According to the labor theory of property everyone is entitled to the fruit of 'er labor. (As to the double meaning of labor: the question is precisely whether this includes the 'labor' of giving birth, unless the traditional his is indeed to mean his.) This proposition must be understood as a corollary of the proposition that everyone has a property in 'er own body. If the former is taken as an independent proposition besides the latter, it leads to the conclusion that parents would have property rights in their children, or that they would not always have such rights in the fruits of their labor. Whatever their age, children would, even as people, not have the same right in their bodies, if labor is used as the fundamental criterion. However, if the right in a person's labor is only derivative, the consequence of the proposition that a person has such a right should not be incompatible with the original premise in which the right to one's own body is granted to everyone, supposedly irrespective of age and regardless of the fact that one's parent(s) may still be alive. If it is incompatible, the argument does indeed need modification, given that children are not just to be their parents' chattels.

The idea that children (up to adolescence, adulthood or any age) would or could be mere objects possessed by their parents may sound repugnant to us, it is a belief entertained even by some latter-day philosophers famous among men and other human beings of the same, or a similar, ideological persuasion. Moreover, the theories of these bourgeois males were equally applicable to women (the wives of husbands) and to servants or apprentices. In the opinion of the most quoted one of them, there was even nothing against killing so-called 'illegitimate' children (of whatever age?) simply because a 'child born outside marriage is also outside the protection of the law'. In the doctrine of this man (who set himself up as the leader of 'critical' thought) the lord's possession of his wife, children and servants is a type of corporeal-personal right, and the persons thus possessed can be used as objects, as means to the lord's ends, but 'without interfering with their personality'. Furthermore, he taught that children (of whatever age?) and servants do not have 'an own will limited by law to determine their actions'. Instead, they are like slaves subjected to the will of the father or gentleman-in-command; not just subjected, but 'like members of his own body'. And that 'without interfering with their personality'. (Woe to him who creeps thru these usufructuary serpent-windings of a theory on the nonuse of persons as means.)

Husbands have wives, parents have children, and people with servants have servants, but a human being must have orthodox monotheist or other ideological reasons to infer from this that husbands possess or own wives, that parents possess or own children, and that people possess or own their servants, or would hold them in usufruct, without the inverse being true as well. (Note that in the theorist referred to above, possession is not a purely empirical but a moral and legal notion. Note also that in the same theorist a child is possessed as an object if the legal relation exists and may be killed if the legal relation does not exist.)

It is one thing to say that A possesses B but that B also possesses A, and quite another thing to produce the sentence that A possesses B but that B does not possess A. This is the case with the children and the servants of the theorist we are presently dealing with. But what about his wives? Why do they not possess their husbands as their husbands possess them? Well, the male, adult, nonserving searcher of wisdom in question does affirm that the relationship between married people is a 'relation of equality of possession', a relation of 'people who mutually possess each other'. But what is the case ? The man's right to command, and the fact that she belongs to him, derives from the 'natural superiority of the man's capacity over the female where it concerns the common interest of the household'. (Incidentally, this was extended to the whole organization of the state in which wives, children and servants were to remain passive citizens. And incidentally, this confirmed the monotheist commandment that wives ought to honor and obey their husbands.) It is the duty of sexual equality with respect to the end of naturalness which underlies the husband's right to command his wife, and not vice versa. (Woe to him who creeps thru these kinky serpent-windings of a theory on the equality of men and women.)

We now have an impression of some of the ideas of a prominent anti-utilitarian (an exponent of both deontology and a teleology of naturalness), but the worst ideas of some utilitarians on the interests of women, children and the poor were hardly better. (Touching their goods and chattels the adversaries were as thick as thieves.) All the consideration the founder of utilitarianism showed for the interests of wives, children and apprentices was that controls on those who possessed them should only in the first instance be absent. And altho 'e --or should we say "he" again?-- was an opponent of slavery, 'er reason was not that this was a violation of the rights of those sold or born into slavery; 'er reason was that the workers would be more productive, if they were free than if they were held as property. It is typical of this utilitarian view that justice is merely a contingent matter. Yet, we should not lump all history's utilitarians together in an aggregative fashion; certainly not when they call themselves "utilitarians", but when they appear to embrace a pluralistic doctrine instead of a monistic eudaimonism. One of the early 'utilitarians' already insisted that there ought not to exist any proprietary right in human beings at all; that they were rights of property in abuses. The objection to this view is the same as that of the extreme anti-property position which does not recognize a person's property in 'er body either.

When asking ourselves whether there are in a certain community or society people, or bodies of people, which are owned or possessed by other people, we should not stop when it turns out that formally no-one or nobody is possessed by someone else. There is a classical distinction between 'dominium', or the rule over things by the individual, and 'imperium', or the rule over all individuals by the state. Since the rights of property entail the right to exclude nonowners, with the exception (on a first-order doctrinal level) of certain kinds of intrinsic rights, we must not overlook the actual fact --as has been pointed out-- that such dominium over nonpersonal things is usually also imperium over other people or their bodies.