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.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'll just say that if a communist community is voluntary, then it rests on individualism. I assume you would agree with that. I think that we cannot escape individualism.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by “if a communist community is voluntary, then it rests on individualism.” If what you have in mind is something like the following, then I agree.
For any human interaction to be voluntary, it can't result from fraud or coercion (force or threat of force). Instead, every individual involved must freely choose to participate. That's the difference between seduction and rape.
Individualism implies self-determination. There exists no collective mind or general will capable of providing the consent of every member of a community. Nor can a majority of individuals consent on behalf of a minority—even a minority of one. If that were not the case, then gang rape could be defended on the ground that all the participants involved except one consented to the interaction.
Thus, for any community, communist or otherwise, to be entirely voluntary requires the informed consent of every individual member.
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.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'll just say that if a communist community is voluntary, then it rests on individualism. I assume you would agree with that. I think that we cannot escape individualism.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by “if a communist community is voluntary, then it rests on individualism.” If what you have in mind is something like the following, then I agree.
For any human interaction to be voluntary, it can't result from fraud or coercion (force or threat of force). Instead, every individual involved must freely choose to participate. That's the difference between seduction and rape.
Individualism implies self-determination. There exists no collective mind or general will capable of providing the consent of every member of a community. Nor can a majority of individuals consent on behalf of a minority—even a minority of one. If that were not the case, then gang rape could be defended on the ground that all the participants involved except one consented to the interaction.
Thus, for any community, communist or otherwise, to be entirely voluntary requires the informed consent of every individual member.