Before being turned into a popularity contest riddled with dubious, shadowy-yet-ever-smiling and dodgy characters and negative connotations with the advent of democracy, politics was largely philosophical. What one used to refer to as politics was how we believe society should organise itself, and how one can justify this position through a set of axioms. We have progressed a long way: from the Stoics to the medieval Thomistics, from consequentialism to ethical Kantianism throughout the millennia. When mentioning “politics”, think not banners and badges, campaigns and cake sales, but think “philosophy”, or, more specifically, “political philosophy”.
As I mentioned, each political philosophy relies on a set list of axioms, and from these axioms (which have to be individually proven true) we have to derive which society is the most justifiable. These axioms could be a labour theory of value, an assumption that land is a positive commons, the existence of one or many gods, that humans are intrinsically self-interested, that nature is the most fairest of paths, and many, many more. What is important when discussing political philosophy is the examination of these axioms, taking down the ideology not from what it proposes, but from what it stands on. You will find it much harder to argue in advocacy of the opinion that workers are fully entitled to the fruit of their labour, for instance, when the labour theory of value is remitted from acceptance; when the very basis of this opinion has been itself put into question.
These axiomatic lists are not messy and in no particular order at all, and you will find that the most extensive and most ordered political philosophies are those which have numerically ordered axioms, where 2 must follow from 1, and 3 must follow from 2, and so on. This is from where we derive oxymorons in political terminology. I’m sure you find yourself a little confused when you hear “fascist anarchism” or “capitalist socialism”, because the axiomatic lists of these component ideologies contradict each other, even if you may not realise it directly.
The most structured political philosophies have, however, one weakness. It is a very important weakness that can not easily be overcome, and is found at the very depths of the philosophy. As axiomatic lists go in numerical order, they must obviously have a starting point, a Starter Axiom, if you will. Rejecting the Starter Axiom is rejecting the whole philosophy, whereas acquiescing to the Starter Axiom of a philosophy is agreeing to approximately nine-tenths of its ethical core.
I am a proponent of voluntaryist libertarianism, and have been considered, quite flatteringly, part of the Academic Right, as opposed to the Academic Left. It was in the Anarchism thread that we stopped looking at what exactly I was asking everyone to do, but rather what I was asking everyone to believe-- what ethical arguments I had hidden under the surface of the iceberg, so to speak, to justify the tip of the iceberg. “Why the non-aggression principle?”; “why is force wrong?” were answered quite innocently by me at first, stating that these things are both right and wrong respectively because they either embody or contravene natural law, which renders them either legitimate or illegitimate. “Why natural law?”: well, because natural rights. “Why natural rights?”: well, because you own yourself and this entitles you to certain rights and liberties that none can take away because that would go against the fact that you own yourself. That was it, I realised. That was my Starter Axiom. You can probably guess that answering “why self-ownership?” was met with little more than “just because”, because, after all, it was my Starter Axiom.
There are many ways to justify self-ownership, but the course I took I had to DIY philosophise, because every single right-libertarian or voluntaryist book never goes deeper than “just because”, and that is not an acceptable justification of a Starter Axiom. I took from Aristotelian hylomorphism to justify my opinion on me owning myself. Put bluntly, the bricks that constitute a house belong to the house; the body that constitutes a person belongs to the person. We can put it this way:
i. A brick house is made of bricks.
ii. Without the bricks, there is no brick house.
iii. The bricks belong to the brick house.
Or, alternatively:
i. A is made from B.
ii. If not-B, therefore not-A.
iii. B belongs to A.
1. A owns B.
Where B is the “relative matter” that Aristotle referred to, and A is made possible by the existence of B.
For the human person or mind (or “soul”), consider this:
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.
Where “functional” means a living, working body, which means that if the body was dead (ie, not “functional”), then this could not apply.
So, TL;DR:
Do you own yourself, NSG?
