exist because a creator desired it so, we’ve used the notion of self-ownership to request doctors to mutilate our crotches and block the hormones that were shaping us according to our God-ordained identities.
We’ve also falsely asserted that it is perfectly moral to terminate lives that grow in the females among us.
I got into this earlier today over at Late in the Day in a post about two recent examples of spiritual rottenness on the part of prominent Democrats: Senator Chuck Schumer’s presumption to tell Israel to vote Netanyahu out of office and accept a two-state solution, and, to the point here, Vice President Kamala Harris’s “historic” visit to an abortion clinic.
I took the occasion to succinctly revisit this matter of divorcing self-ownership from our status as created beings:
This is not the occasion to revisit the entirety of what's happened to Western civilization since Rousseau and up through Shelly, Marx, Freud, John Dewey, Hugh Hefner, Gloria Steneim et al. I've done so a few times at Precipice, and it's a subject of great importance. For our purposes here, let me say that what we've done over the last 400 years is jettison something key to human flourishing: acknowledgment of a transcendent order, of the fact that we are designed in certain ways and not others, that female human beings, like females of lower species, bear young.
And I'm well aware of the very important debates going on within institutional Christianity regarding complimentarianism versus egalitarianism, which plays out in such ways as whether women can preach. I'm well aware of the boneheads such as John McArthur - he who infamously told Beth Moore to "go home" - and the damage they have done to the appeal of the Gospel to the unacquainted.
On a larger scope, I'm aware that there's no turning back regarding the leadership roles women have assumed in business and government. That ship has sailed, and civilization is the richer for it.
But the basic fact to which I allude two paragraphs above will not be disproved. The design of nature, and the fact of a designer who decreed it so, is impervious to the perverse trends by which we attempt to rebel.
To speak plainly, we can call a days-old embryo a pomegranate or a carburetor, but the fact remains that whatever term we use to deny his or her humanity, we each and all were one once.
Vice President Harris may couch her rebellion against the transcendent order in terms of women's health, or personal autonomy, but the Creator will not be mocked.
Once again, it all goes back to Eve’s response to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The serpent made a pretty compelling case, basically saying to Eve, “Look at all the other apple trees around that one you’re not supposed to eat from. Come on, now; do you see any difference? Aren’t you the least bit curious as to whether its fruit tastes any different from that on the others?”
And I like to imagine that Eve put up some resistance, insisting that God had forbidden her and Adam with the utmost seriousness from eating of that tree.
She finally relented, and bingo, humanity had knowledge of good and evil from then on.
We are to use our self-ownership to give ourselves back to He who breathed us into existence. Choosing to do otherwise results in chaos and misery.
It cannot be otherwise.
Oh, and one more thing about abortion: per Professor Williams’s formulation of self-ownership, a fellow human being’s human rights are being violated by that act.
The way I like to think about it, freedom and virtue are partners. In order for there to be true virtue, it needs to be a free choice and we need to be able to choose bad. But just because we have both options available to us doesn’t mean one isn’t right and the other wrong. We do own ourselves, but that comes with a responsibility to govern ourselves widely and choose to do good, rather than bad.