Control it and it is yours: Children's reasoning about the ownership of living things

Ownership as an extension of self: An alternative to a minimalist model

Our commentary challenges Boyer's model by arguing that the extended-self is a more likely basis for ownership psychology. We outline how self-based principles of investment and control might structure thinking about ownership and related rights. We end by expanding the extended-self account to include welfare, as a way of understanding the contexts under which ownership is upheld or violated.

Ownership psychology, its antecedents and consequences

Commentators discussed the coherence and validity of a minimalist approach to ownership intuitions, in ways that make it possible to clarify the model, re-evaluate its cognitive underpinnings, and sketch some of its implications. This response summarizes the model; addresses issues concerning the need for a special technical lexicon when describing cognitive semantics; the psychology involved in contexts of competitive acquisition and their consequences for possession and use of rival resources; the role of cooperative expectations in creating mutually beneficial allocation of resources; the consequences of ownership psychology for social interaction and the production of social norms of property; and the relations between psychological processes and legal institutions in the domain, before proposing some final thoughts.

Autonomy, the moral circle, and the limits of ownership

Why can't we own people? Boyer proposes that the key consideration concerns inclusion in the moral circle. I propose an alternative, which is that specific mental capacities, especially the capacity for autonomy, play a key role in determining judgments about human and animal ownership. Autonomous beings are viewed as owning themselves, which precludes them from being owned by others.

Ownership and willingness to compete for resources

Boyer proposes that ownership intuitions depend on tracking cues predictive of agents' motivations to compete for resources. However, the account may mis-predict people's intuitions about ownership, and it may also be too cognitively costly to be feasible. Even so, alternative accounts could benefit by taking inspiration from how the account handles thorny issues in the psychology of ownership.

Why Children Believe They Are Owned

Owners decide what happens to their property, and so adults typically view autonomous beings as non-owned. If children likewise consider autonomy when judging what is owned, this may have implications for how they view themselves. If children believe that parents have power over them, that they themselves lack autonomy, and that only the autonomous cannot be owned, this may lead them to believe that they are owned by their parents. Across three experiments, we found that 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 206) consistently affirm that children are owned by their parents. In Experiment 1, children judged that children and domesticated animals are owned, but denied this for adults and wild animals. In Experiment 2, children were more likely to see children as owned by their parents than by their teachers, and also denied that children own either kind of adult. Finally, in Experiment 3, children were less likely to view a child who makes decisions against parental authority as owned. These judgments are unlikely to mirror what children have been told. Instead, they likely result from children spontaneously using autonomy principles, and possibly other principles of ownership, in reasoning about the ownership of living entities.

Autonomy and the folk concept of valid consent

Consent governs innumerable everyday social interactions, including sex, medical exams, the use of property, and economic transactions. Yet little is known about how ordinary people reason about the validity of consent. Across the domains of sex, medicine, and police entry, Study 1 showed that when agents lack autonomous decision-making capacities, participants are less likely to view their consent as valid; however, failing to exercise this capacity and deciding in a nonautonomous way did not reduce consent judgments. Study 2 found that specific and concrete incapacities reduced judgments of valid consent, but failing to exercise these specific capacities did not, even when the consenter makes an irrational and inauthentic decision. Finally, Study 3 showed that the effect of autonomy on judgments of valid consent carries important downstream consequences for moral reasoning about the rights and obligations of third parties, even when the consented-to action is morally wrong. Overall, these findings suggest that laypeople embrace a normative, domain-general concept of valid consent that depends consistently on the possession of autonomous capacities, but not on the exercise of these capacities. Autonomous decisions and autonomous capacities thus play divergent roles in moral reasoning about consent interactions: while the former appears relevant for assessing the wrongfulness of consented-to acts, the latter plays a role in whether consent is regarded as authoritative and therefore as transforming moral rights.