The Natural Desire for Property Is Rooted in the Lockean Liberal Principle of Self-Ownership: A Response to Pascal Boyer

Recently, Behavioral and Brain Sciences has published an article by Pascal Boyer--"Ownership Psychology as a Cognitive Adaptation"--along with 31 commentaries on the article and Boyer's response.  I wrote one of the commentaries.

Here I will provide Boyer's abstract for his article, my commentary, and then some comments on the argument for self-ownership in some of the other commentaries and Boyer's response.

BOYER'S ABSTRACT

"Ownership is universal and ubiquitous in human societies, yet the psychology underpinning ownership intuitions is generally not described in a coherent and computationally tractable manner.  Ownership intuitions are commonly assumed to derive from culturally transmitted social norms, or from a mentally represented implicit theory.  While the social norms account is entirely ad hoc, the mental theory requires prior assumptions about possession and ownership that must be explained.  Here I propose such an explanation, arguing the intuitions result from the interaction of two cognitive systems.  On of thee handles competitive interactions for the possession of resources observed in many species including humans.  The other handles mutually beneficial cooperation between agents, as observed in communal sharing, collective action, and trade.  Together, these systems attend to specific cues in the environment, and produce definite intuitions such as 'this is hers,' 'that is not mine.'  This computational model provides an explanation for ownership intuitions, not just in straightforward cases of property, but also in disputed ownership (squatters, indigenous rights), historical changes (abolition of slavery), as well as apparently marginal cases, such as the questions, whether people own their seats on the bus, or their places in a queue, and how people understand 'cultural appropriation' and slavery.  In contrast to some previous theories, the model is empirically testable and free of ad hoc stipulations" (Pascal 2023). 

MY COMMENTARY

The psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership.  The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.

Boyer argues persuasively for the interaction of two cognitive systems to explain the psychology of ownership.  But in doing this, he fails to recognize that there is a third cognitive system for self-ownership that is the true root of the evolutionary psychology of ownership.  In explaining “the interaction of cognitive systems that are not about ownership as such,” Pascal ignores the evolved intuitive psychology of self-ownership, which really is “about ownership as such.”

At the center of Boyer’s model is the “conceptual tag” of “(Agent, thing).”  This assumes without explanation that human beings have an intuitive sense of themselves as agents who claim ownership of things.  He provides no evolutionary explanation for why and how human beings have this intuition.  The best explanation for this is the evolved neurobiology of self-ownership and self-owning agency: if human beings did not have any sense of owning themselves, they could not claim ownership of things external to them as extensions of their self-owning selves.

John Locke saw that the natural desire for ownership or property was rooted in the natural psychology of self-ownership—that “every Man has a Property in his own Person,” and this “no Body has any Right to but himself” (1988, 287).  Boyer points to Locke’s theory of property in explaining why labor is relevant to ownership.  But Boyer fails to see the importance of Locke’s claim about self-ownership in supporting the natural right to property as the fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism, and how evolutionary psychology can explain this as grounded in the evolved neurobiology of the human brain.

Lockean liberals have seen slavery—the institution by which one person can own another person—as the most radical denial of the natural right of everyone to own oneself.  In considering the case of slavery, Boyer explains abolitionism as a widening of the “moral circle” to include slaves, but he does not acknowledge that at the center of that “moral circle” is the self-owning human being recognizing other human beings as self-owners.

This was made clear by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who ran away from his enslavement and became a leading abolitionist orator.  Douglass said that even in childhood, he held onto one idea for freedom and against slavery: “Every man is the original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body; or in other words, every man is himself, is his self, if you please, and belongs to himself, and can only part from his self-ownership, by the commission of a crime” (1991, 42). 

Now we can see how this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body (Ceunen, Vlaeyen, & Van Diest 2016; Tsakiris & De Preester 2019).

The research on interoception shows that our self-awareness arises from the feelings that we have from our bodies as a neural integration in insular cortex of the signals of the condition of the body.  The interoceptive neural network, having its core in the anterior insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, provides the basis for the subjective awareness of our bodily emotions and social feelings, including pleasure, anxiety, trust, and anger (Craig 2015).

The brain’s interoceptive feeling of self-ownership includes feeling whether other people are likely to be helpful or harmful to oneself, as in the brain’s ability to discriminate trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces, or the propensisty to punish people who make unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game.  Our brains evolved to protect ourselves from threats and to seek out cooperative relationships in ways that secure our survival and well-being.

This explains the evolved basis in the brain for Douglass’s Lockean liberal principle of self-ownership in human nature.  In running away from his slave master, and then in arguing for the abolition of slavery, Douglass expressed the evolved natural propensity of the human brain for self-ownership and for moral resentment against those who would threaten the natural human right to self-ownership.  Moreover, Douglass extended this liberal principle of natural human equality in self-ownership to support other natural human rights—including women’s rights, the rights of immigrants, and religious liberty (Buccola 2012).

Brain disorders can disrupt this sense of bodily self-ownership.  One example of this is somatoparaphrenia (derived from three Greek words denoting “body outside the mind”).  People who have had strokes in the right hemisphere of the brain sometimes suffer through a short period in which they deny that their left leg or arm belongs to them.  They can see that their left arm or left leg is attached to their body, but it doesn’t feel like it’s part of their body (Antoniello & Gottesman 2017; Feinberg et al. 2010; Gandola et al. 2012; Vallar & Ronchi 2009). 

Comparing the studies of somatoparaphrenia, similar bodily disorders, and illusions such as the rubber hand illusion, in which the brain is tricked into feeling that a rubber hand is one’s own hand, provides evidence for what Frédérique de Vignemont (2020) calls the Bodyguard Hypothesis: the brain has evolved to protect the body through neural circuits that have a protective body map that creates a sense of bodily ownership and affective motivation to behave in ways that protect the body identified in the body map.  Syndromes of disowning one’s body occur when the body map does not represent a limb that feels alien.  Illusions of body ownership occur when the body map mistakenly represents something as a body part. 

Evolution by natural selection favors those psychological propensities rooted in the brain that enhance our chances for self-preservation, which includes a sense of personal identity expressed in our owning and protecting our bodies, and then extending that sense of self-ownership into the ownership of external property that belongs to us.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership (Arnhart 1995, 1998, 2016).

 

References

Antoniello, D., & Gottesman, R. (2017) Limb misidentification: A clinical-anatomical prospective study. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 29:284-88.

Arnhart, L. (1995) The new Darwinian naturalism in political theory. American Political Science Review 89:389-400.

Arnhart, L. (1998) Darwinian natural right: The biological ethics of human nature. The State University of New York Press.

Arnhart, L. (2016) Political questions: Political philosophy from Plato to Pinker. Waveland Press.

Boyer, Pascal. (2023) Ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation: A minimalist model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46, e323: 1-68. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X22002527

Buccola, N. (2012) The political thought of Frederick Douglass. New York University Press.

Ceunen, E., Vlaeyen, J., & Van Diest, I. (2016) On the origin of interoception. Frontiers in Psychology 7:743.

Craig, A. D. (2015) How do you feel? An interoceptive moment with your neurobiological self. Princeton University Press.

de Vignemont, F. (2020) Mind the body: An exploration of bodily self-awareness. Oxford University Press.

Douglass, F. (1991) The Frederick Douglass papers: Volume 4, ed. J. W. Blassingame & J. R. McKivigan. Yale University Press.

Feinberg, T., Venneri, A., Simone, A. M., Fan, Y., & Northoff, G. (2010) The neuroanatomy of asomatognosia and somatoparaphrenia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 81:276-81.

Gandola, M., Invernizzi, P., Sedda, A., Ferre, E. R., Sterzi, R., Sherna, M., Paulesu, E., & Bottini, G. (2012) An anatomical account of somatoparaphrenia. Cortex 48:1165-78.

Locke, J. (1988) Two treatises of government. Cambridge University Press.

Tsakiris, M., & De Preester, H., eds. (2019) The interoceptive mind: From homeostasis to awareness. Oxford University Press.

Vallar, G., & Ronchi, R. (2009) Somatoparaphrenia: A body delusion. A review of the neuropsychological literature. Experimental Brain Research 192:533-51. 

BOYER'S RESPONSE TO THE ARGUMENT FOR SELF-OWNERSHIP

I was surprised to see that 7 of the 31 commentaries agreed with my argument for rooting the moral right to ownership in self-ownership (Hood 2023; Kemmerer 2023; Merker 2023; Nancekivell and Pesowski 2023; Rochat 2023; Starmans 2023; Wispinski, Enns, and Chapman 2023).  Some of the commentators express this idea as understanding owned items as components of the "extended self."  Others express this explicitly as ownership founded in our sense of our ownership of our bodies.

Boyer rejects this by arguing:  "we do not need to postulate any psychological processes, beyond two mechanisms (competitive acquisition and mutualistic cooperation) that are already independently documented in a vast literature.  By contrast, the extended-body or extended-self metaphors are additional mechanisms postulated specifically in order to explain ownership phenomena" (Boyer 2023, 61).

But this does not refute my argument that Boyer's "conceptual tag" of "(Agent, thing)" assumes without explanation that human beings have an intuitive sense of themselves as agents who claim ownership of things.  The best explanation for this is the evolved neurobiology of self-ownership and self-owning agency.

In his one attempt to answer my argument, Boyer says that he can provide an evolutionary explanation for intuitions of associations between agents and things by saying that there were selective pressures in early human evolution that would have favored recognizing the claims of agents to the ownership of territories and tools, and he cites the commentary by Merker.  

But Boyer is silent about the fact that Merker grounds this ownership psychology in "our sense of ownership of our bodies as the central invariant of resource acquisition," and from there "the sense of ownership extends out, on a species-specific basis, to various extra-corporeal objects and circumstances in which a sense of ownership may be invested."  And so, for example, when our early human ancestors invested labor and deliberate effort in fashioning stone tools, they would have claimed ownership of those tools (Merker 2023, 41-42).

References

Hood, Bruce. 2023. "Ownership as a Component of the Extended Self." BBS 46, e323: 36-37.

Kemmerer, David. 2023. "Ownership Language Informs Ownership Psychology." BBS 46, e323: 39-40.

Merker, Bjorn. 2023. "Invested Effort and Our Open-Ended Sense of Ownership." BBS 46, e323: 41-42.

Nancekivell, Shaylene E., and Madison Pesowski. 2023. "Ownership as an Extension of Self: An Alternative to a Minimalist Model." BBS 46, e323: 45-47.

Rochat, Philippe. 2023. "Primordial Feeling of Possession in Development." BBS 46, e323: 49-50.

Starmans, Christina. 2023. "Autonomy, the Moral Circle, and the Limits of Ownership." BBS 46. e323: 52-53.

Wispinski, Nathan J., James T. Enns, and Craig S. Chapman. 2023. "Hold It! Where Do We Put the Body?" BBS 46, e323: 57-59.