What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

We do not own ourselves

The world is always wanting in concise, vivid restatements of tradition and conservatism. Jason Jones and John Zmirak have attended to that want with this essay: “Self-Ownership Kills Babies.” Beginning with some rather choice quotations, these two have your attention. It is rewarded with this most excellent and elegant summation:

Private property and its protection from arbitrary confiscation or control are implications of human dignity—because property is at its heart the fruit of our labors, which ought to be free. In that sense, we do own ourselves. But let’s ask a few pointed questions about what that ownership really means, how far it extends, and in what ways that ownership is conditioned by what we have ourselves received.

It is clear that no human being is really “self-made.” We are born to parents, without whose care we would quickly die. Human beings are dependent for longer than any other creature on the constant protection of parents. Nor, once we reach adulthood, can most human beings survive alone. We are physically and emotionally dependent on cooperation with others. Our very consciousness is constituted and formed into fullness through the mediation of language—of words and grammatical structures that we learn from others, who have themselves inherited them from the dead. Likewise, we are the beneficiaries of the hard work done by our ancestors in establishing an orderly society that protects individual rights, and creates the infrastructure for education and technology. Think of the immense advantages in lifespan, opportunity, health, and wealth that a modern American or European enjoys over a persecuted Nuba tribesman or a Brazilian living in a favela; can any of us rightly take credit for these? No, these are gifts that we have been given, and without them we would not have the knowledge, skills, freedom or physical safety that make possible our efforts at creating wealth. Two people with similar talents and comparable work ethics will fare very differently, if one of them is born on New York’s Upper East Side, and the other in an aboriginal community in Australia. The discrepancy between the opportunities offered to these two people ought to show us the measure of how much we owe to others, how little of the selves that we have become for which we can take sole credit.

We do not give birth to our bodies, nor create ourselves. We take a vast array of inherited gifts and opportunities and do our best to steward and make good use of them. Given that fact, our ownership of our labor and our wealth is not complete and absolute. That ownership is conditioned by what we owe to others who came before us. For that reason, adults are expected to care for their aged parents. But even more than paying back the care and opportunities we have received, we are expected to pay them forward, to offer the next generation the best chance to thrive in its own right. This debt is more than a moral truth; it is a fact of mammal biology, of a race whose young are born from the bodies of parents, not hatched from abandoned eggs and left to fend for themselves.

In light of these social, biological, and moral realities, we can see that we do not own ourselves outright, free of any liens or claims. By virtue of everything we have that sets apart from a stranded sailor alone on a desert island, we in fact owe a great deal to our parents (which might need to paid forward to our children), and significant debts to the society that shaped us, kept us safe, and made it possible for us to thrive. We owe the most to those who are closest to us, to our parents and our children, and to our direct benefactors. We owe a little less to those in our local community, and proportionately less to total strangers who are faraway fellow citizens. Our debt is least to people who live in distant countries with whom we interact little except to buy the fruits of their labor. However, we still owe them something, a debt that may seem to materialists as intangible or meaningless—but which in times of crisis can mean the difference between life and death, peace and war, coexistence or repression and terrorism. We owe every human being by virtue of his membership in the human family respect for his intrinsic dignity. We owe even distant strangers the recognition that they are different from machines, that their equal humanity is not affected by differences of wealth, race, or religion. We owe them the debt imposed by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If it is ever hard to accept and internalize this truth, here is a helpful mental exercise: When you look at some desperate refugee on television, waving an emaciated hand to keep the flies away from his eyes, do not compare him to yourself as you live now—in relative comfort and safety. Remember instead that you and he were once just alike, tiny fetuses nestled inside another person, utterly dependent on her protection and goodwill, completely incapable of making any efforts on your own behalf. At that point you were exactly the same, completely equal. Then think of all the things that must have happened in his life, and yours, to land you in such very different places—and how few of them depended on your decisions, how little you really did to end up so much better off than this refugee. That is the cold, unvarnished truth, and it isn’t a comfortable one. That is why we work so hard to hide it from ourselves.

Comments (6)

Our own former contributor Ed Feser has taken on the self-ownership axiom in a number of places, once here:

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/08/is_selfownership_axiomatic.html

That statement from Rothbard about society's having the right to let _any_ baby starve to death is truly chilling.

Indeed it is.

Of course I don't own myself...my wife owns me!

"We do not give birth to our bodies, nor create ourselves"

The crude counter-argument to this irrefutable fact often used by proponents of abortion is that "Possession is nine tenths of the law."

How utterly reprehensible to consider a babe in the womb as at the mercy of his/her captor--a truly patholigical view of both the babe and the womb.

Maybe we should start charging pregnant women who visit abortuaries with kidnapping.

Or, we could go the other way: since the baby's presence in the womb is what causes changes to the womb, blood, endocrine system, physiology, etc, maybe we should say that the baby is in possession and the woman has to request permission of the baby to do anything.

Lauran, you are right. The liberal abortion view just is a form of pathology. Sociopathalogic, to be precise.

The charge of kidnapping sounds about right to me, Tony.

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