TGIF: What Is Self-Determination?
It's the individual that counts.
People go on quite a bit about self-determination these days. Some decry the denial of self-determination to “the Palestinians.” Others insist that only "the Jewish people" can have the right to self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel passed a law declaring that principle in 2018.
Unfortunately, I see too little thought behind the term self-determination. What is it? What self are we talking about? What is determination?
This and the related issue of nationalism are big topics with an unsurprisingly big literature. I will resist talking about nations and nationalism. Karl Deutsch got it right: "A Nation ... is a group of persons united by a common error [fiction might have been the better word] about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors." I also appreciate Ernest Gellner's insight: "Nationalism begets nations." It's not the other way around. Moreover, individuals, often with power agendas, beget nationalism. Finally, nationalism begets more nationalism because disliked neighbors may feel the need to respond.
Here, I just want to help clarify the terms. If I do my job, I am confident I will offend everyone on some thorny controversies.
Let's start with self. I know what that usually means. Persons are selves. (Persons don't have selves.) Everyone knows what it means to be a self and to be self-conscious The self-evident needs no elaboration.
Determination in one sense refers to the process and outcome of human action. We determined what would happen by doing what we did. Or we tried to. A person can determine an outcome for himself (I determined I would get a haircut today) or for someone else (I determined that you would get a haircut today). We'd want to call only the first example of self-determination. We could also call it self-ownership, a felicitous phrase.
What distresses me as an ethical and methodological individualist -- a libertarian -- is that I don't see the term being used this way. The priority is the group, the nation, the people, and the like. Where are the persons?
A group has no self; it comprises many selves -- as many as it has members. What makes it a group can be a range of common interests or traits and continuing relations; they might have customs, mores, expectations, roles, rules, and more. But none of that keeps the group from being a collection of individuals. When a group decides, we mean that the members decide. The group does not literally decide.
When we say a group is dispossessed of its land or subjected to genocidal aggression, the crimes are against individuals. Individuals should not be reduced to mere members, representatives, or symbols. This is not to minimize genocide. The point is to keep the spotlight where it belongs: on individuals, who can live or die and without whom no group exists. If a group is important, it's because it is important to the individuals who comprise it. They may regard their association as crucial to the lives they wish to live. But they are still individuals. They decide (unless the state or someone else interferes). They value. They are the group.
If individuals, however many, peacefully, freely, and regularly associate, establishing a culture, customs, and rules of governance, we can say as a matter of convenience that the group exercises self-determination. If they are invaded and then drive the invaders away, we can say the group has restored its self-determination. But we must be careful: a group tyrannized by one of "its own" or by a democratic majority is no more self-determined than a group tyrannized by an outsider or a majority of outsiders. What counts are individuals, their values, and the nature of their associations.
Democracy is not self-determination!
So the principle of self-determination cannot be directly applied to nations or peoples, such as "the Jewish people," "the Palestinian people," etc. -- only to persons. Woodrow Wilson is best associated with the phrase national self-determination though he did not use it in his Fourteen Points speech during World War I. He didn't help things. Strictly speaking, there is no right of national self-determination. (And remember, nation is a political, not a metaphysical, concept.) Only persons -- not states, nations, or "peoples" as such -- have the right to exist.
The need to re-individualize self-determination seems relevant to current controversies. Putting individuals first may produce overlooked approaches to peaceful resolutions.
Methodological individualism seems unassailable -- what is there besides persons, their property, and their relationships? Coercive government interference sows problems. Equally unassailable is ethical individualism. Who would oppose societies of thoroughly free and voluntary associations, starting with respect for individuals and their property? Speak up or forever hold your peace.
I am the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and the author of Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other. TGIF — The Goal Is Freedom — appears on Friday
I found the following definitions of “self-determination” online:
1. Determination by the people of a territorial unit of their own future political status.
2. Free choice of one's own acts or states without external compulsion.
The latter definition implies control of one's own life. That suggests self-ownership because, as I learned in a real estate course, ownership of property consists of a bundle of rights one of which is the right to control what is owned. Some other rights are the right to possess, use, and dispose of something. There are degrees of ownership because one need not have every right in the bundle. For instance, one may not have the mineral rights to a piece of land one owns. Another real estate concept is ownership fee simple absolute, which means that one has every right in the bundle. No real estate in the US is legally owned fee simple absolute because that would prevent government agents from taxing the land or taking it by eminent domain. Hence, all the land is allegedly partly government-owned. Similarly, the power to tax and otherwise control the lives of individuals in a territorial unit implies that individuals do not own their own lives fee simple absolute; instead, they are to some degree government-owned. “Government” is an abstraction that can only refer to individuals and to inanimate “public property”. Since inanimate objects can't own anything, the government owners of individuals must be a large number of people who act governmentally. Slavery is the ownership of one person by another. Hence, government agents presuppose that they are not public servants but public masters who own slaves, namely the people they rule. The US Constitution is said to be the highest law of the land. Its 13th Amendment prohibits slavery. That seems to make the government unconstitutional.
In your 4th paragraph, you mention self-evidence and state that persons are selves. The best examples of self-evident propositions seem to be the laws of thought. It's been said that they can't be proven by means of arguments from more fundamental principles because they are the fundamental principles without which no proof would be possible. However, in case one denies they're self-evident there are ways to respond. Take the law of identity, sometimes expressed as A is A. The denial of the law of identity is A is not A, which is a self-contradiction. If any proposition is false, certainly a self-contradiction is false. One who will accept a self-contradiction will accept that something both is and is not the case, which leaves one with no definite position as distinguished from its negation. Again, the law of identity is self-guaranteeing so that its denial is self-refuting (aka self-defeating). For instance, suppose I say that I deny the law of identity. You may then ask whether I maintain that my denial is, indeed, a denial instead of, say, an affirmation. Thus, I must accept the law of identity even in the attempt to deny it. Here's how this may apply to the claim that persons are selves: One of the most fundamental claims I can make about myself is this: I am myself. The word “I” is an index word that refers to whatever rational being uses it. The word “am” is the copula that links the subject “I” to the predicate “myself”. The word “myself” means, according to my copy of Websters Third New International Dictionary Unabridged: “the self that is identical to I [in accordance with the law of identity]: the self that belongs to me: the self that is mine [in accordance wit the principle of self-ownership]”. That suggests there may be some conceptual link between the law of identity and the principle of self-ownership.
Self-determination can also be construed as another name for free will. Sometimes the free will issue is expressed as the choice between free will and determinism. That's a false alternative. The true alternative is whether determinism or indeterminism is correct. If indeterminism is correct, then all human behavior occurs as a matter of chance. For humans to have free will in any meaningful sense, their behavior must be self-determined, which implies that some version of determinism is correct. Hard determinism is the rejection of free will. Compatibilism, which is accepted by 59% of philosophers, is the view that determinism and free will are compatible. Such self-determination is also called agent causation. That seems to be the natural condition of individuals which government agents try to artificially abridge.
In paragraph 8 you seem to suggest that all libertarians are individualists. But libertarianism is opposed to authoritarianism, whereas individualism is opposed to collectivism. There are collectivist libertarians—e.g., anarcho-communists. Like you, I'm an individualist, but I can see no reason on libertarian grounds to object to voluntary communism.
However, I agree that collectivism involves a fundamental error. It's called hypostatization (aka reification or misplaced concreteness), a fallacy that occurs when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete entity. An example is treating “society” (the concept of a collection of individuals) as if it were one real existent.
I have much more to say about this matter, but I've already gone on too long.