I, Me, Mine: Body‐Ownership and the Generation Problem

Woollard, Fiona

doi:10.1111/papq.12156

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

2016

DOI: 10.1111/papq.12156

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I, Me, Mine: Body‐Ownership and the Generation Problem

Fiona Woollard

Abstract: The Body Ownership Thesis states that each person owns her body. I address a prominent objection, the Generation Problem: the Body Ownership Thesis apparently implies that parents own their children: as we own the fruit of our property, if a parent owns her own body, she must own her child and her child's body. I argue that a person does not own the fruit of her property when that fruit is a person or the body of a person. Persons have conclusive title to their bodies, but only defeasible title to the fruits o… Show more

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“…But precise language would be, 'I have a property right in that thing, in that car,' or 'I own that car.'" See on this: Alstott, 2004;Block, 2016, forthcoming;Cohen, 1992;Curchin, 2007;Fried, 2004Fried, , 2005Hicks, 2015;Jeske, 1996;Kinsella, 2006;Okin, 1991;Shnayderman, 2012;Torsell and Block,2019;Woollard, 2016;Young, 2015. Published: January 2023 MESTE │3…”

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Rejoinder to Kinsella on Ownership and the Voluntary Slave Contract

Block¹

2023

MEST

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Kinsella (2022) separates selling from ownership. He denies the claim that if you can’t sell it, you don’t (fully) own it. He rejects the notion that if you fully own it, you can sell it. He also rejects voluntary slavery and specific performance contracts. The present paper is an attempt to defend both claims. Does this debate between Kinsella and I have any practical consequences? Certainly not vis a vis the voluntary slave issue. That can only have theoretical implications for the establishment and refinement of libertarian theory. But the specific performance issue does have some. Suppose a doctor, during a surgical operation, decides to walk out of the operating room right in the midst of this procedure, leaving the patient to die. Can he or can he not be compelled, with the full force of the law, to get back on the job? Or may a guard forcibly prevent the quit right at the moment of danger? These are some of the issues explored in the present paper.

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Rejoinder to Kinsella on Ownership and the Voluntary Slave Contract

Block¹

2023

MEST

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Some notes on the nature and limits of posthumous rights: a response to Persad

Aas

2019

J Med Ethics

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A person’s body can, it seems, survive well after losing the capacity to support Lockean personhood. If our rights in our bodies are, basically, rights in our selves or persons, this seems to imply that we do not after all have a right to direct the disposition of our living remains via advance directive. Govind Persad argues that our rights over our bodies persist after the loss of our personhood; we have a right to insist that our bodies die after we are gone for much the same reason that we have a right to decide whether or not to donate organs, after our death. Persad’s conclusion may be right; however, his arguments regarding body rights are insufficient. Persad’s suggestion that our rights in our bodies come from a history of acting and sensing through them cannot, quite, be right, since we act and sense through tools, as well. Nor should we accept Persad’s arguments, from intuitions in cases involving posthumous pregnancy, that our posthumous body rights (however acquired) are powerful enough to allow choices that will result in the death of beings that need our living remains to survive. Problems with these intuitions point to a more general concern for this sort of case-based intuitionistic method: it presupposes that what body rights we have is a matter of ‘natural right’, accessible to all, rather than a function of how social institutions do or should resolve conflicts about the proper way of defining our authority over our bodies.

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I, Me, Mine: Body‐Ownership and the Generation Problem

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

Rejoinder to Kinsella on Ownership and the Voluntary Slave Contract

Rejoinder to Kinsella on Ownership and the Voluntary Slave Contract

Some notes on the nature and limits of posthumous rights: a response to Persad

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