These Definitions may be helpful when reading “Nature’s Ethics”
Self-Ownership
Self-ownership is the principle of being responsible for your mind, body, and the effects of your mind and body. You hold that responsibility from your very nature. That responsibility also includes the natural authority to protect your mind, body, and the effects of your mind and body. Your mind, body, and the effects of your mind and body are your property by nature. Property rights originate from the body.
Self-ownership also includes the responsibility of keeping your body alive. You cannot outsource complete responsibility. No one else has the right or responsibility of your brain, organ, and body functions but you.
If your mind and body perform an action of picking up a sword and chopping someone’s head off, you are the owner of that action. That was an effect of your mind and body. That action cannot be owned by another (Mental illness is noted and understood that if one doesn’t have the mental capacity to be a moral agent, they are not responsible for a particular action.)
Some folks try to over complicate the principle of self-ownership and make it sound like some abstract collectivist nonsense. It is a very simple principle that has no need for complication and abstraction.
If someone uses their voice to tell you there is no such thing as self-ownership, they just used a self destructing statement. They just used self-ownership to tell you that self-ownership doesn’t exist.
If I type the words “there is no such thing as self-ownership”, It is a self-destructive statement, because I used self-ownership to state that there is no such thing as self-ownership.
It’s that simple.
Necessary criteria for Ethics to be objective.
I define “Ethics” as a general term for a collection of moral choices.
I define “Morality” as
– Morality – The choice to refrain from initiating violations of another’s self-ownership; Such as, refraining from theft, murder, rape, assault, fraud, etc.
-Immorality – A choice of from a sentient sapien who initiates unwanted violations of another’s self ownership.
Criteria necessary for moral behavior to be valid.
- 1. It must be universal. Meaning, it must apply to all humans at all times at any place.
Many rulers make up arbitrary moral rules that apply to the governed but the rulers are exempt. For example, if I collect taxes from you, it is theft, but if the ruling agents collect taxes, it is moral. Or, if I kidnap you and lock you in a cage because you robbed me, I’m the one who is performing an immoral act, but if the State does it, it is morally justified.
If it’s not universal, it’s just an opinion enforced by violence.
- 2. It must be a non-action, or refraining from a behavior.
For example, a guy in a wheelchair may not be physically able to perform a positive action, and if a moral rule required positive actions, some would not be capable of moral actions, therefore it wouldn’t be universal.
- 3. Morality requires a choice or alternative.
Staying alive is preferable over dying, even on a cellular level (suicidal exceptions noted.). If I am faced with a choice between stealing from you or dying, it is no longer considered a moral choice, as the only alternative is death.
(Note, other philosophers from the Austrian school such as Murray Rothbard propose that even if the only alternative is death, it is still a moral choice. Further exploration is necessary on this.)
4. It must be objective, and based on a foundation of primary principles. For example, equal individual sovereignty (self-ownership)
I personally like to look at ethics in a context of refraining from immoral behavior, rather than looking at it as behaving morally. It could be stated in both variations though.
For example, it could be stated that it is moral to NOT murder, steal, rape, assault, kidnap, etc. But I prefer to state it as, it is IMMORAL to murder, steal, rape, assault, kidnap, etc. Either way morality is a non-action based on ownership and sovereignty of the individual.
If some say we are owned by God, self-ownership is still a part of our nature because the God gave over responsibility and control over one’s mind and body while they inhabit it.
When we embrace a rational set of objective ethics, we will no longer be fooled into obeying the arbitrary moral rules set by pretend authority figures. There is no one person who can decree what is right and moral. That would just be opinion. It is up to objective rational thought.
It’s not up to me or anyone else to “decide what’s right”, just like it’s not up to the mathematician to decide what the correct answer is. It doesn’t matter what the physicist wants the laws of physics to be, or what the physicist says what laws of physics are. It is up to the methodology of objective reasoning to determine the laws of physics, and the final arbiter is the manifestation of those laws in reality.
It doesn’t matter what me or any other philosopher wants morality and virtue to be. It’s up to a method of objective reasoning.
I hope the method of reasoning I have put forth in my previous article Nature’s Ethics is helpful in bringing our primitive ethics out of the dark ages.
