What, then, is the word to describe the right, or the ability, to express sovereignty? Is the individual sovereign over himself?
Is the individual sovereign over himself?
***
That, I think, is the true question. At first blush I might say yes, an individual is sovereign over himself. But is that really true? What does it mean to be sovereign over oneself? I can’t simply decide, for example, to start walking everywhere on my hands. I can develop the skill, perhaps, but I can’t simply “decree” it to be so. There are many examples like this.
Modern society makes it difficult to be sovereign over oneself. Few of us raise our own food, build our own shelter, make our own clothes. We rely on others to do that. We learn other skills, and sell those skills to those whose skills or products we desire. Is that sovereignty? Maybe.
If I am sovereign over my body, can I not cause it to harm your body? Why not? If not, is that a restriction over my sovereignty? Who decides when I am overstepping my sovereignty? Where can I go? What can I do when I get there? Is persuasion, or fraud in convincing others to assert their sovereignty in a way I feel is best ok? Who decides if it is not? How can others decide this for anyone but themselves?
I think none, or very few, of us are sovereign anymore, in any true sense. We rely upon others for many things. Others rely upon us. Do we really even want to be sovereign in the truest sense? I suggest that we neither are, nor really desire to be, sovereign, unless we can also assert that sovereignty over others, or to protect property we now decide belongs to us, however acquired.
A liberty right is a right to do as one pleases precisely because one is not under an obligation, grounded in others’ rights, to refrain from so acting.
One does not have a liberty right to steal because it violates someone’s property rights.
The question to ask is what rights of others are being protected by prohibiting the smoking of dope and can those rights be protected by lesser prohibitions, i.e. driving under the influence laws?
If laws and justice are about balancing the rights and claims of individuals equally before the law, then drug prohibition is wrong on basic philosophical grounds that liberties should only be proscribed when they violate the rights of others.
Course, that’s not reality based thinking, since the drug war is about increasing the power of the collective at the expense of the individual, so there is a lot of misinformation and scaremongering going on to frighten the sheeple into acceptance.
If people were executed promptly for driving under the influence there would be very little of it and a great deal more commerce for cab companies.
The truth is most people are willing to trade the liberties of others for what they perceive as safety. Thus they have neither (I’m sure I’m paraphrasing some founding father there).
Nevertheless, I am unwilling to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Humans do not have a property right in themselves (this is the basic assumption of abortion advocates). Abortion is wrong because a woman’s liberty right to be sovereign over herself conflicts with the baby’s right to life. A right to life should trump a liberty right to act as one pleases, even if a fetus is an unwelcome tenant.
Arguing that drug taking is a property right to do as one pleases with ones body puts you in the same camp as slavers and abortionists. I don’t wish to be in the same philosophical swamp with them.