No, on the contrary.
Owning yourself is another way of expressing that you are born free and sovereign; you are your own master, without external masters. (Except perhaps god if you are religious, yet that is a voluntary choice).
Your sovereignty as a free, self-governing individual is inherent in your biology. You can't transfer ownership of your body; your mind is still there. You can sell your organs, but this implies that you already own your body.
This goes back to John Locke whose ideas provided a groundwork for the abolition of slavery. When you own yourself, nobody else can lay a claim to own you, or the fruits of your labor. Hence slavery becomes a violation of property rights.
John Locke, 1690:
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"Every man has a "property" in his own "person". This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. (Part 2, Chapter 5.27, page 130, Two Treatises of Government)
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This is about individual sovereignty and liberty principles.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a longer piece on John Locke's view on property rights:
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Hmmm, I don't think splitting "person" into mind and body to go on and claim the mind always necessarily owns the body solves the problem. I agree that way you clear my first objection: It's no longer a circle. "You"/"Person" is in the mind owning the body. No circle.
But you now run into the second difficulty with speed. Let's see if you agree to this:
1.) If the body were "normal" property, you'd be able to give it away or sell it like all other property.
2.) So if we want to call it property, there must be some reason to disallow selling it.
3.) Your argument against selling it is that the locus of the mind is in the body. The mind can't leave the body, hence it can't transfer ownership of the body.
4.) Your protection against slavery is as strong as your argument in point 3.
Do you agree to these points? If not, which point not?
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