Owning Oneself

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>For over five centuries, the idea that people own themselves has appeared in philosophical work on justice. But the meaning of self-ownership has changed significantly over time, albeit largely unnoticed. Nowadays, philosophers usually understand self-ownership as a robust set of property-like rights over oneself, and chiefly they have debated whether such rights do or do not rule out certain forms of state redistribution of resources. This debate assumes that such questions about justice are primarily about the disposition of things, the question then being whether and how property in internal things—those things that constitute oneself—might or might not be compatible with equality in the distribution of external things. By contrast, self-ownership first entered current philosophical tradition as something else entirely: a fundamental right to obligate others to interact with one according to shared norms by which persons are reciprocally bound. So understood, self-ownership bears on justice as primarily concerning how one treats one another, and in particular what it means to treat one another as equals. This book is an attempt to recover this earlier, yet now-novel, understanding of self-ownership. It undertakes four main tasks: to illustrate how such an understanding of self-ownership makes possible a unified understanding of ownership generally; to trace and diagnose the shift in understandings of self-ownership over time; to illuminate self-ownership as a basic moral relation between persons; and to sketch how this new, old understanding of self-ownership reframes questions about justice, such as restrictions on labor and the distribution of natural resources.</jats:p>