Left Libertarian Alliance

Mor Stinchcombe (Blog Co-Editor and Spokeswoman for the Midlands)

I. Introductory Comments: Defining “Individual Sovereignty“

To liberals and (left-)libertarians, it is self-evident that the individual person is sovereign. In most test cases, they will be the best person to make the best decisions for themselves. They are, in fact, the only person who should make decisions for themselves. They will be the best person to decide how to spend or save their income; they will be the best person to decide how to use (or abuse) their bodies; the best person, too, on matters of personal taste, health, education, living standards, free time, and so on. To provide a more coherent view of this, we can explain it as so: the principle of personal sovereignty dictates that each individual person must be granted personal autonomy; that being the right to perform actions which they, being of sound mind, see as right and fitting (they can ‘fulfil their interests’, one may say). 

It is evident that the right to fulfil one’s interests is not infinite. We can infringe on the rights of others to fulfil their interests. I, may, say, have an interest in not dying. If you have an interest in killing me, this is where the two meet and come into conflict. It can therefore be assumed that there are at least some personal interests which others cannot override in the name of their interests. This is where Robert Nozick and John Locke alike see the state enter in, to maintain certain inalienable rights for the individual. As such, it is right that I should examine the principle of personal sovereignty by stating (as Nozick does in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)) that there are certain interests of a nature X which others possess and are inviolable. These interests X are the only bar on the performance of actions one sees right and fitting. Hence a (minimal) state is present to maintain said guardrail.

It will also spring to the attention of the careful reader that I have said, ‘of sound mind’. In general, it may seem right, even to libertarians of various colourings, for a state to use its mechanisms to intervene in the lives of the suicidal if they are about to follow the ‘interests’ as dictated by their mental illness. The philosophical reasoning behind this is possibly that a mentally unwell state is distinct enough that the mentally unwell person can be considered a separate person distinct from their mentally well counterpart, and therefore suicide in such a state would be causing harm to a distinct person too and going against their interests. À la Liebnizian identities, they do not share all properties, so they are distinct, and one cannot be allowed to harm the other.

Pursuant to Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), these attitudes share a common origin: property rights. You are your own property, you own property, and in both cases, your ownership is what grants you the right to do as you please with your body, mind, and belongings. He argues the above from God granting us free will and our being in His likeness, and that in His likeness we also therefore have dominion over the products of our labour (which he terms ‘property’). This is quite unconvincing to the modern secular mind, who may find such justification too theocratic. As such, one must find another means to substantiate individual sovereignty.

II. People Make Bad Decisions. So What?

This principle of individual sovereignty is not self-evident to everybody, and for good reason; other people dress terribly. They wear heavy cologne which could kill pond life. They take drugs and gamble. So, how can we justify the idea that a person has the right to fulfil their own interests if they are, even when of sound mind, so prone to bad decisions? If they have free will, as is implied by the suggestion that they are their own property, then they are not using it well. Alternatively, they are not to blame for their poor choices, but it is warranted to restrict them because they do not possess themselves. Holding the existence of discrete individuals in the one hand and humans’ social nature in the other cannot be easily balanced and does not make for ideal conditions to argue that individual sovereignty is an almost inviolable principle. It is still possible, as we will see.

One could return to Locke’s arguments and counteract them with the claim that we do not, in fact, uniquely possess our person: we are members of a society, who are shaped by said society. Our identity and interests are contingent on social influence and those who surround us. My desire to be, say, vegetarian would be of a different nature were I raised by vegetarians. This would assume that my interests tend to be shaped with respect to my parents’ interests, as opposed to being an interest rooted in ecological concern, or weight loss. I do not have complete possession over my interests, and they are not entirely mine, because they could be altered in some significant sense by how others around me interact with me.  Social influence, as social psychology again and again demonstrates, be it in the forms of modelling (Bandura 1961), conformity (Asch 1951) or obedience (Milgram 1963), is so profound and powerful that any claim to unique ownership over one’s characteristics or interests, so key in understanding personal sovereignty, is dubious. People make poor decisions not entirely off their own back, and so they have no right to make them. They exist within a social mélange which must be regulated, or so it may seem to a statist.

A much milder variant of the hypothesis that the self is constructed from fragments granted to it by society is the hypothesis that, even if one’s interests were completely our own constructions, they influence others so much that their behaviour is unable to be viewed purely as the right use of individual sovereignty. Take, for example, the use of one’s body to smoke cannabis in the street. A consequence of this could be that the street smells unpleasant. If you and a group of others do it regularly enough, the local area you choose could become less popular and local shops may see a downturn in custom. To take another example, if one takes the choice to treat one’s cancer with alternative medicine, one legitimises this choice and raises its status such that it may, even to one or two other people, seem acceptable. Although this latter example only primarily impacts the cancer patient, there is nonetheless the concern that the cancer patient is promoting a healthcare choice which may endanger people’s lives. Equally, they may cause harm to their family as the burden of caring for the patient falls upon them as the cancer progresses due to the patient’s own negligence. We are so intertwined with our society that our choices have inevitable negative externalities (inadvertent poor consequences). Why should others be lumped with the price of somebody’s “freedom”?

Let us approach it conversely: if others are so burdened by your pursuit of your own interests that they have as much right to call the shots over your decisions, you become deprived of freedom of choice under their rules. Your actions are commanded and lorded over. You are, in effect, enslaved to the masses, because it has been concluded that they have enough of a say in your life and decisions that they own your personal expression and your choices. Therefore, there is a point P at which the citizen becomes enslaved by the state, in the form of the enforced and coagulated interests of the masses. The left-libertarian takes this enslavement as inherently immoral by definition and calls on us to avoid P; it is not a matter merely of good or bad statesmanship to avoid enslaving the citizenry – it would be actually outright immoral to do so. As such, a better starting point is to assume that nobody else may own my decisions, and I may fulfil my interests, applying exceptions as we find there to be infringements on others’ abilities to fulfil their interests.

Of course, left-libertarians are a diverse bunch, and these principles may be expanded upon to justify different political views. I am perhaps at the most right-leaning end of the category; I do not believe that property rights infringe on the individual sovereignty of others. I believe that taxation is (justified and necessary) theft. These opinions bring me to discuss the interactions between personal property and individual sovereignty.

III. Of Personal Property and Individual Sovereignty

I may be said to own many things: pens, a cat, an acre of land. It does not naturally follow from owning myself (as a precaution against enslavement) that I own these belongings too; it is not part of a sphere of selfhood which would permanently be altered if I did not own these things. It is not true that I would cease to be myself if I no longer owned a Lamy fountain pen or a ginger cat by the name of Angus. If Angus finds me disagreeable and moves elsewhere (as some cats do), my characteristics are not so quintessentially altered that I am a different person to who I was before Angus’ leaving. Therefore, property rights do not necessarily follow from ownership of the self, as Angus is not an inseparable part of myself. The same argument applies just as well if my Lamy pen is under question.

What, therefore, grants us a right to personal property, which we may then use for the ends of fulfilling our interests? Locke offers an explanation, albeit now outdated and racially-charged:

“The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life.” – John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689).

The root of this argument is the idea that you do not have a claim to what others own. To Locke’s mind, you do not even have a claim to what may be held in common. Therefore, you cannot use something until it is assuredly yours. Yet, considering that public toilets exist and are considered good, we can surely have possessions free for use as one wishes which fall under common ownership. As such, we must find other justifications for personal ownership. 

What Proudhon offers us is the option to regard property rights as a tool against the bulwark of the state. As an anarchist, he poses that the fact that “whoever touches [my personal property] offends the apple of my eye” (What is Property? (1840)) is a stop against the state. Protests against the state, for him, are thus based upon the idea that the state could “ransack” our property. In fact, if we refer upwards back to our arguments for the basic principle of individual sovereignty, they are based on the idea that infringing on it too far would be equivalent to enslavement: possession of a human being, depriving them of the right to own themselves (or not be owned). There is, at the core of an argument for individual sovereignty, an argument that the dignity of a human being entails some significant ability to own. 

Proudhon offers us an interesting excuse for property rights: they can be justified out of their consequences, rather than any philosophical grounding based in “objective values”. Indeed, this is perhaps preferable. Philosophy has value in aiding us to understand where our impulses tend to come from and where we assign value. Philosophy, though, is not history, nor psychology. It lacks the practical skill to tell us where policy failures actually occur. As such, I point to Pol Pot as an example of the abolition of private property during the 1970s. This was so remarkably degrading that people were left with little more they could call their “own” than a spoon. This is an extreme that we can call undesirable, in multiple senses. It violates one’s dignity for private property to be so stripped away, as Proudhon pointed out, and if one holds deontological (hard and fast rule-based) ethics to be true, human dignity may be up there in terms of things which must be absolutely preserved. If one is more consequentialist, a utilitarian, perhaps, one may state that stripping private property from citizens makes them so vastly unhappy or goes so against the grain of their interests that the general utility (sum of fulfilled happiness or interests) goes undervalued.

If there are any Pol Pot defenders out there, they may claim that Cambodia was poor for various reasons and so the abolition of private property was going to fail. Yet it has led me to ask the predominating question, why would we abolish it in the first place? Or why would we limit it? If the state can appropriate private property, it makes an affront to utility and dignity, and – most importantly to left-libertarians, declares that the state has no interest in the ability of an individual to fulfil their interests without harming others. Most notably, by infringing on property, the state declares that it wishes to shake the bedrock of “ownership”. 

As established, I am not defined in my person by what I own. However, my right to fulfil my interests is founded here on the idea that I do own myself. Predation of the state on one implies that it is altering our common understanding of what it means to “own” something, to even have property rights. Were these rights gotten rid of, we cannot claim in the same significant sense to “own” ourselves, because any benchmarks by which we would understand “ownership” have shifted. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two and they support one another in our current understanding of individual sovereignty and property rights. It is fine for me to own a fountain pen and use it to my ends, fulfilling my interests, so long as I do not stab anybody with it.

Furthermore, in the eighth chapter of the first book of The Social Contract (1789), Rousseau outlines the idea that there is a distinction to be made between “possession”, which exists outside of the social contract – that is, grabbing at what one desires regardless of the general will – and “property”, which is justified within the general will. Whereas Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia expresses a perhaps naïve hope that the free market will naturally allocate property in the fairest possible manner, Rousseau lays out more broadly that it goes against the principle of a social contract (which by design implicates the state) for somebody to own too much. There is ample room in this for left-libertarians to consider that property exists within the symbiotic relationship outlined above, and therefore has the constraint upon it, too, that property may only go as far as it does not violate another person’s right to fulfil their interests. From such a principle stems the possibility that private ownership of the means of production is a violation of individual sovereignty, as it ensnares workers in systems of exploitation in order to survive, preventing their interests to be fully realised independent of the interests of their employer.

There is much more to say on the matter concerning “ownership” of sentient beings: Angus comes to mind. So do children. But this is for a later article. There is much more to be said, too, on how to negotiate the above difficulty regarding the means of production. As such, I recommend looking to our previous blog-posts and keeping an eye on future ones as we expand on our principles and demonstrate their suitability and efficacy.

IV. Concluding Remarks

From the above it is to be seen that individual sovereignty and the right to personal property are in a symbiotic relationship wherein one is inseparable from the other. This principle of individual sovereignty has led many left-libertarians to take various policy positions which minimise the ability of the state to make choices for the citizen, including: legalisation and / or decriminalisation of sex work and / or drug usage; opposition to surveillance and state-issued IDs; opposing various forms of income or consumption tax, as they hamper one’s right over one’s belongings (including wealth), and many more. “I believe in a world where gay married couples are free to protect their marijuana fields with fully automatic machine guns” said notable US libertarian Austin Peterson. Some may not go so far. The position is on the table, nonetheless.

The LLA will publish, in coming blog posts, elaborations on such principles. It will become clear through our dialogue how strong our commitment to individual sovereignty is as we continue to discuss its implications for policy.

Live Free or Die.