In this paper I argue that teleology and a proper teleological analysis of the uterus is important for a comprehensive understanding of the rights of the unborn. I argue that a right to life entails the right to use those organs that naturally function for an individual’s survival. Consequently, an unborn child has a right to his mother’s uterus. If this is accepted, bodily-rights arguments for abortion such as those proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson and David (...) Boonin are completely undermined. While Thomson and Boonin may be justified in arguing the right to life does not always entail the right to use another person’s body, I argue that the right to life of the unborn does entail the right to use their mother’s body. (shrink)

This article asks whether personal ventilators should be redistributed to maximize lives saved in emergency condition, like the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins by examining extant claims that items like ventilators are literally parts of their user’s bodies. Arguments in favor of incorporation for ventilators fail to show that they meet valid sufficient conditions to be body parts, but arguments against incorporation also fail to show that they fail to meet clearly valid necessary conditions. Further progress on this issue (...) awaits clarification of difficult normative, conceptual, and metaphysical questions about the possible boundaries of a person’s body. Rather than relying solely on incorporation arguments, we propose an argument against reallocation from widely accepted anti-discrimination principles. Possession of a personal ventilator is an obvious marker of disability identity; thus, reallocating ventilators from those that already possess them discriminates on the basis of a stigmatized trait – a paradigm case of presumptively wrongful discrimination. This discrimination claim, taken together with uncertainty about the bodily status of ventilators, yields a strong presumption against personal ventilator reallocation. (shrink)

This article focuses on the resurgence of women’s movements in Turkey and Norway against the backdrop of their historical trajectories and wider gender policies. Throughout the 2010s, both countries witnessed a similar set of conservative and neoliberal policies that intervened in women’s bodily rights. In both countries, women’s movements responded with mass mobilizations and influenced the political agenda. The proposed restrictions on abortion were interpreted as a restriction on women’s basic bodily rights in both countries. This (...) article argues that a feminist, multidimensional reconceptualization of the concept of citizenship and a definition of abortion as an element of women’s bodily citizenship rights are useful to promote a strong and encompassing argument for mobilization. The comparative analysis shows that the right to control one’s own body has been a unifying issue for women’s movements in Turkey and Norway which are gradually becoming more inclusive. (shrink)

Medical interventions such as methadone treatment for drug addicts or “chemical castration” for sex offenders have been used in several jurisdictions alongside or as an alternative to traditional punishments, such as incarceration. As our understanding of the biological basis for human behaviour develops, our criminal justice system may make increasing use of such medical techniques and may become less reliant on incarceration. Academic debate on this topic has largely focused on whether offenders can validly consent to medical interventions, given the (...) coercive environment of the criminal justice system. Both sides in this debate share the assumption that administering medical interventions to offenders without their valid consent would be unethical. Recently, Thomas Douglas has mounted a formidable challenge to this “consent requirement”. Essentially, his argument rests on a comparison between prison and medical interventions. Douglas asks: if the state is entitled to impose a prison sentence on a criminal without the criminal’s consent, why is consent required for the imposition of a medical intervention? The most obvious way of defending the consent requirement against Douglas’s challenge appeals to the fact that incarceration merely interferes with the right to free movement, but medical interventions interfere with the right to bodily integrity. This argument rests on what Douglas calls the “robustness claim”—the claim that the right to bodily integrity is more robust than the right to freedom of movement. In other words, the right to freedom of movement loses its protective force in a wider range of circumstances than the right to bodily integrity. Douglas’s article seeks to undermine the robustness claim, by arguing that neither case-based intuitions, nor theoretical considerations support this claim. In this article, I will attempt to raise some doubts about Douglas’s challenge to the consent requirement and the robustness claim. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides (...) a useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

The status quo on parental licensing in most Western jurisdictions is that licensing is required in the case of adoption but not in the case of assisted or unassisted biological reproduction. To have a child via adoption, one must fulfill licensing requirements, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. One is exempt from these requirements, however, if one has a child via biological reproduction, including assisted reproduction involving donor gametes or a contract pregnancy. In (...) an earlier paper, we challenged this system of parental licensing by showing that arguments in favour of it do not succeed. One argument we failed to consider, however, is that prospective biological parents have a right to reproduce that protects them against the sort of state interference that is involved in parental licensing. According to this argument, because prospective adoptive parents do not exercise a similar right when attempting to become parents, they are not similarly protected. In this paper, we argue that this reproductive rights argument, like other arguments in favour of the status quo on parental licensing, is flawed. We also question whether people in fact have a right to reproduce, and in doing so distinguish this right from others that we think are legitimate, including a right to become a parent and a right to bodily autonomy. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides (...) a useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

In recent years, direct brain interventions have shown increased success in manipulating neurobiological processes often associated with moral reasoning and decision-making. As current DBIs are refined, and new technologies are developed, the state will have an interest in administering DBIs to criminal offenders for rehabilitative purposes. However, it is generally assumed that the state is not justified in directly intruding in an offender’s brain without valid consent. Thomas Douglas challenges this view. The state already forces criminal offenders to go to (...) jail without their consent. This represents a serious interference with an offender’s rights. If criminal offenders are already morally liable to incarceration, why is the state not also entitled to administer DBIs without consent for the purposes of rehabilitation? Douglas argument focuses on the right to ‘bodily integrity’. He argues that there is no compelling reason to believe that bodily rights that protect an offender from non-consensual DBIs are stronger than rights that protect an offender from incarceration. This paper will extend Douglas’ analysis. It will consider the more fundamental right to ‘mental integrity’. The right to mental integrity defends an inner sphere of liberty. It protects critical capacities necessary for the exercise of autonomous human agency—without which a vast majority of moral rights could not exist. Thus, the right to mental integrity is ultimately more important for a moral assessment of DBIs. The right strongly suggests that both presently, and in the future, there may be many cases in which the state is not entitled to administer DBIs to criminal offenders without valid consent. (shrink)

In this issue, Elizabeth Shaw and Gulzaar Barn offer a number of replies to my arguments in ‘Criminal Rehabilitation Through Medical Intervention: Moral Liability and the Right to Bodily Integrity’, Journal of Ethics. In this article I respond to some of their criticisms.

Opponents of male circumcision have increasingly used human rights positions to articulate their viewpoint. We characterize the meaning of the term “human rights.” We discuss these human rights arguments with special attention to the claims of rights to an open future and to bodily integrity. We offer a three-part test under which a parental decision might be considered an unacceptable violation of a child's right. The test considers the impact of the practice on society, (...) the impact of the practice on the individual, and the likelihood of adverse impact. Infant circumcision is permissible under this test. We conclude that infant circumcision may be proscribed as violating local norms, even though it does not violate human rights. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, against the current consensus, that the right to withdraw from research is sometimes alienable. In other words, research subjects are sometimes morally permitted to waive their right to withdraw. The argument proceeds in three major steps. In the first step, I argue that rights typically should be presumed alienable, both because that is not illegitimately coercive and because the general paternalistic motivation for keeping them inalienable is untenable. In the second step of the argument, (...) I consider three special characteristics of the right to withdraw, first that its waiver might be exploitative, second that research involves intimate bodily access, and third that it is irreversible. I argue that none of these characteristics justify an inalienable right to withdraw. In the third step, I examine four considerations often taken to justify various other allegedly inalienable rights: concerns about treating yourself merely as a means as might be the case in suicide, concerns about revoking all your future freedoms in slavery contracts, the resolution of coordination problems, and public interest. I argue that the motivations involved in these four types of situations do not apply to the right to withdraw from research. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our moral (...) rights to bodily autonomy or to privacy. My argument presents hypothetical cases in which a state interferes with a person's procreative choices in order to promote aggregate social welfare, but this interference does not violate any of the person's nonprocreative moral rights. These cases not only undermine frequently made claims that widely recognized nonprocreative moral rights entail procreative moral rights, they also challenge the intuitively plausible claim that interference with our procreative choices as such violates our moral rights. What at first appear to be substantive moral rights are in fact a kind of illusion created by the frequent overlap of other rights, but lacking in substance beyond that overlap. While this argument against the existence of procreative moral rights has substantive implications for ongoing debates in reproductive ethics, I ultimately suggest that it is consistent with a progressive approach to reproductive justice. (shrink)

This timely book by internationally regarded scholar of ethics and social/political philosophy, Michael Boylan, focuses on the history, application and significance of human rights in the West and China. Boylan engages the key current philosophical debates prevalent in human rights discourse today and draws them together to argue for the existence of natural, universal human rights. Arguing against the grain of mainstream philosophical beliefs, Boylan asserts that there is continuity between human rights and natural law and (...) that human beings require basic, essential goods for minimum action. These include food, clean water and sanitation, clothing, shelter and protection from bodily harm, including basic healthcare. The achievement of this goal, Boylan demonstrates, will require significant resource allocation and creative methods of implementation involving public and private institutions. Combining technical argument with four fictional narratives about human rights, the book invites readers to engage with the most important aspects of the discipline. (shrink)

In 1987, a young woman named Angela Carder, pregnant and dying from cancer, was ordered by a court of law to undergo a cesarean delivery against her and her family’s wishes. She and her baby both died. Three years later, an appeals court took an extraordinary stand: it vacated the order that ended their lives and upheld pregnant women’s rights to informed consent and bodily integrity. The “unkindest cut of all,”1 it seemed, had been condemned by the courts.2 (...) Yet shortly before the twenty-year anniversary of this landmark case, the same rights were stripped from another young pregnant woman. In January of this year, oral arguments were heard in the case of Samantha Burton. She had been twenty-five weeks .. (shrink)

The self-defense argument maintains that, even if a fetus is a person, abortion on demand is morally permissible on the grounds that the fetus is using his mother’s body in an intimate way, and, in an unwanted pregnancy, without her ongoing consent. According to the argument, this sort of use justifies lethal self-defense on the part of the mother against her unwanted fetus. I produce a counterexample to one of the premises of this argument and show that it cannot be (...) successfully revised. I further show the underlying commitments of the self-defense argument lead to the absurd conclusion that a woman who has consensual sex that results in pregnancy thereby violates the fetus’ right to bodily autonomy and so such an act would be morally impermissible. We thereby have good reason to abandon the argument. (shrink)

Some, like the Scholastics, held that nonhuman animals could not survive bodily death and would therefore be absent in any afterlife. Against them, I argue that all sentient animals lacking moral agency are immortal and that their immortality is good for them. Call this thesis Animal Immortalism. This paper offers two arguments for Animal Immortalism: the Faultless Harm Argument and the Just Compensation Argument. According to the former, because death and eternal misery are harms to sentient animals to (...) which they neither consent nor are liable (given their lack of moral agency), these harms to them are unjust. Thus, a perfectly just God would prevent their death and eternal misery, and would therefore provide them with a good afterlife. According to the latter argument, nonhuman animals who suffer pre-mortem unjust harms are owed compensation, which only an eternally good afterlife can provide. Thus, a perfectly just God would provide them with an eternally good afterlife. The chapter concludes by evaluating and rejecting several objections, including the Gappy Existence Objection, the Transworld Unluckiness Objection, the Anti-Animal Rights Objection, the Boredom Objection, and the Agency Objection. (shrink)

The right to genetic privacy is presently being incorporated in legal systems all over the world. It remains largely unclear however what interests and values this right serves to protect. There are many different arguments made in the literature, yet none takes into account the problem of how particular values can be justified given the plurality of moral and religious doctrines in our societies. In this article theories of public reason are used in order to explore how genetic privacy (...) could be justified in a way that is sensitive to the “fact of pluralism”. The idea of public reason is specified as the idea that governments should appeal only to values and beliefs that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens in the justification of rights. In examining prevalent arguments for genetic privacy – based on the value of autonomy or on the value of intimacy – it is concluded that they do not meet this requirement. In dealing with this deficiency in the literature, an argument is developed that genetic privacy is fundamental to the democratic participation of all citizens. By referring to the preconditions of democratic citizenship, genetic privacy can be justified in a way that respects the plurality of comprehensive doctrines of morality and religion in contemporary societies. (shrink)

Suppose that a team of neurosurgeons and bioengineers were able to remove your brain from your body, suspend it in a life-sustaining vat of liquid nutrients, and connect its neurons and nerve terminals by wires to a supercomputer that would stimulate it with electrical impulses exactly like those it normally receives when embodied. According to this brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, your envatted brain and your embodied brain would have subjectively indistinguishable mental lives. For all you know—so one argument goes—you could be (...) such a brain in a vat right now.1 Daniel Dennett calls this sort of philosophical thought experiment an “intuition pump” (Dennett 1995). An intuition pump is designed to elicit certain intuitive convictions, but is not itself a proper argument: “intuition pumps are fine if they’re used correctly, but they can also be misused. They’re not arguments, they’re stories. Instead of having a conclusion, they pump an intuition. They get you to say ‘Aha! Oh, I get it!’ (Dennett 1995, p. 182). Philosophers have used the brain-in-a-vat story mainly to raise the problem of radical skepticism and to elicit various intuitions about meaning and knowledge (Putnam 1981). The basic intuition the story tries to pump is that the envatted brain, though fully conscious, has systematically false beliefs about the world, including itself. Some philosophers reject this intuition. They propose that the envatted brain’s beliefs are really about its artificial environment or that it.. (shrink)

PovertyPoverty is a serious threat for human beings and their well-beingWell-being. People are simply unable to live a good life when they are faced with severe problems, e.g., bad education, poor housing, poor sanitationSanitation, poor hygiene, or malnourishment. However, one of the most urgent problems with regard to poverty is badHealth/ healthcare, right toaccess access to primary health careGlobal healthcare and the allocation of health care resources for millions of people around the world. These people are deprived of human flourishing, (...) and life is for them, in general, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this chapter, I present an ethical argument that shows that people have a moral right to primary health carePrimary health care, and that wealthy developed countries are morally obligated to help the needy. Primary health care, and hence access to it is, as I will argue, a global public goodGlobal public good that is protected by human dignity and the human rightHuman rights of protection from unwarranted bodily harmHarm. (shrink)

In ‘Public Reason and Prenatal Moral Status’ (2015), Jeremy Williams argues that the ideal of Rawlsian public reason commits its devotees to the radically permissive view that abortion ought to be available with little or no qualification throughout pregnancy. This is because the only (allegedly) political value that favours protection of the foetus for its own sake—the value of ‘respect for human life’—turns out not to be a political value at all, and so its invocation in support of considerations bearing (...) upon the permissibility of abortion is beyond public reason’s remit. Thus, it will scarcely if ever be legitimate to restrict women’s equality and bodily autonomy for the sake of the foetus, even at full term. In this paper, I argue that Williams fails to establish that Rawlsian reasonable citizens must endorse the radically permissive stance vis-à-vis abortion. Citizens can, I claim, reasonably accord the value of respect for human life weight, and indeed converge on the claim that it outweighs other salient political values, during later stages of gestation. Nevertheless, Williams’s argument gets something right in that it reveals why the value of respect for human life is inadmissible at the bar of public reason in early stages of pregnancy. But then, far from throwing Rawlsian public reason into disrepute, Williams’s argument actually (albeit inadvertently) provides arguably more compelling grounds than any hitherto rallied for endorsing Rawls’s much maligned claim that opposition to the duly qualified right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy is ‘unreasonable’. (shrink)

The issues of human cloning and stem cell retrieval are inseparable in circumstances in which the rationale of self-preservation may be invoked as a negative right. I apply this rationale to a hypothetical case in which cloning is necessary to preserve the bodily integrity or life of an individual. Self-preservation as moral integrity is examined in a narrower context, i.e., as applicable to those for whom deliberate termination of embryonic life is morally-problematic. This issue is addressed through comparison with (...) two paradigms commonly used in support of clinical practice: the distinction between letting die and killing, and the permissibility of vital organ retrieval after death. Although these paradigms are questionable in their own right, they offer a rationale by which scientists and clinicians may respect the negative right to moral integrity of those with whom they disagree. (shrink)

Psychiatric inpatients with capacity may be treated paternalistically under the Mental Health Act 1983. This violates bodily autonomy and causes potentially significant harm to health and moral status, both of which may be long-lasting. I suggest that such harms may extend to killing moral persons through the impact of psychotropic drugs on psychological connectedness. Unsurprisingly, existing legislation is overwhelmingly disliked by psychiatric inpatients, the majority of whom have capacity. I present four arguments for involuntary treatment: individual safety, public (...) safety, authentic wishes and protection of autonomy. I explore these through a case study: a patient with schizophrenia admitted to a psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act 1983 after an episode of self-poisoning. Through its discussion of preventative detention, the public safety argument articulates the ethical underpinnings of the current position in English law. Ultimately, none of the four arguments are cogent—all fail to justify the current legal discrimination faced by psychiatric inpatients. I conclude against any use of involuntary treatment in psychiatric inpatients with capacity, endorsing the fusion approach where only psychiatric patients lacking capacity may be treated involuntarily. (shrink)

This chapter tries to make sense of a particular aspect of our contemporary experience: the so-called “post-truth era.” This era is characterized by strong polarization where it seems like the arguments and opinions of the opposing sides are informed by different realities. When beliefs are still held despite being debunked by contradicting evidence, it is easy to dismiss the opponent as “irrational,” resulting in breakdown of communication. This chapter argues that such beliefs may still feel right because they connect (...) to something deeper in the bodily awareness and lived experience, which Eugene Gendlin calls the “felt sense” or “felt meaning.” When we are disconnected from this bodily sense, it can result in various articulations which do not make sense at a surface level but critiquing the surface level articulations while ignoring their source often results in frustration and anger. Rather than dismissing people’s rationality, we should assume they have reasons for holding their beliefs, although they may not be able to articulate those reasons. Drawing on the works of Gendlin I argue for a sympathetic yet critical listening to the bodily sense which requires attention to the whole situation of our social environment. (shrink)

Francis Beckwith’s Defending life: a moral and legal case against abortion choice defends the pro-life position on moral, legal and political grounds. In this critical notice I consider three key issues and argue that Beckwith’s treatment of each of them is unpersuasive. The issues are: (1) whether abortion is politically justified by the principle that we should err on the side of liberty in the face of reasonable disagreement over the moral status of the fetus; (2) whether the fetus’s natural (...) capacity or genetic propensity to develop rationality and communication is sufficient to give it a moral right to life; and (3) whether abortion is morally justified on the basis of bodily rights. I also show that Beckwith’s book fails to consider several important issues and arguments. (shrink)

Whereas previous discussions on ownership of biological material have been much informed by the natural rights tradition, insufficient attention has been paid to the strand in liberal political theory represented by Felix Cohen, Tony Honoré, and others, which treats property relations as socially constructed bundles of rights. In accordance with that tradition, we propose that the primary normative issue is what combination of rights a person should have to a particular item of biological material. Whether that bundle (...) qualifies to be called “property” or “ownership” is a secondary, terminological issue. We suggest five principles of bodily rights and show how they can be applied to the construction of ethically appropriate bundles of rights to biological material. (shrink)

The right to bodily integrity (RBI) may seem inapt for inclusion in this volume, which is supposed to address new human rights, for as A. M. Viens notes, the RBI is a long-standing fixture in the philosophical and legal discussion of rights. However, Viens does, I think, make a good case for the right’s inclusion here. Not only does he note the increasing recognition of a new right to genital integrity derived from the more general RBI, he (...) also argues for a new conceptualisation of the RBI itself: he argues that we ought to decompose the RBI into several constituent rights, delineated according to the different values from which they derive – rights to bodily autonomy, bodily dignity, bodily ownership, well-being, and so on. (shrink)

An argument against treating our bodies as commodities No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in (...) commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, Our Bodies, Whose Property? challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. Anne Phillips explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. What, she asks, is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? Phillips contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But she also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, Our Bodies, Whose Property? demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend. (shrink)

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds and adults evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations—whether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other (...) person approved of the action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights. (shrink)

We present an argument in support of the legal prohibition of infant male circumcision (IMC) in developed Western countries. We submit that all IMC, irrespective of whether the motivation behind it be secular or religious, violates children’s rights to self-determination (autonomy) and bodily integrity and is therefore morally illegitimate. And while IMC’s being morally wrong does not entail that it ought to be criminalised, we contend that it should be legally proscribed so as to protect children against harm (...) and to uphold their rights. We consider and reject an argument that an exemption from the legal ban should be granted to religious parents who perceive themselves to be under a moral obligation to subject their male infants to IMC. We argue that since IMC sets back children’s basic interests and violates their rights, there is no room, and no case, for the conferring of a religious exemption. (shrink)

This study in moral, political, and legal philosophy contends that it is morally impermissible to circumcise male minors without a medical indication (nontherapeutic circumcision). Male minors have a moral anticipatory autonomy right-in-trust not to be circumcised. This right depends on norms of autonomy and bodily integrity. These norms generate three direct non-consequentialist arguments against nontherapeutic circumcision: (1) the loss of nonrenewable functional tissue, (2) genital salience, and (3) limits on a parental right to permanently modify their sons' bodies. (...) An indirect argument holds (4) that if it is morally impermissible to remove the female prepuce (clitoral hood), then it is also morally impermissible to remove the male prepuce (foreskin). Although there is debate across medical cultures, a reasonable understanding supports the claim that nontherapeutic circumcision causes some harms and imposes unwarranted risks on male minors. The overall moral case applies to secular circumcisions and, with some qualifications, to religious circumcisions in Judaism and Islam. Arguments of political philosophy that invoke the freedom of religion, toleration, multiculturalism, and social meaning qualify somewhat, but do not eliminate, the case against circumcising male minors without a medical indication. Nevertheless, the arguments deployed in this study do not warrant legal interference at this time with secular and religious practices of nontherapeutic circumcision. (shrink)

According to the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection, human persons will have an embodied existence in eternity. Many Christian materialists, especially Lynne Rudder Baker, Trenton Merricks, and Kevin Corcoran, argue that the doctrine of bodily resurrection creates serious problems for substance dualism (dualism). These critiques argued that bodily resurrection is made trivial by dualism, that dualism makes it difficult if not impossible to explain why we need to be embodied, or that dualism should be rejected as (...) class='Hi'>bodily resurrection is better accounted for by a materialist view. As of yet, there has been no systematic analysis of these arguments in the literature. This paper fills that gap and argues that each of these objections to dualism fail. In making these arguments I make use of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to provide a theory of embodiment for substance dualism. Accordingly, the body is a complex structural mode of the soul. The essence of the soul is the internal efficient cause and teleological guide of the functions and structure of the body. As such, the body is an ensouled physical structure, not a mere physical machine, but has both physical and non-physical aspects. (shrink)

What are the ethics of child genital cutting? In a recent issue of the journal, Duivenbode and Padela (2019) called for a renewed discussion of this question. Noting that modern health care systems...

_ Source: _Page Count 18 There are two ways to transfer a bodily right. One might transfer a bodily right in a detaching way – that is, without transferring jurisdiction over one’s future bodily choices. Alternately, one might transfer a bodily right in an attaching way – that is, in a way that transfers such jurisdiction. For instance, A might sell his kidney to B for money paid at the time of the transplant. Alternately, A might (...) accept money now, agreeing to give up his kidney some time down the road. In the latter case and not the former, B acquires normative jurisdiction over A’s future bodily choices. In this paper I will argue that the distinction between attaching and detaching transfers of bodily rights has implications regarding whether certain contracts and agreements should be legally enforced – and whether problems arise when the moral and legal transferability of these rights comes apart. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 18 There are two ways to transfer a bodily right. One might transfer a bodily right in a detaching way – that is, without transferring jurisdiction over one’s future bodily choices. Alternately, one might transfer a bodily right in an attaching way – that is, in a way that transfers such jurisdiction. For instance, A might sell his kidney to B for money paid at the time of the transplant. Alternately, A might (...) accept money now, agreeing to give up his kidney some time down the road. In the latter case and not the former, B acquires normative jurisdiction over A’s future bodily choices. In this paper I will argue that the distinction between attaching and detaching transfers of bodily rights has implications regarding whether certain contracts and agreements should be legally enforced – and whether problems arise when the moral and legal transferability of these rights comes apart. (shrink)

Though the authors of this commentary have deep felt doubts about the fruitfulness of Björkman and Hansson’s analysis of bodily rights, they do not doubt their capacity to develop both creative and provocative thoughtsIt is always welcoming to be confronted with thoughts that, even though one wholeheartedly disagrees with them, have the effect of stimulating one’s own reflections on matters, which without such confrontations, would have been less distinct, less critical—and we would gladly admit, less polemical. Thus it (...) is thanks to Barbro Björkman and Sven Ove Hansson’s article, “Bodily rights and property rights”, that we have been able to set our present course into these murky waters. The issue they want to address is by no means of a kind that lends itself easily to theoretical speculation. This has, perhaps, as much to do with the inherent intricacy of the issue itself as with the controversy it has managed to arouse. The issue is: is it possible to have ownership over one’s own body—that is, is it appropriate to treat the body and its components as property? What are the implications of conceptualising the body and its parts in terms of property? Should one, as a general rule, be able to sell and buy human biological material? If so, who should be allowed to buy and sell it? Does the sale or donation of one’s own bodily parts imply a transfer of ownership rights to the buyer or receiver, or is it rather that ownership of human bodily parts can only be acquired after the material has been, say, manipulated in a laboratory?Contrary to Björkman and Hansson, who see “the primary normative issue” to be “what combination of rights a person should have to a particular item of biological material”, we believe that their decision to construe …. (shrink)

Several arguments suggest that motor planning may share embodied neural mechanisms with mental rotation (MR). However, it is not well established whether this overlap occurs regardless of the type of stimulus that is manipulated, in particular manipulable or non-manipulable objects and body parts. We here used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the cognitive similarity between MR of objects that do not afford specific hand actions (chairs) and bodily stimuli (hands). Participants had identical response options for both types of (...) stimuli, and they gave responses orally in order to prevent possible interference with motor imagery. MR of hands and chairs generated very similar behavioral responses, time-courses and neural sources of evoked-response potentials (ERPs). ERP segmentation analysis revealed distinct time windows during which differential effects of stimulus type and angular disparity were observed. An early period (90–160 ms) differentiated only between stimulus types, and was associated with occipito-temporal activity. A later period (290–330 ms) revealed strong effects of angular disparity, associated with electrical sources in the right angular gyrus and primary motor/somatosensory cortex. These data suggest that spatial transformation processes and motor planning are recruited simultaneously, supporting the involvement of motor emulation processes in MR. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 4, Page 850-867, August 2022.

Libertarians often rely on arguments that subordinate the principle of liberty to the value of its economic consequences. This invites the question of what a pure libertarian theory of justice—one that takes liberty as its overriding concern—would look like. Grotius's political theory provides a template for such a libertarianism, but it also entails uncomfortable commitments that can be avoided only by compromising the principle of liberty. According to Grotius, each person should be free to decide how to act as (...) long as her actions do not violate the equal liberty of others. According to this principle, however, people are free to enter any contract and alienate any rights, permitting even contracts of slavery or the alienation of rights of bodily integrity. Libertarians can escape this commitment to absolute freedom of contract only by adopting ad-hoc amendments to the principle of liberty. (shrink)

Some responses to analogies between abortion and infanticide appeal to Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument for the permissibility of abortion. I argue that these responses fail because a parallel argument can be constructed for the permissibility of infanticide. However, an argument on the grounds of a right to choose to become a parent can maintain that abortion is permissible but infanticide is not by recognizing the normative significance and nature of parenthood. -/- Certaines réponses aux analogies entre l'avortement et l'infanticide font (...) appel à l'argument de Judith Jarvis Thomson en faveur de la licéité morale de l'avortement pour désamorcer ces analogies. Je soutiens que ces réponses échouent parce qu'un argument parallèle peut être construit en faveur de la licéité de l'infanticide. Cependant, un argument reposant sur le droit de choisir de devenir parent permet de soutenir que l'avortement est autorisé mais que l'infanticide ne l'est pas en reconnaissant le sens et la nature normatifs de la parentalité. (shrink)

The practice of solitary confinement (SC) is established within the literature as a common occurrence of torture within the prison system, and many international and national human rights organizations have called for its abolition. A somewhat more contentious topic in the literature is the practice of force feeding (FF) of hunger-striking prisoners. The paper aims to make a case against FF by establishing a parity argument that states the following: If SC is considered an immoral practice (and indeed it (...) should be), it should follow that FF is morally impermissible as well. In conclusion, this paper will argue that FF of hunger-striking prisoners is a violation of their fundamental moral rights and constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment and, therefore, should be abolished. (shrink)

In the United States and elsewhere, there is substantial controversy regarding the use of race and ethnicity by police in determining whom to stop, question, and investigate in relation to crime and security issues. In the ethics literature, the debate about profiling largely focuses on the nature of profiling and when (if ever) profiling is morally justifiable. This essay addresses the related, but distinct, issue of whether states have a duty to collect information about the race and ethnicity of persons (...) stopped by police. I argue that states in the U.S. do have such a duty on the grounds that such information collection would help secure the value of persons’ human rights against discrimination and unfair policing. Nonetheless, a large number of states do not require it. I begin by distinguishing rights from the value of rights, and arguing that under certain conditions persons have claims to the value of rights themselves, and that states have duties to secure that value. I then turn to the issue of profiling and offer the value of rights argument in favor of information collection about the race and ethnicity of persons stopped by police. (shrink)

Many of the most popular liberal arguments for cultural rights all note that the world is formed into groups. But in the attempt to universalise these arguments, it is too often assumed that the nation is the most important of these groups. This focus upon the nation ignores the many and varying bases of self?respect. It overlooks the fact that self?respect may be tied to many different kinds of groups. Further, most discussions of cultural rights are (...) fuelled by the experience of particular groups. Which groups depends on the theorist and issue at hand. The discussion may be sound for the particular group being discussed. But then many cultural rights theorists, in generalising from one case to others, may not have good reason to do so, leading into a mistaken universalism. The study of cultural rights arguments, with closer reference to the case studies that underpin them, should serve to limit illicit generalisation and to illuminate the true value of cultural rights arguments. (shrink)

Oppressive governments that use violence against citizens, e.g. murder and torture, are usually thought of as liable to armed revolutionary attack by the oppressed population. But oppression may be non-violent. A government may greatly restrict political rights and personal autonomy by using surveillance, propaganda, manipulation, strategic detention and similar techniques without ever resorting to overt violence. Can such regimes be liable to revolutionary attack? A widespread view is that the answer is ‘no’. On this view, unless a government is (...) or is likely to turn violent, revolution against it is disproportional. After all, revolution would involve launching potentially lethal attacks against oppressors who do not threaten the lives and bodily integrity of their subjects but pose only lesser threats. I argue that this claim of disproportionality is false. Armed revolution against Stably Non-violent Oppressive Regimes can be proportional under some circumstances, thus they may be liable to revolutionary attack. My argument relies on the Responsibility-Sensitive Account of Proportionality. This account holds that responsibility for posing threats renders agents liable to greater defensive harms than the harms with which they threaten. Even if non-violent oppressive regimes do not threaten citizens with murder, serious physical injury, or enslavement, their responsibility for creating an environment in which citizens’ political rights and personal autonomy are extremely restricted may loosen the proportionality requirement of inflicting defensive harm and render them liable to revolutionary attack. (shrink)

abstract This paper examines, from a philosophical point of view, the ethics of the role of the family and the deceased in decisions about organ retrieval. The paper asks: Who, out of the individual and the family, should have the ultimate power to donate or withhold organs? On the side of respecting the wishes of the deceased individual, the paper considers and rejects arguments by analogy with bequest and from posthumous bodily integrity. It develops an argument for posthumous (...) autonomy based on the liberal idea of self‐development and argues that this establishes a right of veto over donation. It claims, however, that whether the family's power to veto would conflict with posthumous autonomy rights depends on how it comes about. On the side of respecting the family's wishes, the paper first considers an argument from family distress. This supports a contingent, non‐rights‐based reason for the family's power that is trumped by the deceased's rights. It then outlines and criticises an argument based on family autonomy. The conclusion is that the individual has the right to veto the family's wish to donate and that, while the family has no right to veto the individual's wishes to donate, it can legitimately acquire this power and has done so in practice. (shrink)

The idea of basic action is a fixed point in the contemporary investigation of the nature of action. And while there are arguments aimed at putting the idea in place, it is meant to be closer to a gift of common sense than to a hard-won achievement of philosophical reflection. It first appears at the stage of innocuous description and before the announcement of philosophical positions. And yet, as any decent magician knows, the real work so often gets done (...) in the set-up. I argue that the seemingly innocent idea of basic action is, in fact, bound up with a wide-spread conception of the nature of bodily or physical action (section 3). Its legitimacy is vital to the intelligibility of the causal theory of action, according to which physical action consists of a mere event and a condition of mind joined (in the right way) by the bond of causality. Left unchecked, means-end reason threatens to permeate physical action, and thus threatens the sovereignty of the sphere of material events at the center of the causal theory: such events, including the movements of one’s body when one intentionally moves it, are thought to be constitutively independent of the subject’s rational capacities. Basic action is a necessary countermeasure, a sort of metaphysical containment wall needed to preserve the separate jurisdictions of the mind of the acting subject and what merely happens. I argue that so long as action theory proceeds under the assumption that there must be basic action, it must regard our relation to the progress of our own deeds as not different in principle from Marx’s understanding of the relation of the non-worker (Nichtarbeiter) to the material processes that realize his own ideas, namely the work done on the factory floor. Each is alienated from the progress, or getting done, of his deeds. In each the process of doing something intentionally turns out to be a case of delegating tasks to another power. How the process comes to completion is not willed, and at best watched: the causal work is not the agent’s work, his knowledge not self-knowledge (section 5). We should find this unacceptable. And if this is right, it should be a pressing question whether there must be basic action. I argue that we have no good reason to think so: basic action is not forced on us by argument (sections 2 and 4). It is open to us to consider an alternative, one on which action is not, in the fundamental case, barren of means- end structure, but instead permeated by it: we register as a force in nature not at the limit of the means-end order but precisely in its constitution. [from article introduction]. (shrink)

The right to bodily integrity is a controversial issue within moral, political and legal discourse. This first collection of scholarly research articles provides a comprehensive overview of the debates around the ethical and legal aspects of the right to bodily integrity and its implications in theory and practice. The selected essays examine topics such as pregnancy and reproduction, altering children's bodies, transplantation, controversial modifications and surgeries, and experimentation and dead bodies.

Abstract:There is a role for regulatory oversight over new genetic technologies. Research must ensure the rights of human subjects, and all medical products and techniques should be ensured to be safe and effective. In the United States, these forms of regulation are largely the purview of the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. Some have argued, however, that human genetic therapies require new regulatory agencies empowered to enforce cultural norms, protect against hypothetical social harms, or (...) ensure that the human genome remains unchanged. Focusing on the United States, this essay will briefly review these arguments and argue that the current limited regulatory role over human gene therapies is sufficient to protect public health, bodily autonomy, and reproductive freedom. (shrink)

Some people oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses have full moral status and thus a right to not be killed. We argue that special obligations that hold between mother and fetus also hold between parents and their children. We argue that if these special obligations necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then they also necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of organ donation. If we accept the argument that it (...) is obligatory to override a woman’s bodily autonomy for the sake of an unborn child’s survival, we must continue to override the bodily autonomy of parents to ensure the survival of their living children, until the parent no longer has a special obligation to their child to the same degree as their special obligation to the fetus. And if the life of a child is truly more important than the bodily autonomy of its parents, as must be the case to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, this should remain true until such a time that their children are no longer considered their responsibility. Thus, parity of reasoning suggests that policies compelling the gestation of a fetus should be accompanied by policies compelling organ donation. (shrink)