Life, who owns it?

Recently a very high profile news story has appeared about a woman who, from the story, has terminal cancer.  With this knowledge, she has decided that she wants to end her life (possibly by the time I finish this she might have already taken the final moment).

Of course, this brought up all the usual questions about morality and what we're teaching the children about the nature of the universe and thus life.  But not one person, through the clatter has asked the most basic question there is:

Who owns that body?

There are three possible solutions:
1. God owns it
2. The State owns it
3. The Individual Owns it.

Only one of them makes any real sense. Let us look at the details of all three:

Does God Own The Body?

All the religions of the world that currently hold the major sway in philosophy would basically echo the Augustinian view.  Saint Augustine (I only use the word Saint here for clarity not as a consideration of truth.  He was actually Augustine of Hippo) was one of the first church philosophers whom tried to reconcile the opinions of the church against Plato and more importantly, Aristotle.  He was a Neo-Platonist whom converted to Christianity (Plato and Christ are not really that far apart metaphysically) and held the view that men were composed of two distinct entities: Body and Soul (this is also what Plato held by the way).  His problems began though when he tried to reconcile the church's concepts of free will against it's also dogmatic view of gods power.  You see, the Aristotelian view precluded the value of body and part of 'existence' and thus allowed for the law of causality to influence action by the body.  Augustine was in a pickle, how could we have free will and  more importantly, how could a sinful man 'earn' salvation, when in fact only his version of god could offer it and thus, by opposition, could in fact refuse to offer grace if he wanted.  Augustine realized that a man whom, by simply belief in Christ, earned his own passage to heaven violated the divine power of God to simply not allow that person into heaven.  God became powerless to stop people from doing as they wished (Saint Horz: The King of Strength) between choosing Heaven and Hell.  This meant that free will had to be an illusion and only god, in the end, had the power to decide the fate of men.  By Augustine's view, even the most devote christian was not guarantee a seat in heaven, but it was only by god's good grace that men were allowed into heaven.  Also, Augustine, put forth the premise that those whom avoided sin and gained pride in how Christ-like they made themselves where suffering the great sin of vanity or worse, equating themselves to Christ and risking the ire of God.  Thus, under Augustine's original view men lost the right to free will and worse, the right to determination of will, because even the act of making up one's mind was a subjugation that would be sinful and thus possible eternally damning.  Later church scholars further enforced this view.  In the end, religious philosophy says: 1. You do not own your body.  2. You had no control over your birth and should have no control over your death (unless of course the Church wants to burn you at the stake or send you to war).  3. That you have no real free will (Read Leibniz on the subject of the illusion of free will).

But is the church right?  Is there such a thing as freewill or is all deterministic or worse, the outcome of a play preconceived by a deity that offers the appearance of individualism?  Without getting to deep: it all hinges on the the existence of the universe. Either the universe is real and exists or its a Neo-platonic semi real (or completely an illusion) representation of true reality.    How do we determine such? Simply by experience, then understand the perceptions that reality creates and thus, developing concepts.  Once you have concepts, to test them against your senses.  In the end, but actual testing reality against your premises and vice versa, you should come to the opinion that those ideas that require a Neo-Platonic view can't hold up to the underlying known metaphysical nature of the universe.  In the end religion proves itself wrong.  Existence exists and with its existence, then the property of the the body is not in the hands of god, but even in his universe, left to the rules of nature, which he does not arbitrarily alter or change to suit his whim.  Even if you concede the notion of the existence of god you have to say that he keeps his hands off and does not mutate his universe to some end.

The body is not the property of god, but is a natural entity made (created if you wish) by a set of rules applied to the whole fabric of the universe.  He no more created my body than I created these words.  Both of us, simply aligned objects (him nature, me sentences), the rest is up to the law of causality. 

Does the State Own the Body?

This may seem like a strange argument, but it's actually pretty common.  There is an entire philosophic ideal of non-existence. Hume basically postulated that: 1. the universe is an illusion. 2. your consciousness is an illusion 3. that cause and effect are an illusion.  I substituted illusion here, he said, 'meaning' in the philosophic sense, and although it does not mean exactly the same as illusion, it's close enough.
The point is that from this line of logical thought stemmed another line of thought: What is right and wrong within the fabric of an unknowable anything?  The whole point of ethics, disappears and we are left with a 'social' version of truth.  But unfortunately, people are still people and they cling to their unknowable truths as if they are knowable (using the Hume universe).  Things take on lives of their own, including the egalitarian view of life.  Our Constitution says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights...Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness..."  The founding fathers were taking from John Locke when he said that, of existence, we humans are born with the same basic underlying truths, and those truths were the ability to live, the ability to do as one wishes and the function to hold onto the fruits of such action. The problem with a Kantian (Hume was superseded by Kant) view of existence is that those rights are subjective from the get go and inalienable is technically, meaningless.  From this view, such a thing as Life is not a determination an individual can even know, because from this view, there is no individual.  The sense of individualism is an illusion that can not be proven, a fiction of our own imaginations.  How can you say you have a body or a personality that has a right to determine it's worth?  From this view of course, we got the ideas of Engels and Marx and basically any other socialism that developed under the notion that nothing is real and subjective to the will of the state.   here is an example of this line of thinking, clearly from the bible Math 18:8:

If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away.

In other words, you are a foot in the social world and if the great leg of society demands you walk, you walk, or be cut off.  You are not an individual under the views of Statism.  One must then, ask, if I am to offer my body to the state by action of my participation of the state, does this imply that absent this participation that I can be free of the offering my body to the state?  Or more importantly, how about the sense of individual consciousness, does that too, by my willing vote and allowed delegation of power to the state, infer, that they have the right to determine it as well.  Is this blog post a violation of that agreement?  Does the state have the authority to remove it, to delete it, to perform a lobotomy on my mind to stop me from thinking it?  Or worse, to simply take over the writing I post here and to determine, by its collectivism, what should actually be posted here?


Would anyone submit their mind, their hands, feet, eyes, to the actions and purpose of government? And if they did, would they have been individuals to begin with?  That is, was there something to submit or is the act of rendering self the property of others automatically the destruction of self and no self exists?  One has to give themselves up in order to give themselves up.  An impossibility.

The Individual Owns Their Body.

All that remains then, is that the body is the property of the individual.  In fact, it is the only axiom of existence that all other qualities stem from.  Life, Liberty and Property are aspects of the same entity: the self.  Only the self has the ethical right to determine its own existence.  Ethics, is the idea of living a life worth living, that is determining the Good of life.  If, philosophically, the Good is about living a live of value, to express meaning of life either through self aggrandizing or selfless devotion to others, then, not being able to do so, would be unethical.  And the choice to live such a life would be valued by the individual having to live with such ethics.  No one else has the authority to take such a Platonic view and force their will on what they assume is sickness, for where would it end?  No, only the individual, has this authority.  Obviously, for the best approach to determining one's existence, one should use reason, logic and read everything they can about philosophy.  Read everything, especially if the idea is to end the use of your body.  In the end though, the determination of self is, well, a selfish act...and that is the rub, for we no live in a society where individualism is mostly illusionary and only allowed to surface if it furthers the egalitarian views of the masses.  That is, if it helps society as a whole feel better about itself.  It's that old trope: The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.  

In the end the decision to life a life and find meaning it is a personal one, stemming, we hope, from a solid epistemology.  But to assume that 'soul sick' people should be put in hospitals of the mind and forced to comply with witch doctor healing methods is the worst form of ethics to grace our existence.  

HAMLET	To be, or not to be: that is the question:
	Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
	The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
	Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
	And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
	No more; and by a sleep to say we end
	The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
	That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
	Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
	To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;