Self-Ownership

= the central notion that each individual has a property in his own person, that is, an unlimited right of disposition over himself, his own body, his own faculties, and his own labor. [1]

Discussion

Shawn Wilbur:

"There's an individual, with a "property in his own person"—a relation we generally call "self-ownership"—and there is nature—largely a passive element available to the uses active agents, and "inferior." (To the extent that Lockean property theory incorporates assumptions about land use, those assumptions are likely to be more simply "environmentalist" than "ecological" in character. But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit...) The human actor is a coherent and evolving force and/or bundle of projects, and it appropriates nature by incorporating resources into its projects, subjecting them to its forces. "Property," in Locke's scheme, refers in turn to the the relation of the human actor to itself, to its effects, and to the elements it incorporates. There's a clear sense in Locke's prose that there is a chain of connections here, based initially on the property posited in the "person" of the actor (which "no body has any right to but himself"), and extending out by steps. "Every man has a property in his person," so "we may say" that "the labour of his body, and the work of his hands"are "properly his." And then some other resource can be considered appropriated because, by "mixing" those things that "we may say" are his, he has "joined to it something that is his own." "Property" appears to be "something" (vague as that is, it's the word Locke himself used at key points in his account) that radiates out from the property of the person, to property in the products and efforts of the person, and then to property in the resources incorporated in the the products and transformed by the efforts of the person (provided the provisos are met.) While the general model is of an expanding envelope of exclusive personhood, it seems pretty clear that the actual relations, and thus the associated rights, of property are not identical at every remove from that initial "person with property in themselves." There are causes and effects, persons that are proper to themselves by definition and things that become proper to them by extension." (http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2011/01/thoughts-on-mutualist-land-theory.html)

More Information

Gerald A. Cohen, Professor of Political Philosophy at Oxford, coined the phrase self-ownership to describe this concept.

Source: COHEN, G.A.: Self-Ownership, World-Ownership and Equality. In: LACASH, F. (Ed.): Justice and Equality Here and Now. Ithaca (Cornell University Press). 1986. pp. 108-135.