'The non-aggression principle (also called the non-aggression axiom, the anti-coercion principle, the zero aggression principle, the non-initiation of force), or NAP for short, is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. Aggression, for the purposes of the NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property, including that person’s body, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficiary or neutral to the owner, are considered violent when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination, as based on the libertarian principle of self-ownership'
WIKI
this definition is very interesting to me- to start with the question of self-ownership.
to whom belongs my body? and how much space my body takes?
what is the extension of my body and my territory?
According to G. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership is that "each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply."
so do we own our bodies? do we have the power over our life? do we control our bodies?
do we have the freedom to control our life as we want it? is there anybody around us? hellooooo!!! is anybody thereeeee....????
i just think that this definition of self is entirely determined by concepts of private property and the rational free agent at the core of each and every decision point in the free market. this is the very heart of Neo-Classical economics. Friedman, Greenspan, Globalization, Neo-Liberalism have defined their economic perspectives with his key idea in mind. Namely that the free market is in a way a God. The "invisible hand" that ought to be let loose as much as possible. Because this "invisible hand" will ultimately develop all societies, etc. towards a more humane and financially robust horizon. This (fantasy) is very much connected to a particular conception of the individual in this situation (of the market). Namely that the individual is fully rational and will make always "rational" decisions based on their options (in the marketplace).
ReplyDeleteThe problem with this thinking. Conceputally. Is that has no idea, literally for how things work in aggregate. That is how at certain moments mass actions occur. It literally cannot account for this.
In other words, it cannot account for how a collective action can occur. It literally cannot think this thought.
This is why infamously these very same thinkers (Greenspan, the Chicago School of Economics) did NOT predict, at all, that there would be a crash in the markets in 2008.
THey literally had no theory for what is called aggregate actions. That is how an event can snowball. How in fact, crashes in the markets work. Following the crash of 2008, Greenspan aknowledged that their school of thinking had a major hole in it. This being how they had not properly theorized the possibility of a mass breakdown. A crash. But precisely in how they did not have a way of thinking of aggregate actions in the negative.
And so Bernake was appointed to be the head of the FED in the U.S. He is a neo-classical economist like Greenspan. But with one caveat. His speciality was the Great Depression. And he has spent a great deal of time developing (supposedly) understanding into what went wrong in terms of national economic policy that lead to and further continued the Great Depression.
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anyhow..
point i want to really make is that this approach to a concept of self is an idea of self as property managment.
It is in Locke as well way back. If you follow it to its end point, it means taht its quite rational to sell your body if you need to (prostitution).
In other words, its quite naive as to what is actually happening in terms of the body, desire, our relationship in fact to property and capitalism.
Marx by the way, strongly disagreed with this concept of self.
Rather he saw self as a consequence and in certain circumstances a strong participant in the social production. Self is never outside the social. But in it. Of it. In the time we are in.
Foucault I think saw self similarly but had a somewhat different view to power.
The good or the bad of power structures was not just a matter of capitalism vs. a communist future. But rather simply how power structures formed at any given time. Hence at some moments soviet communism could have been ideal for the participants at some place, at another a horror. Same with american capitalism... Its not one one thing. How it plays in NYC as opposed to say South Carolina are matters of how the power is configured..
So the self is then in a position of taking care of self, as perhaps the heart of what SElf is. this is not quite a matter of property management. Not really...