Do I own my own body or does nobody own my body?
You’ve got it on a long term lease and there are plenty who like to make rules about what you can and cannot do with it.
… but don’t lose heart…
… they may want to cut it out…
… and they’ll want to avoid a lengthy search!
Are you asking a legal question or a philosophical question?
The answer to this question is much easier if you’re in the military - then you know who owns your ass.
I would venture to say nobody, legally, because you can’t do things like suicide or self-inflicted harm without the police getting their noses into the matter and locking you away for a bit.
Philisophically, you have to define what “you” is - if “you” IS your body, then the question is moot.
“Yes, I know what a liver is, but I’m using it.”
“Hallo! What’s this then…?”
“A liver donor’s card.”
“Need we say more?”
“Look, I can’t give it to you now. It says ‘In The Event of Death’…”
“No-one who has ever had their liver taken out by us has survived…”
I think of it like a long term lease or borrowing of chemicals. You own it whilst you are using it. So you don’t own all the skin dust you shed, or the organ you donate, or the corpse you leave behind.
Your body owns you. When it decides it’s time to go it’s going to take you with it, kicking and screaming if necessary.
I own your body. I’ll be around later to pick it up.
Joking aside about your body owning you, I once knew a man who was a committed schizophrenic (committed in the hospital sense, not in the dedicated sense). Part of his condition was that various body parts spoke to him, had wills of their own. He would frequently be found following its will (his left foot insisting on being shoed first, or needing to perform a certain action (use the restroom when he really didn’t have to) etc). The bad part of it was that it would keep him up all night telling him it was going to stop working. Poor guy laid up all hours counting his heartbeats. Treatment helped, but it was still touch and go for him, last I knew.
…
I didn’t really have a point to that. Just breaking the jovial mood, I guess.
As I said before, philisophically, you have to define what “you” is before you can define if you own your body. As many Dopers have posted here, their impression is that they are their body, though some theists would perhaps separate body and soul.
You wil find out who/what you is/are when you are separated from the body, not before.
What comprises “you” is the life principal, soul, ‘heart,’ spirit, intellect, memory, etc.
That “you” when separated from the body is no longer perceived as “you.”
Your body or the body “you” occupied then is inamimate and is as the dust of the earth, worth $29 more or less adjusted for inflation and not even that as all of the constitutents are mixed up and unusable for anything but to fertilize the garden.
I think this is one of the fundamental philosophy questions that has never been adequately answered.
There are real legal issues involved here. Sorry I can’t give a cite, but there was a case where a man had a tumor removed from his body. The tissue from the tumor was cultivated in a lab and later used to develop a new drug. The man sued, saying that because the drug had been developed from a part of his body it was his property. The drug company’s defense was basically that once the tumor came out it was no longer his. As I recall, the patient lost.
Sounds like when you leave trash out by the street - it then automatically becomes public domain. If you left an original Picasso you found in your attic out for the trash man thinking it was a 3rd grade art project, and someone walked by and picked it up, it’s his, not yours. If he then sells it for a million bucks, you’d be SOL.
Legally, at least in the UK, it has been established that a corpse cannot be stolen because the law does not view a cadaver as “property”. This was established way back in 1746 (Handyside’s case). But organs and bodily fluids can be stolen - this was decided in a case in the 70s when some guy poured away his urine sample which he had given in relation to a drink-driving offence.
If you think of prison or jail, for example, the government ‘owns’ you in a sense. You don’t want your body to be put there, but your government decided to take away their agreement they have with everyone that you are a free roaming person. You don’t want your body to be put there, but it is and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
Yeah, that has a lot of holes in it and I barely hold it up as a real argument, but it is an interesting thought.
I was asking in the philosophical sense. I recently witnessed a debate elsewhere where opposing sides were arguing over which is more legitimate; to say that I own myself or nobody owns myself.
Myself, in this context, was referring to body, mind etc.
Can anyone find the GQ thread where someone asked if they could give their own skull to someone in their will? (I think the answer was that they couldn’t.)
Actually, actor Del Close did precisely that. Those wacky Chicagoans…!
As has been mentioned upthread, in the Westminster legal system it has been held that there is no property in the human body (so you cannot legally “own” body parts); but there have been cases in the UK in which it has been held that preserved specimens of organs, skeletons, etc. are capable of being stolen and therefore constitute property because they have had people’s labour and skills expended upon them (Doodeward v Spence [1908]).
Have a look at R v Kelly, the most recent case, which concerned a guy who nicked various body parts from the Royal College of Surgeons.
Also, consider what this all means in terms of the arguments for the abolition of slavery - i.e. no-one can legally own any human being under the law.
If we’re thinking of the same case, it was his spleen and his unique “hairy leukemia” cells. I don’t remember the case name either, unfortunately.
The holding was essentially that the plaintiff abandoned his spleen as his property when he had it removed and it became the property of the institution (as I recall, a state university).