CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Leung, Kin-wai |
|---|---|
| Title | Priority of Individual Sovereignty: A Libertarian Approach |
| Summary | This project develops a novel account of self-ownership overcoming two interrelated problems that contemporary libertarians have yet solved—the problem of imprisonment and the denial of assigning a greater moral weight to an individual body than to extrabodily materials. The thesis that an individual has natural ownership of his body appears to well account for the wrongness of non-consensual use of an individual’s body. The problem of imprisonment challenges this appearance. Since right libertarians place weak or no limits on appropriation, they could not rationally condemn unilateral occupation of the natural environment that amounts to imprisonment of an innocent individual so long as the appropriator has worked on the environment. This project examines various right-libertarian attempts to solve this problem after mapping a new conceptual terrain of libertarianism. Besides the common division into libertarian theories that place limits on appropriation and libertarian theories that do not, this project proposes another division focusing on whether the thesis and rules of distribution are inferred from the same set of more fundamental principles and nonmoral premises. As these two divisions cut across each other, right-libertarian theories are classifiable into four types. This project demonstrates that, in solving the problem of imprisonment, right-libertarians generally in turn deny greater moral importance of our bodes relative to extrabodily materials. Falling into none of those types, this project develops an original idea about what our bodies are distinct from extrabodily objects concerning our living. Our agency extends beyond our bodies to extrabodily materials because we make an impact on the world by means of exercising materials’ causal capacities to make changes. Since we are identical to our bodies, our bodies play an extra role that extrabodily materials lack—changes that our bodies undergo are changes that we undergo. Control over changes to our bodies that we are, if disrespectful, is a tie-breaking consideration giving priority to respect self-ownership over ownership of extrabodily materials. The last part of this project provides a physiological conception of human body as organism by drawing recent literature of biology and philosophy of biology. The project reveals that several counterexamples to the normative priority of the body over extrabodily objects rest on dubious presuppositions stemming from the folk understanding of organism. |
| Supervisor | Moles, Andres |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/leung_kin-wai.pdf |
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