Assistant Professor Seton Hall University South Orange, New Jersey
Abstract: The right to bodily integrity seems distinctive and unusually robust. It seems especially wrongful to invade or intrude upon a person’s body, even more so than non-consensually infringing her property or restricting her liberty. But why? Why does it seem morally worse, normally, to subject someone to non-consensual surgery than to a psychiatric hold? I answer this question by defending the Body Exceptionalism Thesis (BET): that, other things being equal, invading a person’s body is morally worse than non-consensually infringing her property or restricting her liberty. I first critique three accounts of the special wrong of bodily invasion, which center—respectively—on the notions of welfare loss, self-/bodily ownership, and bodily autonomy. Next, I argue for BET directly, contending that it follows from the idea that each living person is coextensive with her physical body, so that a person’s bodily boundaries constitute the boundaries of the person she is. When a person acts on or perceives the world, she does so through her body, making her body the basic medium of her agency and subjectivity. So, bodily invasions are direct attacks on the person whose body it is, while infringements of property or restrictions of liberty aren’t: people aren’t coextensive with their property or the sum of their options. My discussion implies that wrongful forced treatment is wrong, in many cases, because it involves invading the patient’s body, not just intruding upon her private decision-making, and likewise that the justificatory bar for treating over objection is higher than people think.
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