Abstract
To what extent the libertarian defense of the self-ownership is valid? In this paper, I would examine Prof. Morimura's original theory on the justification of self-ownership which can be called as “physiological-intuitional defense of libertarianism.” A paradigmatic example which supports the theory is a lottery of eyeball: a public lottery in which every ordinary person is forced to participate and some elected. are asked to transplant his or her pair of eyeballs to the blind persons. Libertarians would not agree this lottery run by the government since physiologically imagined pain would be a good reason to deny it in the light of property rights for our own body parts. However, what about a lottery which transplants cornea under the condition of negligible pain and negligible deterioration of the eyesight? Some people would agree to join this lottery and the government could run it under the condition where people have a right not to take part in. This kind of lottery of transplantation shows how our physiological sense of self-ownership is ambiguous. The sense of the self-ownership of our body depends how we focus on its body parts. In addition, even if we could justify our body-ownership as a basis of our self-ownership, the degree of its justificatory power for our labor and products would not be the same. The question is to what degree a fundamentalist method of developing a systematic logic for self-ownership would be valid. I raise some alternative ways for the justification of private property rights system from a point of a Hayekian growth-oriented liberalism. Especially, I would examine a boundary problem of self-enslaving contract and a problem of “a pleasure of ownership” as a basis of private property rights system.
