Abstract

A question that has recently attracted considerable attention is this: What is the nature and significance of the normative relationship a person bears to herself ? On one view, it is held that persons are self-owners : as Locke put it in one of the more famous passages in the Second Treatise : [E]very man has a property in his own person : this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his