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This chapter argues that the duty of assistance includes a duty to make some of one’s body parts available, before death, to those who need them. It claims that however demanding such duty may seem at first sight, it can be delineated in such a way as to preserve the interest of the healthy in living a minimally flourishing life.

Pregnant women and persons engaging in homosexual practices compose two groups that have been and still are among those most severely subjected to coercive restrictions regarding their own bodies. From an historical point of view, it is a recent and rare phenomenon that a woman’s right to abortion and a person’s right to engage in homosexual interactions are recognized. Although most Western liberal states currently do recognize these rights, they are under continuous assault from various political and religious movements. Moreover, though liberal theories of justice typically defend women’s rights to abortion and people’s rights to homosexual activity, these theories often struggle to capture the fundamental ground for these rights. For example, it appears hard for the liberal to say why and when only the woman and not the embryo/fetus has rights and why the right to certain sexual practices is not on par with rights to other preferences. Contemporary liberal theories of justice, therefore, have a hard time identifying what distinguishes questions of abortion and sexual activities from other questions of right and thereby also have difficulty capturing the gravity of the wrongdoing involved in coercively restricting homosexual interactions and abortion as such. I argue that Kant’s theory of justice succeeds on both counts, because it can locate the fundamental ground for these rights in an understanding of the bodily integrity of the person. Just states will neither permit nor outlaw all abortions or sexual interactions, but rather will require all such laws to be reconcilable with the protection of each person’s right to freedom.

This chapter sets out the theory of justice which underpins the book’s central claims. It argues that all human beings have a fundamental interest in living a minimally flourishing life of which autonomy and well-being are central components, which in turn, implies that they all have rights against the better-off to the material resources they need to lead such a life. However, the better off are under a duty to help if, and only if, they would not jeopardize their own prospects for a minimally flourishing life.

This chapter argues that the duty of assistance outlined in Chapter 1 includes a duty to make one’s organs available upon death to those who need them. It reviews analogies and disanalogies between the confiscation of cadaveric organs and inheritance taxes, and claims that the healthy be exempt from their duty to the sick if, and only if, they can deploy a conscientious objection to not being buried or cremated intact.

The purpose of this chapter is to give an account of the body rights that are relevant to transplantation. The chapter first explains the idea of moral rights. It then argues that we have rights of bodily integrity and rights to individual autonomy, which is characterized as ‘personal sovereignty’. The chapter develops a model of personal sovereignty in the light of apparently conflicting practices and of the doctrine of informed consent in medicine. It concludes by replying to some criticisms of a rights approach. In addition to giving its own account of rights, to be used later in the book, the chapter also introduces concepts, such as negative and positive rights, autonomy, informed consent, and ownership, that figure prominently in discussions of transplantation.

Chapter 2 explores the doctrinal history of personality rights in Scotland, knowledge of which is essential to an understanding of the present law. The Roman delict of iniuria (which protected one’s body, reputation and dignity) became in Scots law the crime and delict of “injury”. This was divisible into “real injury” (iniuria realis) ie caused “by an act” (re) and “verbal injury” (iniuria verbalis) caused “by words” (verbis).The former had sub-categories eg mutilation, and demembration, whereas “verbal injury” had none until defamation in the 19th century. Since “verbal injury” lacked subcategories the term was frequently used whereas “real injury” had high-profile sub-categories and so was rarely used. This historical quirk explains why “verbal injury” has survived into modern Scots law whereas doubts exist whether the concept of real injury has survived. The fact that “verbal injury” operated both as a second-level category and a third-level category promoted conceptual confusion and loose usage. Nevertheless the chapter shows that the Institutional writers and other authorities affirmed the existence of “injury” as a unitary field of delictual liability.

This chapter aims to identify the particular structure of rights and duties that ought to apply to the use and storage of bodily material. This requires an assessment of whether the rights that arise in items of bodily material are conceptually consistent with property rights. It is argued here that a right in bodily material that is in-itself is conceptually consistent with property rights and therefore such rights ought to obtain the legal structure of property rights. However, rights in bodily material that is for-itself or for-others are exclusive but non-contingent rights. In addition, insofar as these items of bodily material are self-ascribed, such rights are ambiguous. Rights in bodily material that is for-itself or for-others therefore ought to adopt a structure that is akin to the common law right to privacy. Hence, the law ought to develop a dualist approach to the legal status of bodily material.

This chapter examines how human rights discourses and norms ostracize others—along with those lives seen to exemplify them—from the purview of full personhood. In particular, it explains how anxiety about the body finds its central expression in the dual myths of human dignity and bodily integrity. It considers one popular instantiation of human rights discourse—a genre known as the “human rights bestseller”—and how liberalism's aversion toward the body masks and condones concrete discrimination against raced, gendered, and otherwise disadvantaged populations. It argues that liberalism's reluctance about embodiment lurks behind many of the missed opportunities of human rights and explores how ambivalence toward embodiment that plagues liberal theories of selfhood and political practice comes to be reproduced within theoretical models for framing the troubled relationship between narrative literature and human rights.

This chapter offers a reading of Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero to highlight the fragile status of women's rights as well as the discordant relationship between the individual and the collective. Through the protagonist Firdaus—an Egyptian prostitute on death row for the offense of murder—Woman at Point Zero experiments not so much with the idiom of rights alone as with corresponding liberal vocabularies of selfhood. This chapter examines the formal properties of Woman at Point Zero and how they probe the appropriate mode and genre for representing human rights violations. It also considers how Firdaus's experience of her erotic life contravenes notions of privacy, bodily integrity, and consent that are typically associated with liberal political thought accounts for embodiment. Finally, it explores how popular discourses surrounding female circumcision/female genital mutilation divulge the problematic assumptions often embedded within idealized conceptions of bodily integrity.

This chapter aims to identify two ‘conceptual’ features of property rights and then consider how these features align with the right to bodily integrity. Property rights enable the rights-holder to exclude others from an object or resource, which thereby preserves an open-ended set of activities with regards to the object or resource. Property rights also enable preferences and choices that can exist independently of the particular rights-holder. The right to bodily integrity is akin to property rights insofar as the right is also an exclusive right, but differs from property rights as the right to bodily integrity enables preferences and choices that cannot exist independently of the rights-holder. The extent to which the right to bodily integrity differs from property rights in this regard depends on the (first-person or third-person) perspective of the body.

This chapter looks at how domestic violence shelters have become bases of political thought and action; by providing physical spaces for safety and support, these shelters have defied one of the most brutal expressions of gender inequality—male violence—by protecting a woman’s basic right to bodily integrity. For most of history the law has failed to protect women attacked by intimate partners, leading to the question of whether or not battered women are understood as citizens of the state at all. The chapter argues that if women cannot move and act freely in the public sphere, or if they are intimidated in the privacy of their homes, their ability to act as citizens is limited. Domestic violence shelters have thus become places of refuge for these women, within which they can build their self-esteem and acquire a greater autonomy for themselves.

This book analyzes how interwar cultural critics in France reconstructed the meaning of bodily integrity through the elaboration of fantasies about the body-violating qualities of pornography and homosexuality. It explores how shifts in the historical meaning of sexuality are related to shifts in the fantasmic concept of bodily integrity; how discussions about sexual behaviors and representations are then constitutive of the integral body; why pornography and homosexuality were invested with a psychic and cultural charge so forceful that critics perceived them as capable of unbinding the impermeable body, and with that body, the social world of metaphorical territories and boundaries fashioned in its image; and how the experience of violence was figured and inscribed in the social body. The book also describes the process by which pornography and homosexuality came to symbolize the modern violation of human dignity and thus traces one of many complicated narratives that fashioned the liberal social body. That process was inextricable from the reconstitution of the integral male body in new terms after World War I.

This chapter uses amputation and Jesus’s instruction to amputate one’s own appendages to discuss the question of bodily integrity as it relates to the resurrection. It examines the evidence for reading the saying literally and asks why modern scholarship refuses to consider the possibility that Jesus is encouraging bodily deformity.

This chapter aims to identify the ‘structural’ (or ‘doctrinal’) features of property law, compare these features with other branches of law, and consider how these features have been applied to the use and storage of bodily material. Since property rights are exclusive rights, property rights are exercisable against an open-set of persons, actionable per se, and impose duties of non-interference. This set of features can explain why there is pressure on the common law to recognize property rights in bodily material: to pull the entitlements in bodily material behind an ‘exclusionary boundary’. Additionally, since property rights are also rights that can exist independently of the particular rights-holder, they impose corrective remedial duties and are transferable. This set of features can begin to explain why there are limits to the appropriate application of property law: not all rights regarding an object or resource can exist independently of the rights-holder.

This chapter examines how the Philippine Women's Centre deploys the language of rights in practice. It traces how certain boundaries naturalise domestic workers' unequal access to rights and considers whether rights discourse is itself a flawed and limited resource that throws responsibility for social inequality onto individuals and deepens the regulatory reach of the state. A close study of the Philippine Women's Centre's nimble use of rights discourse suggests the limits of a purely theoretical critique of rights. Four spatial arguments about rights are advanced: we inhabit multiple spaces and multiple discourses and this allows important room for manoeuvre; human rights is itself a fragmented discourse that has emerged from and is deployed in particular ways in specific geographical contexts; geographical scale can be exploited in productive ways; and universal rights are an ‘empty space’ that can be used to reveal exclusions and acquire concrete rights.

This chapter deals with damages in the context of tort law. In this case, the greater the loss, the larger the damages award. The chapter examines this fundamental commitment. It argues that it is unfair that someone wealthy, like Mick Jagger, would be owed greater compensation if he were negligently injured in a crash involving his luxury car than the average person would be if the roles were reversed. The chapter pursues a justification for the kind of consequential loss-based tort that would enable someone like Mick Jagger to be so compensated, but finds none. While the case is strong for fully compensating someone for negligently inflicted bodily injury insofar as everyone has a right of bodily integrity, the case for compensating someone for negligently caused lost wealth is weak for such compensation is neither essential to respecting bodily integrity nor does anyone have a moral obligation “to ensure that the wealthy remain wealthy.”

This chapter continues the analysis of the lex Aquilia from the previous chapter. The first section examines the statutory definition of the delict as iniuria. The second section deals with the protection of a freeman's bodily integrity. The third section discusses the usus modernus legis aquiliae. The last section explores various contributions towards the modern, generalised law of delict.