Self-Ownership as a Form of Ownership

Merely by sharing an environment, we each face a trade-off between freedom to act and freedom from interference. The goal of this chapter is to elucidate self-ownership by taking it seriously as a form of ownership, understood as an institution for optimizing the trade-off between freedom to go about one’s life and freedom from the interference of others, in a world in which going about one’s life almost always interferes with someone else’s. The central thesis is that self-ownership is an institution entitling the bearer of a claim right to protection from interference with his person, labor, and freedom, in ways that that person can afford to be protected in the greater scheme of things as the bearer of a liberty right to live a life of his own.