Some good thoughts Bob. I don't know what the answer is, but I think this does illustrate why libertarians or anyone else shouldn't take their political ideology too seriously.
 

Well, I think of ownership as a profoundly human concept, invented by (or at least for) humans to keep their societies and their relations with other human beings in order.

Why would you apply those human concepts to God, who doesn't have equals that he would have to resolve conflicts with? Does it tell you anything about God's nature or do you just end up assimilating God to man?
 

The Blackadder Says:

Is the soul an idea? I wouldn't have thought so.
 

Maybe God owns my soul and he can come and claim it when I'm dead.

Meanwhile, I know that mine is totally free from any cohersion.
Nobody can force my soul. This is my ultimate private proverty, the one that absolutely nobody can reach. Not even a god.
And in the event that one would, I would chalenge him as any other. To my death if needed. For my real freedom: the freedom of thought.

Knowing that, I know also that the only real danger to my soul is myself.

As for your saying that some god has the right to kill me anytime he wants if it please him. I would challenge his values against mines.
Would he have the last world on it as you say, I would die knowing that I stood for my values.

I live for no one, not even a god !
I live for myself.
And I see no contradiction on this.
 

"I think He has every right to kill you with a tornado, to sit back and allow the Nazis to gas you, etc. Now we of course don't fully understand His plans and some of His decisions seem outrageous, but ultimately He has the right to do whatever He wants"

Oh dear! A being which exercises rights which conflict with the very values said being is alleged to have given us in the 'Commandments' (not to speak of not 'passing on the other side' etc, etc). This induces cognitive dissonance in me. Even were I not an atheist, why would I choose to worship such a being?
 

what's a soul? Not being flippant here, but i have not found a good working conceptualization of it.
 

Bob,

I'm not surprised you bring this up--you raised a similar notion as some sort of criticism of Hoppe's argumentation ethics years ago in this piece. In my reply thereto, I noted:

"MC introduce supposed "counterexamples" of God and slavery. ... As for God – you can't just posit that God owns everyone and "therefore" we are not self-owners. Moroever, even if God does own us, it could be that we are still self-owners vis-a-vis each other. In any event, this in no way refutes the conclusion that only the libertarian norms can be argumentatively justified in discourse."

If there is a God, since He is Good, we can assume he's libertarian and has decreed a libertarian moral law within his universe. So even if God owns A and B, A still has a better claim to A's body than B does.
 

By the way, I've noted elsewhere a connection between God and IP in my Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way (noting that 13.7 billion years ago, "God invents the universe. He does this without permission of anyone else. He doesn't look in the Celestial Patent Office filings first to make sure he is in the clear.").

Also, in my How We Come To Own Ourselves, I discuss the issue of why children are self-owners--the parents (mother, really), as the creator and initial owner of the material of the baby's body, would seem to be the baby's owner, as master to slave. This is similar to the argument that God owns us, as his creations. (But I think God has even more of a claim, since now only is He purported to have created us, but he maintains a type of omnipotent domination over all creation.) One argument I use is that the parent arguably owes freedom or manumission to the child, just as she has an obligation to feed, shelter, etc. this new person she has created. A similar argument could be used for God: if He is good, certainly he would also not create a being with natural needs (including self-ownership, freedom) and then keep them enslaved. But the main argument I use is that the child has a better connection to his than his parents do. But can this be said of God? I don't think so. He has a special omnipotent dominion over all creation; in some sense they are parts of his body. Do I have a better link to "my" body than does God? I doubt it. So... sure. He has a better claim to my body, and has a "right" to be the owner/master to humans. But would it be moral for him to do this? I don't think so, and since God is Good, then he never would. So in some sense it's a moot point.

And this highlights part of the problem of positing this "God" thing. It's such a bizarre, incoherent idea that of course it introduces logical problems, just as assuming 1=2 would, just as dividing by zero does. I don't think there is a God (or anything supernatural; and confess that I find such beliefs to be completely irrational and mostly incoherent), but if there were one, I don't see the problem saying he owns us. Ownership means the right to control. If God really created the universe .... and is omnipotent etc., etc., can he be said to NOT have the "right" to control it? I mean once you introduce these loopy assumptions anything is possible. If each person "is" or has a soul, then God owns--has the right to control--your body, as well as your soul, sure. What is the argument otherwise--that the soul is not a scarce resource because it is not "physical"? But presumably the soul actually has an identity, a nature, and is subject to certain causal rules in its own spirit-realm too, over which God also has dominion. The little dilemma or puzzle about how souls can be scarce or owned is nothing compared to the metaphysics and ontology of a God-filled universe. Again, if you posit a God, you open up a can of worms.

You also write, "I loved C. S. Lewis' line: "You don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body." So when it comes to us being "really" free etc., I think it ultimately has to do with our wills or souls, not our physical bodies. This is part of my problem with some libertarian arguments over self-ownership; they often seem to conflate one's physical body with one's ego."

I disagree with this. The libertarian argument about self-ownership is an argument about who has the right to control your physical body. It does not matter for this argument if you have (or "are") a soul or not. Whehter or not you have or are a soul, the question remains: who has the right to control your body: you, or some other person? Obviously, you; and using "self-ownership" to denote this view makes perfect sense. (As I discuss further in What Libertarianism Is.)
 

Stephen: "If there is a God, since He is Good, we can assume he's libertarian and has decreed a libertarian moral law within his universe."

I like that! Since God is good, he must be a libertarian!

I think God's ownership and self-ownership are compatible. One describes the relationship between God and man; the other the relationship between men.

Small quibble: "He is not a monster for causing kids to get born with birth defects, anymore than a human novelist is a monster for creating characters who commit crimes." While God did initiate the evil that we endure, such as birth defects, that doesn't mean that God arbitrarily afflicts people with disease or other evils. The proper way to think about evil in the world is to recognize that God created a world without evil. When mankind rebelled against him, God stepped back and let us have our way. Also, he cursed the planet and introduced entropy where it hadn't existed before. Birth defects, cancer, etc., are part of the law of entropy resulting from the fall. For example, harmful mutations outnumber beneficial mutations in our bodies by a million to one.

While the curse seems awful, God did it in order to persuade mankind to end its rebellion. Occasionally, God will intervene and reverse the effects of the curse as a result of our prayers, but generally he lets the laws of physics and genetics run their course.
 

If you believe in free will, then the answer to the question is an unambiguous no. Free will requires the freedom to choose between good and evil. If you don't believe in God, the answer is also unambiguously no, because nothing can be owned by an entity that does not exist.

Where this question becomes truly bizarre is if you believe in determinism. While in would seem initially that determinism implies that God owns men's souls, that is not required at all. God can give us our souls without the freedom to do anything with them. One might wonder what the point of that would be, but it is logically possible.
 

Do "rights" really apply to God? Does it even make sense to say that God has a "right" to do something? I'm not sure I'm prepared to discuss God's actions within the framework of Enlightenment rationalism.
 

Come on Bob, there are at least 4 of us anarcho-libertarian/Christian/Kinsellans.
 

To all:

From the standpoint of scriptures, God certainly asserts both ownership and dominion over the entire human being (body and soul). According to orthodox Christian theology, individual souls were purchased or redeemed by God (through the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross), but the point must be made that the consummation of this transaction is one of voluntary servitude, through faith. *All purchased people come willing*, not as someone at gunpoint, but as one who loves the master and hears his wonderful voice calling them into the fold. There is not a single person in the world that is taken captive by God against their will. That person does not exist. Now here is where things get tricky. Scripture does not teach that Christ purchased every soul. Yes, on some levels clearly Jesus died for the common grace of every person, but more particularly, he purchased his own flock. Consider Jesus’ parable of the sheep. He claims that he is the owner of the sheep and cares for them not as a hireling, but as his own private property. Other sheep however are not led by him, but rather follow the hired hand of another owner. All of these other sheep think they are free, but are really in bondage to their own inherent depraved will. They could leave the governance of the hireling if they wanted, but they are content to stay.

For anyone wanting a better understanding of these matters in Christian theology, I commend to you Martin Luther’s ‘De Servo Aritrio’, in response to Desiderius Erasmus’s ‘De Libero Arbitrio’. Good light holiday reading! Happy Thanksgiving.
 

Update: I just recalled also an interesting related discussion by Guido Huelsmann in his article The A Priori Foundations of Property Economics:

"Rothbard referred to this fact as self-ownership, meaning that each individual by its very nature owns himself.15 ...
15. 15Terrell (1999) has criticized this notion on theological grounds, arguing that human beings do not own themselves, but belong to God. God is therefore the true owner of our minds and bodies and human beings are only temporal stewards or caretakers. This argument misses the mark, however, even though it is pertinent in its own right. Rothbard does not argue that human beings own themselves in some ultimate sense. His point is that the immediate control that each individual has over his mind and his body can be distinguished from the immediate control that other individuals exercise over their minds and bodies. For this to be true it plays no role whether God owns us, whether we control our
property by His grace, etc."

[The Terrell paper is: Terrell, Timothy. 1999. “Property Rights and Externality: The Ethics of the Austrian
School.” Journal of Markets and Morality 2 (2).]
 

[The Terrell paper is: Timothy Terrell, “Property Rights and Externality: The Ethics of the Austrian
School,” Journal of Markets and Morality 2 (2) (1999); see also Terrell's working paper The Origin of Property Rights:
A Critique of Rothbard and Hoppe on Natural Rights, at note 19.]