Content area
Full Text
Most of us believe that we have some kind of special moral authority over our own bodies. We tend to think, for instance, that I am not morally permitted to treat your body the same way that I am permitted to treat mine. While I may make decisions about what foods to put in my body or what kinds of medical procedures to undergo, I may not typically make the same decisions about your body. Some philosophers have tried to explain this in terms of self-ownership: people own their bodies and can do as they please with them. Just as I may not simply walk into your messy house and start cleaning up, I may not step in and force you to eat a healthy diet or make the right medical decisions. Like your house, proponents of self-ownership argue, your body is yours.
To unfamiliar ears, the idea of self-ownership may not seem especially contentious. After all, it is a matter of dispute just how stringent the rights are that people have over the things they own. There appears to be conceptual space, then, for different conceptions of self-ownership with different views about what kinds of interferences self-ownership prohibits. Self-ownership, however, has typically been defended by libertarian political philosophers who also defend highly stringent conceptions of ownership. As a result, the notion of self-ownership has become synonymous with the idea that people have incredibly stringent rights over their bodies. In fact, self-ownership is often understood to involve having the most stringent rights one can possibly have, consistent with everyone else having the same rights. According to Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, for instance, “full self-ownership is the logically strongest set of ownership rights that one can have over one’s person that is compatible with someone else having the same kind of ownership rights over everything else in the world.”1
This essay offers an alternative conception of self-ownership—Duty-Sensitive Self-Ownership—that is designed to overcome a crucial problem faced by highly stringent conceptions of self-ownership: the problem of minor intrusions. Anytime I make a noise that you did not consent to hear, or slightly pollute the air you breathe, I am intruding on your space in a small way. Such intrusions seem plainly permissible. Traditional,...