Political Phil. of the Body

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

You, and not anyone else, should get to decide what happens with your body. But why? Is it because you are your body? Or, rather, because you own your body? In this seminar, we will seek to answer this question, and explore related practical and theoretical issues. We’ll ask: what is a body, and what does it have to do with a self? Examining answers from analytic metaphysics, feminist philosophy, and disabilities studies, we’ll consider whether our rights in our bodies can come, directly, from our rights in our selves; and if so, how (if at all) we can use an account of the self to determine the boundaries of our bodily rights. We’ll also ask: what is to own something? Are ownership rights natural, or socially constructed? On this, we’ll consider Lockean, Humean, Kantian, and Hegelian accounts of property rights. We’ll ask whether any of these arguments concerning the natural or social character of property might not have implications for body rights as well. If body rights are ownership rights, are they socially constructed too? If so, how (if at all) can we find principles that tell us how to construct them? Throughout, we will consider various practical issues in political philosophy and bioethics that turn on difficult questions regarding our bodily rights, including but not limited to: the taxability or non-taxability of bodily resources; the possibility of body rights in inorganic items (an ‘extended body’ to match the much-discussed ‘extended mind’) markets in body parts and bodily services; and rights of research subjects in value created by the commercialization of tissues.