Why is it Okay and Morally Justified to Own other people?

A mother and father “own” their biological child, who is 3-years-old. The child is the property of the parents. The child is owned.

So why is it morally acceptable, “right”, and “common” for this type of ownership, but not the ownership of “adults”, or one race of another race?

Furthermore, if the child grows and is 33-years-old, does the parent no longer “own” the child? Is he/she no longer “the property” of the parents?

Or, don’t parents still feel ‘ownership’, regardless of age?

Finally, what is “ownership” really? What is the full, in-depth analysis of ownership and property? Merely a feeling? Do you “own” the food that you eat? When? Before it enters your mouth and is chewed up, swallowed? Or, after? What is “ownership” except a subjective belief, directly corresponding to feelings of Responsibility, Guilt, and Pride???

Ownership is an abstraction enforced by the politician.

Faust would have said something like politics is the death of philosophy.

Who said parents own their children? I would say that they are the one-and-only legal guardian of their children, but it’s more that children own their parents. Feed me! clothe me! look after me! we cry and say, and they do… or should do.

In modernity, reparations compensate for a freer society, do they not?

A fisherman hooks a fish just as a bigger fish swallows the smaller fish …so who owns what?

…not the best quality argument I was looking for.

I’d rather not get riled

Ownership is more a concern for the right to space, rather then time.
Time served can free the lien , but space reserves the right to a territory, until an increase of force is applied to that of pretension.::: oops I meant retension.( of property).

You’re big on territory today.

Following you around, invading sacred space, haha.

Parents have legal and moral responsibility for their children but they do not own them - they are not their possessions
Children are too young to be responsible for themselves but adults are not and so that is the difference between them

So wait, parents don’t own their own children? Who does then?

How can you be “responsible” for something you don’t own?

Do you own yourself, or not?

I must have been mistaken. I was under the premise that people ‘own’ themselves and their ‘own’ private-property. People ‘own’ private businesses. People ‘own’ the food they cook and eat.

Some of you are suggesting otherwise, no ownership. You do not ‘own’ your own body. (Somebody else does? God maybe?) A mother, giving birth, does not own herself, nor her child?

Humans do not own their own children?

I’m asking these questions, based on the replies I’ve gotten so far. Correct me where I’m wrong.

You own your body because it is yours and only yours and not anyone elses
But children are separate from their parents and cannot be owned by them
Owning something and having responsibility for something are not the same

Always behind schedule Babes, I guess too busy protecting my claim .

People own themselves, because they are responsible for themselves. But children/infants do not own themselves, because they are not responsible for themselves?

Is this your position? Doesn’t this contradict the suggestion that responsibility has “nothing to do with” ownership? Is it true?

Or isn’t responsibility, a necessary aspect of (self) ownership? If you are not responsible for yourself, do you also not own yourself?

My premise was that a child is a bodily extension of the mother. As the mother owns “her own” body, so too does she ‘own’ the body of her own child. This suggestion, which most of you are pushing, that “nobody owns anybody, not even themselves”, makes no sense. Children are the material and bodily property of their biological parents. “Guardianship” has nothing to do with it. You are a guardian because it is your property, because you own it. Not the other way around?

Slaves have always been treated like children. Childhood may be extended temporally to include slaves.

But possessions are terrotorially indefinite.

Therefore, taken literally, human beings treated as slaves, become like territorial claims. Their figurative timelessness is predicated as more a power struggle to protect autonomy.

Owners insist on their right to possess by virtue of being responsible for them. That kind of rationalization is self defeating on the long run.

How exactly is it self-defeating? Explain it to me.

Being responsible for your child, is how people act-out ownership. Being responsible for yourself, works exactly the same way. So how is this mistaken?

Urwrong said: ““Guardianship” has nothing to do with it. You are a guardian because it is your property, because you own it. Not the other way around?“

I can’t ever say that I felt like my parents owned me, but that I did belong to them… I definitely felt that school owned me between the hours of 9 to 4.30, but that’s another story altogether.

Sure, our parents have Rights over us, that everyone else does not have, because we belong to only them… so Rights = ownership, to you? You could call parents ‘the interface between their children and the outside world’, where parents make decisions for them. Parents cannot but help continue to be a parent, because they will always want the best for their (adult) children, and so they probably never stop being parents.

Owning/enslaving others, to do someone else’s bidding, is taking away those peoples’ freedom to live-out and actualise their own lives… so treating grown-ups as if they were children.

Lol, ok… I didn’t think that an option, so now got it.

If a parent says, feels, or thinks “my child is mine” then this signifies ownership, possession.

So even if you do not feel ‘owned’, doesn’t mean you are not owned. You are. You are your parents’ property. Parents who have children, know this intuitively and instinctively. It should be common sense, and is somewhat surprising to discover, here on this forum, that it is not. Maybe most inhabitants of this forum are childless. Parents will admit, readily, that their (biological) children, are theirs and nobody else’s. There are many instances of Ownership, Possession. Are not Step-children, also owned?

The connotation of “ownership” is negative, but, overlooked and selectively-ignored, when it comes to biological children, or even selfhood as property. Do you not own yourself? Are you not responsible for yourself?

In this thread, the answers are overwhelmingly, ‘No’, but this only begs-the-question as to Who-or-What does own people, humanity, in general?

I would guess, it must be ‘God’. And some of you may believe, in the back of your minds, that ‘God’ is your “Owner” or “Creator”. Is Creation, also Ownership?

Do you own what you create?

If an Artist paints a painting, does he/she own it? Or does somebody else? Who has claim to things?

It is self defeating not to particularise, but overly generalize whom to include categorically in the semantic qualifier of who should be held responsible for the ownership of others.

As convoluted that response appears, it is because it contains logical consequences that may be dwfinitionally forfeited.

My primary and apropp complaint need not be interpreted a negating the intent of justifying or nihilizomg the objective of the argument, merely looking at it as if such justification has not been properly assigned to a particular set.

I think by ’ children’several definitions could expunge the sense of responsibility trying ownership as an unfounded objective each other, for all men could be concerned the children of God.

It matters not to subsumed an existential truism to that catagorization

Today it’s fathers day, and God the father is responsible for all men, for Creation has imbued responsibility by an intrinsic logic, that only He can define.

It does not argue well to understand by that sense of responsibility to imply that God owns man. The most and the least are equally beheld by the Deity, therefore Man, can not take it upon himself to displace God’s role in Creation with similar or, even identical exetudr regarding the interreal meanings that are generated by that Creation.

Further, such critical points could not merely trickle down meaningfully blocked relationship between them, but rain down cataclysmic stoppages of faithful belief in the interchange.

So I do go along the generalized semantic sense of the connections pointed out , but miss in the particular versions , hence the sense of overly specific interpretation misses the objective sense of the narrative.