Who are you?
When you introduce yourself to someone, you tell them your name. Often enough, you tell them something about what you do for work, or who you are in relation to others: husband, wife, parent, Bob’s friend, Jenny’s cousin.
Is that who you are?
If you dig a little deeper, perhaps you tell them something about your likes and dislikes. Your thoughts about this or that. Your hopes and your dreams.
Are those who you are?
Those of us who are concerned with human freedom often emphasize the centrality of the individual human person in moral and political questions. Yet we seldom delve deep into who and what the individual is.
Are we defined by our roles? By our similarities and relations with others? By what makes us unique? By fathomless depths that no one can truly plumb? Or perhaps some mystical combination of all of these, and more?
You Are Irreducible
We begin with the magical act of reproduction. A man and a woman join to contribute to the ongoing creation of the universe. They create a
person.
A person has
life. A person has
identity. A person has
agency.
And, very importantly, a person is
irreducible.
Groups are made of separate units. A nation or region is composed of communities, a community is composed of families and social relationships, and all of these are composed of individuals. But only the individual cannot be further reduced.
A group can lose an individual and still be a group. An individual, by contrast, is
indivisible. You see—it\s right there in the name.
The implications here are profound. Individuals cannot justly be relegated to the status of a cog in a machine or a cell in a larger body. We cannot be reduced to a function or a classification.
The individual human person is the fundamental unit of moral concern—the beating heart at the base of
everything.
#1
You Have Exclusive, Inalienable Self-Ownership
As the autonomous locus of your own experiences, thoughts, actions, and choices, you are the self-governing author of your own being. You have dispositive decision-making authority over yourself as an ineluctable fact of your personhood.
Dispositive decision-making authority is the primary characteristic of a
property right. You
own yourself. Not as a purely moral abstraction, but quite literally.
Others can influence or forcibly coerce you, but no one can assume the authorship that you and you alone possess. Your self-ownership is thus naturally
exclusive.
You can be severed from the rightful enjoyment of your natural rights as a human person, but your personhood cannot be unmade by any force on Earth. Your self-ownership is thus naturally
inalienable.
#2
You Have Requirements for Continuance
As the self-owning mover of your own life, you are naturally free to pursue your own continuance—to survive and to thrive. And yet, as a vulnerable, necessitous being, your continuance is not assured. You must act in pursuit of your own betterment.
This pursuit requires that you be secure in your own
person—in your body, identity, and personal agency.
You must be free to create and acquire
property—the external means necessary to sustain and enjoy your life.
And you must be free to
exercise your own
agency—to make choices and take actions in furtherance of your own existence and improvement.
Because you are an infinitely precious being, these requirements are worthy of respect by others.
Self-ownership and
continuance are contingent upon, and extensions of, one another. As a naturally free being, you extend your thoughts, choices, and actions out into the world. You have the natural authority to do this for yourself (and for no one else). To pursue your own betterment—for your self-ownership to be
real—you must be free to act without external restraint upon your person, property, or agency.
Yet no one is an island alone. You are part of a world, surrounded by your fellows. And that is how you would want it, for indeed,
You Are a Relational Being
I am me; I am not thee; yet we can choose to be we.
You are a unique, separate, autonomous, self-owning being, but you are also a member of an ultra-social species. We pair-bond and raise our young together. We form families, bands, clans, and communities. We cooperate like no other species on the planet—by biological imperative, but also by
choice. We are relational creatures.
Locus of responsibility
As the exclusive owner, author, and instrument of your actions, you are exclusively responsible for those actions and may rightly be held accountable for any trespasses. You are a self-owning moral agent.
You cannot rightly be held responsible for the actions of any others, however, nor may any others be held responsible for yours. Your credits and demerits are yours alone.
Locus of Consent
Only a responsible, self-owning being is capable of consent. You and you alone can consent for yourself: to enter into relations with others, to engage in transactions, and to share your person, property, time, and being with another. You cannot consent for anyone else, nor can anyone else consent for you. Nor is your consent the business of anyone else.
All of these things are organic facts of your existence. And all of them are grounded in the reality that
You Are Ontologically Free
Your existence is contingent upon the actions of your parents and ultimately upon the Source of all things, and there is a period during which your parents exercise a temporary and conditional authority, protecting you and serving as trustees of your future adult self. Beyond this, no one has any natural authority over you. No one.
You exist as the kind of being you are, within a universe that is itself free to unfold according to its nature. Freedom is your natural state. Any other imposition of authority is an artificial intrusion upon your natural state.
Freedom is the primordial ground of being.
And you—the individual person—are the sacred fire of
meaning.
Did you hear the music? Did you feel the song?
Do you realize what a miracle you are?
I don’t know if you noticed, but there aren’t a lot of moral claims in our song. We have delighted in the beauty of it all, but we haven’t needed to make many normative statements, because these things are just the facts of nature.
There are moral
implications from these facts, but the facts are just the facts. You are all these things not because we say so, or because we wish it so, but because you are.
You ARE.
Stay tuned for the next installment, in which we demonstrate how these facts render the consent of the individual human person to be the fundamental unit of moral concern in society.
Questions? Input? Concerns? Feel free to email me at
chriscook@theadvocates.org
