I would argue that your use of the word meaningfully is a concession in and of itself, because property would exist, it merely would not be ever in contention under these circumstances. However, you’d still own yourself, and the results of your actions and the like, and should another person ever come into being, it would be then possible to determine ownership.
Except that no, it does not make sense within that context. There is no one to exclude, therefore the idea of property does not even apply.
Furthermore, since all matter within the system (if you insist on using this method as a crude hack) would belong to the original agent, it would imply that the first agent owned the second agent’s body, or at least literally everything they needed to survive, and could therefore coerce them virtually at will.
I disagree, property and self are intimately linked on a fundamental level, the very fact that you use possessive terms to indicate the person you are speaking to and attribute statements (really, actions) to is, again, a concession of this very fact.
It isn’t a concession, it’s a linguistic construct.
The principle of self-ownership is intrinsic, and its because of that fact that property, as a concept, exists.
It is not. In the one-agent system, the concept of direct physical control over bodily tissue would exist, but this is distinct from the concepts “ownership” and “property”.
How do we know this? Because you said the body-hijacker parasite doesn’t have a valid claim over your body. This is extra information which is not included in physical control of your body. If “property” and “direct physical control over body” are identical, then this extra information would be encoded into the universe and the parasite’s actions would be impossible, even though both you and I know it is physically possible to hijack nervous systems.
It is no less intrinsic, though; it follows naturally and necessarily from physical reality.
It does not. You have failed to produce an ought from your is. You can control your body. Why should you be able to?
In short, even if I was a pure materialist, I still can argue the necessary existence of property as a, well, property of reality.
You have not shown this. Property is not a property of reality. It does not exist in the same sense that minds do.
This is silly, because unless your end argument is that there is no such thing as an individual, following your argument here to its conclusion ends up hardly where you want.
Oh yes it does. Borders in some sense exist, but like the boundary between “chair” vs “stool” it’s more of a statistical effect describing a cluster that has real implications than a hard, solid line.
Individuality, too, is blurred rather than solid, more like a cluster of points than an opaque sphere. You argue that you have control, and therefore, absolute rights to property. You have no absolute control, and therefore, no absolute property, even if we run by the fiction of human rights.
Of course, you’re missing the point by attempting to appeal to outside exceptions or missing the actual core of the statement. My consciousness, and my conscious actions are my own, and only ever my own. You are attempting to obfuscate that.
Your actions are not purely your own. If they were then they could not be influenced by outside factors. And probably, weird stuff with minds will show up later in human history with transhumanism (could be 50 years, could be 10,000), so your moral system should be able to withstand that if it’s a true objective morality.
They influence your behavior but the behavior and actions ultimately are, again, your own. It is not an outside agent controlling you, it is an outside agent using means to manipulate you; they are not controlling you as one might a character in a video game.
Absolute responsibility is a crock. If they can manipulate you, then they have some share of control of you. If they literally have no impact whatsoever on your actions (a far cry considering just how potent some drugs can be), then it doesn’t even count as manipulation.
Such a hypothetical organism would not be able to do so any more than my seizing of your car makes it my car merely because I’m the one driving it. The organism would not have any claim to the body.
Why? It was your exclusive control that you said established the claim in the first place. Establishing exclusive control through a nervous system was the method by which the claims were established.
The simple fact is you do control yourself, and the results of your actions.
Let me know if you ever develop an executive functioning disorder, so we can talk about how that’s a bunch of baloney. You want absolute responsibility to be applied to agents. That requires absolute control. Absolute control doesn’t exist.
You acknowledge this as an implicit fact in your recognition of me as an independent entity, which you do each time you address me, and respond to my statements.
This implies a perfect binary of control is required. It is not.
The principle of self-ownership is logically necessary for us to even converse this way.
No, it is not. Distinctness from self precedes property, and is recognizable even in a single-agent system in which property is nonsensical.
Furthermore, you have still failed to derive the should for a principle of self-ownership which can make moral claims, independently from the fact that you have some level of control over your body.
To branch off, the funny thing is, even if it wasn’t the case, it would still be ideologically necessary to commit to supporting self-ownership and the right to property, because otherwise, you end up being arbitrary, and morality cannot be arbitrary, even if we were merely inventing it for the function of society.
Recognizing the personhood and utility of others, both of which precede property, is not arbitrary. The choice of property is arbitrary, which is part of why you have failed to convert your is to an ought.
either you have a right to keep all your property, or you can’t really argue that you have any property at all, and we fall into merely utilitarian claims and that’s hardly a road I think you want to fall down.
Oh ho, I do want to go down the road towards Utilitarianism, because Utilitarianism correctly recognizes that property is merely a tool to be exploited for the benefit of people, and both utility and personhood precede property.
To which the actual response, which I’ve stated, is that folks will invent new jobs that we never could have thought of now, and resolve the problem,
This is based on market faith. If machines are better than humans at literally everything, then there is no reason to ever hire humans. I’m not going to believe these jobs exist until their first instantiations are actually created.
to say nothing of the fact that this theoretical world of hyper-automation still needs consumers, and you seem to be running on this idea that production drives consumption, rather than the other way around.
This role is fulfilled by the owners of capital. Those without capital are the ones really in trouble there, as they need the capital owners’ property to exist, but the capital owners do not need them.
Given your supposed solution to this imagined crisis is essentially a rehash of socialist central planning, I feel more or less sound in dismissing it as an attempt to push that under a new guise,
The funny thing is that markets throughout the world manage to have some regulations like “don’t dump so much waste that the Cuyahoga river lights on fire” (where does that even fit into your framework, where someone could presumably claim water after it has evaporated?) which are “centrally planned”, and yet still produce enormous amounts of wealth. There’s a continuum, or perhaps some scale even more multidimensional than that, and the optimal point isn’t what you think it is.
yet that guise passed away already when your plan seemed to have very little to actually do with the supposed problem of this oncoming hyper-automation.
It’s actually a medium-term solution intended as a flexible response for the time period between “soon” and “all human economic labor whatsoever becomes obsolete.” There is the potential for a lot of unnecessary human suffering in there - much of which your system lacks the ability to morally condemn.
Long-term would probably be something like just cutting a check for some % of the output of the economy, but while an initial experiment in Canada was not a failure, there are reasons to believe such a policy is not suitable yet and should still be limited to much smaller experiments than a whole country.