Self-ownership

Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own body, often expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity meaning the exclusive right to control one's own body including one's life, where 'control' means exerting any physical interference and 'exclusive' means having the right to install and enforce a ban on other people doing this. Since the legal norm of property title claim incapacitates (or bans) other people (except the zygote) from claiming property title over the same resource at the same time, the right to control or interfere with one's own body in any arbitrary way is secured. Anarcho-capitalism defines self-ownership as the exclusive right to control one's body as long as the owner does not aggress upon others, leading to the concept of the sovereign individual. In Minarchism the 'exclusive right' is understood by separating the 'liberty-to' from the 'liberty-from' where for each person the 'liberty-to' is restricted by all the 'liberty's-from' of others, effectively subjecting the liberty-to to the ban on the usage of force. Thereafter self-ownership means the exclusive right to control one's body insofar considering action between inhabitants and not involving the state, making it roughly a pacifist morality (except for the right to limited self-defense) only among inhabitants. Self-ownership is a central idea in several political philosophies that emphasize individualism, such as libertarianism and liberalism.

'Sovereignty of the individual, 'individual sovereignty' or self-sovereignty, is generally understood as a right implying the right of self-ownership and one's property, also called negative sovereignty, but also implying the rejection of positive sovereignty, in the sense that it is the initiation of forceful action, where negative sovereignty includes property rights and positive sovereignty includes the right to subjugate self-owning people to command obedience or sovereign rule or simply being endowed with the right to receive some economic good. A view that is held by 'negative-rights libertarians'. Legal theoretically sovereignty is achieved by person A, the declarator, by applying a power norm on person B which does not require any declarative volitional behavioral action of B, where as a legal consequence B becomes the legal subject (of the obligation) meaning B receives an obligation that is satisfied by the 'non-initiation of forceful action' (negative sovereignty) by B, or any other obligation (positive sovereignty). Example of negative sovereignty power norms are declaring a land ownership claim by planting a flag or raising a fence on previously unowned land installing a physical interference ban exempted by local rules. Positive sovereignty power norms violate consent (volition) of the legal subject in the sense of libertarian involuntariness, but the negative sovereign power norm does not by definition.

The conception action is legally a power norm that imposes the (positive) parental duty on the parents which does not violate self-sovereignty or impose involuntary servitude because it was imposed on themselves by their own behavioral physical interference action with a zygote as a negative claim right of the zygote to the parental duty which is an implicit obligation similar to a sanction norm in corrective justice. One is obligated not to create a zygote by an pure (physical) interference action or perform the parental duty which is an obligation resulting from negative sovereignty by assuming an implicit law on the zygote. So the parental duty is not a positive sovereignty claim right by the zygote. Normally in libertarian theory the claimer of property implicitly immunizes all people from circumstances on the property at the moment of acquisition that were caused by a pure (physical) interference action, which is also known as the negative Voetstoots assumption of property acquisition. Most libertarians assume the zygote to have a form of self-ownership called liberty from immediate harm, while still being subject to ownership by the parents. This right does not imply the unconditional right to subject the child to command e.g.parental power or compulsory education, a form of involuntary servitude. Many assume the parental duty to imply raising the child unharmed and to full physical and mental health followed by the duty to secure for the child its claim of full self-ownership (physical non-interference) understood as self-sovereignty, which implies independent moral capacity (moral agency). Negative-rights libertarians assume people to be self-sovereign until they voluntarily dispose parts of this right.

States generally do not recognize individual sovereignty of any natural persons, but only of states. The right to state sovereignty and duty to keep to its treaties follows from the fundamental principles of international law called just war theory and is an implementation of the non-aggression principle. States generally only recognize natural persons as bearers of rights as matter of national law sourced from international human rights treaty and not as a fundamental principle. This fundamental non-recognition of natural persons leads to states violating the property of individuals outside of the boundaries of sovereign states, and denying the people the right to resist when the state violates the state law that it bound itself to by declaration. Such a state considers itself the ultimate arbiter in every conflict with a natural person, including conflicts involving itself, outside of any other sovereign state, as long as it does not aggress upon another state. This is called the monopoly on violence and goes further than merely claiming the right to set rules on a territory (negative sovereignty) and enforce it. It implies that this state claims the legal right to initiate force.

The 'right to property in one's person' is often understood as personality rights, and are just like intellectual property rights and right to privacy or private life generally a violation of self-ownership or self-sovereignty. For example, the right to be forgotten bans any person from keeping reputation on other people. The right to life is sometimes named as part of self-ownership and is implied by the self-ownership right when understood either as the inviolability to the purely interfering negligence tort of killing or simply as the tort of (bodily) property trespass killing the owner.