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” (Reference Locke1988, p. 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” (Reference Douglass, Blassingame and McKivigan1991, p. 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, Reference Ceunen, Vlaeyen and Van Diest2016).
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, Reference Craig2015).
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 propensity 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, Reference Buccola2012).
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, Reference Antoniello and Gottesman2017; Feinberg, Venneri, Simone, Fan, & Northoff, Reference Feinberg, Venneri, Simone, Fan and Northoff2010; Gandola et al., Reference Gandola, Invernizzi, Sedda, Ferre, Sterzi, Sherna and Bottini2012; Vallar & Ronchi, Reference Vallar and Ronchi2009).
Comparing the studies of somatophrenia, 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 (Reference de Vignemont2020) 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, Reference Arnhart1995, Reference Arnhart1998, Reference Arnhart2016).
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” (Reference Locke1988, p. 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” (Reference Douglass, Blassingame and McKivigan1991, p. 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, Reference Ceunen, Vlaeyen and Van Diest2016).
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, Reference Craig2015).
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 propensity 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, Reference Buccola2012).
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, Reference Antoniello and Gottesman2017; Feinberg, Venneri, Simone, Fan, & Northoff, Reference Feinberg, Venneri, Simone, Fan and Northoff2010; Gandola et al., Reference Gandola, Invernizzi, Sedda, Ferre, Sterzi, Sherna and Bottini2012; Vallar & Ronchi, Reference Vallar and Ronchi2009).
Comparing the studies of somatophrenia, 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 (Reference de Vignemont2020) 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, Reference Arnhart1995, Reference Arnhart1998, Reference Arnhart2016).
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interest
None.