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Whose Body?
Published in Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce P. Blackshaw, Daniel Rodger, Agency, Pregnancy and Persons, 2023
This section addresses this question of what we might call the metaphysics of self-ownership. It is no more than a preliminary discussion, a sketch of some considerations that suggest two complementary claims. First, a claim of any person to “self-ownership” of his or her body in any deep metaphysical sense is offset by every person’s ultimate inability to “own” the fact that this is his or her body. Each person is radically unanswerable for the fact of their bodily existence and the relation in which they stand to their particular body.
Health care needs, justice and rights to health care
Published in Ian Rees Jones, Professional Power and the Need for Health Care, 2018
The New Right are not a homogenous group of thinkers and there are a number of streams of thought which can be described as New Right in origin. However, there are common elements to the approach of the New Right to the concept of needs and health care needs. Firstly, the New Right see the expression of individual preferences through the market mechanism not only as a more effective means of distributing resources, but also as having moral superiority over any attempt to plan on the basis of need. Secondly, the libertarian stream within the New Right equates personal health with individual responsibility as a means of promoting the ideal of ‘self ownership’. This can be seen in Hayek’s (1944) arguments concerning the link between markets and freedom, and Nozick’s (1974) attacks on taxation, setting limits on its legitimacy as a means of supporting welfare provision.
‘Needs’ and ‘wants’
Published in John Spiers, Patients, Power and Responsibility, 2018
The touchstone test – of individual self-responsibility and the power to be self-responsible – is revealed (without any need for further refinement) in Akroyd’s words. It concerns the separation of ownership and control, or of self-ownership and self-responsibility. It is by Akroyd’s words that any proposal for decentralisation or ‘consultation’ or any other substitutes for consumer choice should be tested. My argument is that all other substitutes are political kites. They will remain insufficient because they are evasions. So, too, are such substitutes for individual responsibility (although offered as half-way houses) as private-public partnerships and limited contracting out of services to the private sector. For none of these, nor decentralisation, will reduce the range of issues that will still be decided by political means, or minimise the extent to which Government (national or regional) retains the power of choice for itself. Substitutes will not correct over-government and the imperfections of ‘Government failure’. And while economic power remains joined to political power in healthcare, then the actual decentralisation of control and the necessary prompts to spontaneous order are beyond our reach.
Is It Ethical to Mandate SARS-CoV-2 Vaccinations among Incarcerated Persons?
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
A libertarian counterargument, as applied by Sandel, holds that evidence of benefit is insufficient cause to mandate infringement upon individual rights to self-ownership (Sandel 2016). That point should not be dismissed lightly, particularly as any further infringement upon incarcerated persons would be compounding the effects of various infringements on a population already vulnerable to coercion (Moser et al. 2004). However, Nozick in considering extreme examples of individual freedoms conceded the possibility that in certain cases, in order to avoid “catastrophic moral horror,” social well-being may trump individual rights (Nozick 2013). The question then becomes, does this instance constitute a “catastrophic moral horror?” Here we must pause to consider the concept of herd immunity.
An anthropophagic proposition in occupational therapy knowledge: Driving our actions towards social life
Published in World Federation of Occupational Therapists Bulletin, 2022
The third concepts suggested as purposes of occupational therapy practice are emancipation and autonomy, with a focus on the promotion of conditions of freedom and social life for individuals and collectives. The idea of emancipation was debated throughout the twentieth century, mainly by the theorists of the Frankfurt School, who relied on Marxism to define possible social emancipation (Santos, 2005). Emancipation can be understood as the ability of people, from their reflection on the uncertainties of contemporaneity and their perception of social contradictions, to restore themselves as autonomous individuals by critically thinking about their human condition, guided by a praxis that enables a process directed toward social transformation. This process can only occur if there is a degree of autonomy, of self-ownership, but of a type that fosters and enables connections (rather than disconnections) with society, resulting in freedom as a marker that allows individual expression in the social world (Safatle, 2019). In this conjunction, the proposition focuses on the relevance of occupational therapists acting in emancipatory practices jointly aimed at developing opportunities for knowledge, productivity, and recognition that are directed towards processes of individual and social autonomy. This results from an intervention that pursues ‘concrete alternatives of potency and potentiality of individuals and collectives’ (Lussi, 2020, p. 1.344).
Aporia of the Gift: Precision Medicine’s Obligations Without Expectations
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2021
Although Lee emphasizes social recognition as the target of exchange in “the gift,” social recognition generated from a biospecimen “gift” inescapably trades on the body and its labor to instigate a transaction intended to grant previously withheld social recognition. Labor and ownership are problematically conceptually linked, especially in how property ownership historically arose from the exploitation of other people’s bodies and labor (Thomson 1990). Bodily-self ownership is a frequent premise in political and bioethical accounts of autonomy and rights to self-determination, but the complicated history of property rights, ownership, and labor undermine “self-ownership” as a concept supporting social justice aims (Lanphier 2021). This holds for “self-ownership” of one’s biospecimens and data that is then “gifted” to researchers.