After rationality, the next really crucial idea in Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty is self‐​ownership. Together, these two ideas are the foundation of Rothbard’s argument for private property. Below I’m going to try to systematize, drawing heavily on Rothbard’s argument and (I hope) representing it faithfully, along with some extensions and criticism.



Let’s start with the question: Who is your rightful owner?



To answer it fully, I think we should consider two different assumptions (1) ownership of a self cannot be meaningfully divided and (2) it can.



(1) Assuming that selves can’t be meaningfully divided, there are only three types of answers to the question: Either (a) someone else owns you, (b) no one owns you, or (c) you own yourself.



(a) is easily dispensed with; it’s slavery, and it fails by almost any moral standard.



(b) is more interesting, and in discussions with people who don’t accept self‐​ownership, I have often heard variants of it. It is sometimes asserted that owning a person is a category error; one could no more own a person, properly speaking, than one could eat a song. Even if that person is oneself, ownership just isn’t possible for this category of thing.



There is somewhat of a problem, though, with asserting that no one owns you, including yourself.



One corollary of ownership as it is commonly understood is that ownership confers the right of use. Rothbard suggests that if no one owns you, then you don’t have the right of use over your own body. Any actions you take with it are therefore not rightful. (p 45, n)



Yet this puts you in an impossible position, because you have little choice but to go right on using your body. Even suicide isn’t an option, because it would necessarily damage some property you do not own. And by the terms of (1)(b) above, you have absolutely no hope of finding the proper owner and asking his permission. That’s because no one else owns you either. A complete lack of ownership implies a complete lack of use rights.



This sounds fairly damning, but there are two problems with Rothbard’s argument about ownership and use rights.



First, although the right of use is a common corollary of ownership, it may also be a corollary of other things, too. This possibility is surprisingly difficult to rule out.



In the real world, people may acquire use rights not only through ownership, but also through lease, rent, borrowing, or other forms of agreement with the owner. Although each of these (legal) forms does imply the existence–somewhere–of an owner, it is not necessarily clear that all types of use rights (which are moral, not legal claims) must stem from someone’s ownership somewhere.



This seems to require further demonstration; although I find it intuitive to assert that use rights stem from ownership, I’m not prepared to say that they never stem from anything else. And if they can, then it might be the case that we have use rights in our selves without anyone, including ourselves, having ownership.



Might we hold our selves in trust from God? And might God still somehow disclaim his ownership of us? With God all things are possible, but these are metaphysical speculations of the sort Rothbard was eager to avoid. Rothbard saw all too clearly that the mid‐​20th century libertarian movement was in danger of bifurcating on the contextually irrelevant question of theism and atheism, and one of his great accomplishments was to argue forcefully that it need not do so.