Aff’s notion of human nature is illogical.

There are three quick responses that can be made to this argument. First, the argument rests on an equivocation between the kind of control one has of one’s body and the kind of control Feser associates with initial appropriation. In the case of the body, the agent exercises direct control over the body in the sense that she can manipulate the body simply by willing it to do certain things; by contrast, the control over resources Feser describes involves physically keeping others from being able to manipulate those resources, e.g., by building a fence or placing armed guards around a patch of land.24 However, if agential control is what makes the thesis of selfownership plausible, it is unclear why physical control would make resource ownership plausible.25

Second, even if one grants that both forms of control are equally relevant to establishing ownership, Brian McElwee persuasively argues that the plausibility of the self-ownership thesis stems not only from the fact that one controls one’s own body, but also from the facts that one feels pain and pleasure through one’s body, one needs one’s body, and one’s body is irreplaceable when it comes to satisfying this need.26 If these conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for having ownership of an object, then mere control of a natural resource will not suffice to establish ownership of that resource.

Finally, if one takes seriously Feser’s control thesis, then it would seemingly follow that parents own their children. After all, assuming that agency emerges in children sometime after birth, the parents of a child are the first people to “show up and take possession” of its body. Thus, they would seemingly have the right to that body, with the agent who comes to inhabit that body being analogous to the latecomer who arrives at a patch of land that has already been fenced in.27 This implausible conclusion would seem to be a reduction of Feser’s argument.28

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However, the fact that coercion ultimately benefits some other person would not seem to be an adequate justification for that act. As an illustration of this point, consider the case of two castaways stranded on an island with minimal resources. After a few months of bare subsistence, something fortunate happens: a small motorboat washes up onto the beach. However, when the castaways attempt to climb into the boat, they quickly discover that the boat can only carry one of them, as the weight of both causes the bow to submerge. Thinking quickly, one castaway says to the other,