Body Autonomy
Body autonomy refers to the principle that individuals have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, free from external interference or coercion. This includes the right to make choices about healthcare, reproduction, and bodily integrity. It is a fundamental aspect of individual freedom and human rights, often central to debates around issues such as abortion, contraception, and medical treatment.
4 Key excerpts on "Body Autonomy"
eBook - ePubRethinking Autonomy
A Critique of Principlism in Biomedical Ethics
- John W. Traphagan(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 Self, Autonomy, and Body The only security against political slavery, is the check maintained over governors, by the diffusion of intelligence, activity, and public spirit among the governed. — J. S. Mill (1994:333) 2.1. Principles and Ethics In this chapter, I focus on the issue of autonomy, which I view as the conceptual product and generator of the Western (particularly American) notion of the self as atomistic and ontologically isolated from other selves. It is important to keep in mind the fact that theoretical approaches to culture that set up dichotomies between individualist versus collectivist societies are rarely, if ever, accurate. Nonetheless, political and philosophical doctrines that shape ethical decision making often are structured in terms of very clearly and simplistically elaborated ideas and assumptions about the relationship of one person to other persons and to the institutions that form society. The problem of autonomy lies at the center of the neoliberal emphasis on individual freedom and resistance to controlling authority (McNay 2009:56) that has had a profound influence on shaping principlist biomedical ethics, particularly when developing theories related to concepts such as paternalism or informed consent. Autonomy itself, however, is a cultural concept, not an objective, culturally transcendent given that grounds either the self or the way in which people think selves should be connected—or disconnected. Before moving into a discussion of autonomy, I want to keep in mind the fact that when American biomedical ethicists contemplate the creation of models for moral problem solving, they often do so with little awareness of the complex ways in which people in other societies conceptualize the nature of being human and, consequently, put together their ethical systems...
eBook - ePubThe Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom
Subjectivity and Power in the New Sexual Democratic Turn
- Leticia Sabsay(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...As such, autonomy refers to the control over ourselves and to the control that effectively extends cultural and political regulation to ‘others’ who are understood as lacking this autonomy. Just like those symbolic frontiers that shape the horizon of acceptable diversity, the liberal ontology of the subject imposes a limit on sexual politics in accordance with specific versions of individual autonomy. And so, the establishment of frontiers that normalize the map of diversity as well as the map of autonomy that sustains it continues to differentiate between possible and impossible political subjects. Ideas of sexual freedom are linked to a conception of autonomy that is based on the notion that subjects have an innate faculty to make autonomous choices on the basis of unconditioned reason and self-knowledge, two characteristics that shape what is understood as moral autonomy. But this idea of autonomy that conceives freedom mainly as freedom of choice also bases the capacity for being morally autonomous on notions of self-ownership, among which to be in possession of our own body takes center stage. As Anne Phillips points out, many liberal presumptions about moral autonomy are actually more dependent on notions of self-ownership than they would seem at first sight. In ‘Feminism and Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right?’ a review essay on Martha Nussbaum’s book, Sex and Social Justice, Phillips indicates that ‘liberalism is primarily driven by its commitment to free choice rather than its recognition of individuals as equal and separate.’ 20 Free choice, in this context, Phillips continues, is associated with the idea of being free to choose without the intervention of the State (or any other authority), pretty much along the lines of free market logic...
eBook - ePub- Marina Oshana(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The happy person, certainly, will not be ideally autonomous. Political Autonomy The idea of political autonomy or liberty can be specified in more than one way, but however it is interpreted, the idea depends on the status of the individual in relation to the state and to institutions of public and civic authority. It is open to question whether politically autonomous citizens must be self-governing or globally autonomous in the sense that concerns me in this book. However, many of the reasons for valuing political autonomy are related to the value of personal autonomy. As members of societies, particularly liberal democracies, persons ideally possess certain legal and political rights in relation to the state. Among these are the rights to own property, the right to move about freely and to speak freely, to be granted due process under law, to practice religion without fear, to educate one’s children, and to not be subject to unlawful detainment, search, and seizure of property. Arguably, the idea that we should have these legal and political rights rests on an idea about personal autonomy—on the idea, that is, that persons enjoy an inherent dignity in virtue of which they are entitled to a certain status before the state. As persons we have a standing that constrains both how we are to be treated and what we are permitted to do and expected to do vis à vis one another. As Robert Nozick reminds us, “What persons may and may not do to each other limits what they may do through the apparatus of the state, or to establish such an apparatus...
eBook - ePub- Howard Davis(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Willan(Publisher)
...20 Bodily integrity DOI: 10.4324/9781843924548-20 20.1 Introduction Privacy means little unless it includes the idea of a person’s right to control what happens to his or her own body. A person’s body cannot, by right, be touched, beaten, cut, entered, etc. by another without consent. Conversely, a person, by right, controls the uses to which his or her body is put. No one, by right, can be compelled, for example, to procreate, to use or not use contraception, to have an abortion, etc. We can properly speak of bodily integrity as a matter of ‘right’. It is central to the conception of personhood upon which fundamental rights are predicated. The freedoms inherent in the notion of bodily integrity are inherent in the meaning of being a ‘person’ or in the concept of human ‘dignity’. Bodily integrity receives its principal protection through the general law in a range of contexts which are outside the scope of this book. The criminal law prohibits all but the most trivial interferences. Similarly, interferences with bodily integrity can be the subject of a tort action aiming at damages or an injunction. ‘Interference, however slight, with a person’s elementary civil right to security of the person, and self-determination in relation to his own body, constitutes trespass to the person’. 1 Carelessness towards the person of others can be the basis of a negligence action. 1 Brazier, M.R. (1995) Clerk and Lindsell on Torts, 17th edn. London: Sweet & Maxwell, chapter 12, p. 583. The passage cites Collins v Willcox [1984] 3 All ER 374, 378, which contains further references. No crime or tort is committed if the interference has lawful authority. In Chapter 4 we have already considered the extent of lawful authority enjoyed by police, military and other state agents to use force, including lethal force, in the execution of their duties...
