Arkolon wrote:i. The person is made from the functional body.
ii. Without the functional body, there is no person.
iii. The functional body belongs to the person.
1. The person owns their body.
iii. and 1 seem like restatements of the same claim ("person owns body") - "owns" and "belongs" are the same thing (only in the active and passive tense respectively). You've asserted a property relationship between the person and body without justifying it. The logic is circular/begging the question ("I own my body because my body belongs to me"/"My body belongs to me because I own myself"), but there isn't an axiomatic justification for why this is true. It's just an assertion.
I still believe in self-ownership, but for different reasons. I accept the principle of communicative action (which is a matter for another thread) - in short, that discourse is an active, participatory behavior, and that there is an architecture to logic in which the act of discourse forms a constitutive part. Our action communicates certain truths that cannot be denied, because argumentation (the discursive act of denying these truths) relies on their presupposition, as per the example "language has no meaning" (in which my communicative act of using language has presupposed our mutual acceptance of the intersubjective meaning of language).
For reasons of a long, deductive chain of Hoppean ethics that I can post if we want, I think claims to ownership are logically inevitable - that is, "property" has to exist (even in a "socialist" utopia, the scarce nature of things means that their use is limited, and therefore they will be owned, at least in a temporary sense, through exclusive use. Even if everyone shares everything, two people can't eat the same unit of cake, which means someone will end up owning that slice of cake to the loss of the other). The only question is which claims of ownership are justified.
I don't think slavery-norms (someone else owning another person's body) could possibly be justified, because we are all rational agents, and any theoretical justification for this norm would rely upon our use of agency to directly contravene this principle. For example, if I were to say "I own my body", this is a proposition that is not substantively contradicted by the form of my statement - if, in reality, I do own my body, then the act of making the argument that I own my body can theoretically be justified. If, on the contrary, I were to say that "Person X owns my body", then the substance of the argument would contradict the form, because my action in discourse of claiming my body relied upon the exclusive use of my body by my own agency - if I did not own my body, I would not be justified in this action absent Person X's ownership of my body. If I were to claim that "Everyone own's everyone's body [that is, some shared division of each body amongst a collective]", I would also be in contradiction of this principle, because I would need the collective permission of everyone else in order to act. However, because everyone else would require collective permission in order to act to grant collective permission, this norm could not possibly be sustained, because no communication could ever take place (because no action - including the action of discourse - could ever be justified absent prior permission, but this prior permission too would, as action, require prior permission, into infinite regression of non-action).
Now, particular slave relationships are another problem, and I am personally not sure whether or not they can be justified. Each individual is the first owner of his body (that is, I have the most justified claim to my body because my agency was originally tied to my body and manifested through it - I originally appropriated my body). But I am personally not sure whether or not I could voluntarily become the slave of someone else - if, for example, I were to sign a contract stating that "Person X owns my body from this point onward", is this contract justified? Under most circumstances, ceding ownership of a good onto someone else is completely justified, but, here, I am ceding "exclusive use" (ownership) of a good (my body) onto someone else, even though the nature of that good excludes others from its direct use. Absent some sort of mind control, my own agency is intimately tied with the use of that good - person X could never exclude me from use of my own body. This ethical principle (that my own claims to my body are unjust and that someone else's claims are just) is unsustainable, because it contradicts the principles presupposed in justification. I would have to become a non-rational, non-thinking, non-justifying, non-moral non-agent (like an ox) in order for this ownership relation to be justified.
So it seems as though, within argumentation ethics, slavery is the only contractual, property relationship over a physical object (the body) that could never be justified. Other 'property relationships' over intangible ideas (who owns "a triangle"?) are also unjust according to argumentation ethics, but for slightly different reasons (these goods are non-exclusionary, but are also non-scarce, both of which mean that they cannot be 'owned' as property... the body is scarce, but the nature of its exclusion is intimately tied to its controlling agent, which means slavery can never be totally exclusionary).
So, ultimately, I think self-ownership is undeniable and unavoidable. Any alternative to self-ownership is self-contradictory and immoral.
