Here is a paragraph from Barbara H. Fried’s essay “Left-Libertarianism: A Review Essay,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (winter 2004): 66-92, at 68-9 (footnotes omitted):

It is hardly surprising that the redistributive proposals that have surfaced in the current political climate are ones that self-consciously fly under a libertarian banner. The last significant strain of left Lockeanism in British and American political thought arose during a period (the 1880s through the 1930s) in which economic laissez faire enjoyed widespread support in both countries. Our own times are more hospitable to laissez faire, and less to egalitarianism, than any since that period. In this political climate, strategic motives surely counsel rewrapping the aims of equality in libertarian garb, and it is not hard to detect such motives at work in left-libertarianism. Yet self-ownership, the “libertarian” part of left-libertarianism, clearly holds a genuine allure for many on the left. The question is, why? G. A. Cohen suggests one answer: the embrace of self-ownership reflects adaptive preference formation for the “politically bereaved.” Faced with a world turning increasingly to the right, many on the left may have been driven to rethink whether there might not be something they can live with in resurgent libertarian premises. For many others on the left, however, the allure of self-ownership is clearly heartfelt, as Cohen himself poignantly demonstrates in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, his Bunyanesque chronicle of his own, ultimately victorious, struggle to free himself from the grip of the self-ownership thesis.

Fried distinguishes between two types of left-libertarian: (1) those who are attracted to self-ownership (“genuine allure”) and (2) those who are not attracted to self-ownership but appeal to it for strategic reasons. Fried is puzzled by the first type. How could a leftist be attracted to self-ownership? I’m puzzled by Fried’s puzzlement. Here is Michael Otsuka’s formulation of the “libertarian right of self-ownership” that left-libertarians and other liberal egalitarians (as well as right-libertarians) endorse:

A very stringent right of control over and use of one’s mind and body that bars others from intentionally using one as a means by forcing one to sacrifice life, limb, or labor, where such force operates by means of incursions or threats of incursions upon one’s mind and body (including assault and battery and forcible arrest, detention, and imprisonment). (Michael Otsuka, “Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 [winter 1998]: 65-92, at 69 [footnote omitted])

Why is Fried puzzled that a leftist is attracted to this? Is she a consequentialist, like Peter Singer? Does she believe that a person may be used as a mere means to collective ends? Otsuka’s libertarian right of self-ownership is nothing more (or less) than an agent-centered restriction (in Samuel Scheffler‘s terminology). Deontologists accept such restrictions; consequentialists do not. It seems to me that left-libertarians and liberal egalitarians are on firmer ground than strict egalitarians such as Fried, if the latter are committed to consequentialism.