‘To whom does my body belong?’

Abstract

Summary In debates over whether a society should recognize the right of an individual person to end his or her own life (and to enlist the services of a physician to do so), the question is often formulated in terms of ownership: Who owns my body? Those who advocate for self-ownership of their body see the reason for the public enforcement of this right to be “autonomy.” Those who advocate for societal ownership of anyone's body see the reason for the public recognition of this right to be “heteronomy.” And those who advocate for God's ownership of anybody see the reason for the public enforcement of this right to be “theonomy.” Advocates of autonomy, though, have difficulty in justifying a right of self-ownership, since humans are far more dependent on others than they are on themselves. Self-ownership implies a largely fictitious self-sufficiency. Advocates of heteronomy, though, have difficulty in justifying a right of public ownership, since this has been the justification of totalitarian regimes to eliminate persons arbitrarily deemed dangerous or even useless to them. And advocates of theonomy, though, have difficulty in justifying the killing of any living being that is a creature of God. This paper will argue that the whole ownership model is morally flawed. Instead, a model of mutual care is morally more adequate. In this model, we are all both the subjects and objects of care, and that we couldn’t survive were this not so. We come into the world as infants totally dependent on the care of others. As we grow into adulthood, we become the subjects of the claims of others to care for them and for ourselves along with them. Society's task is to coordinate our mutual roles as care-receivers and caregivers. No functioning adult is only a caregiver or only a care-receiver. As caregivers we have duties; as care-receivers we have rights. Autonomy should only be invoked when society claims ownership of any of its members. Heteronomy should only be invoked when an individual person acts as if his or her decision to live or die involves nobody else, and nobody else should be concerned. And theonomy should be invoked whenever an individual person or a society claims to have created himself or itself and to have the right to do with themselves whatever they please. Therefore, individual persons have the right to call for their society to care for them when they cannot help themselves, instead of the right to call for society to help them eliminate themselves from society even when they want to do so. A society has the right to call for individuals to care for themselves and others when they can do so, instead of the right of a society to eliminate individual persons it no longer wants to care for. And religious believers can affirm both the duty of individuals to care themselves, and the societal duty to care for its individual members, are to be exercised in imitation of the God who cares for creation and who commands human creatures to act accordingly. God's unique ownership of creation, however, is another matter and, as such, it is inimitable.