Kant and Property Rights in Body Parts

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Munzer
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Single Finger ◽  
General Appeal

A “human being,” Kant writes, “is not entitled to sell his limbs for money, even if he were offered ten thousand thalers for a single finger” (LE 124). This arresting statement is part of a broader position of Kant’s according to which persons lack property rights in parts of their own bodies. One can find in his work at least three arguments in support of this position. One is an argument from human freedom. It is riddled with difficulties. The second is an argument from humanity and dignity. It has general appeal but does little to justify Kant’s verdict on some of his own examples. The last is an argument from self-respect. It has some force. Yet, unless one tempers the Kant of moral opinion with the Kant of moral theory, this argument sometimes delivers unacceptable answers to casuistical questions.

Property in Human Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
First Principles ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Law

This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials ‘as such’ to consider also (a) the availability of rights of personal and intellectual property in objects incorporating or derived from them, and (b) the reliance on quasi-property rights of possession and consent to regulate the storage and use of corpses and detached bodily materials, including so-called ‘bio-specimens’. Reasoning from first principles, it highlights the practical and conceptual, as well as the political and philosophical, difficulties in this area, along with certain differences in the regulatory approach of European and US authorities. By way of conclusion, it proposes the law of authors’ and inventors’ rights as simultaneously offering a cautionary tale to those who would extend the reach of property even further than it extends currently and ideas for exploiting the malleability of the ‘property’ concept to manage the risks of extending it.

Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Boxill
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Perfect State ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Species ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
Moral Teaching ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
History Of

Appalled by Kant’s views on race, some Kantians suggest that these views are unrelated to his central moral teaching that every human being “exists as an end in itself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” But Kant developed his racial views because of his teleological view that we regard the history of the human species as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to establish an externally perfect state constitution as the necessary means to the end of developing all human predispositions. To evade the difficulty, Kantians may claim that Kant’s teleology and moral theory are not essentially related, but Kant thought that they were and close textual analysis supports their connection.

Glimpses of Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Uneven Distribution

Bringing the slaves back into our conversations about freedom and modernity, and giving slavery a history and a politics of its own, alters our conceptual frames much more radically than the discourse of new slavery allows. Racial and gendered domination and violence, and the production of vulnerability, are structured and constituted through the complicated pasts, presents and futures of slavery. The freedom and status of personhood and its roots in property, possession and exchange can only be understood through the lens of slavery and the uneven distribution of the category of the human. In order to understand how it is that our ideas of universal human freedom can separate some people whose liberties matter from others who are not to included in the category of full personhood, we need to step into the space between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity and confront the ways in which the zone of freedom is rooted in property rights, and in the codification of persons as property.

Mendelssohn and Kant on the Immortality of the Soul

2020 ◽  
pp. 142-166
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

Mendelssohn argued for the immortality of the soul in his 1767 best-seller Phaedo. Kant’s argument for the postulate of immortality in the first two Critiques was not dissimilar to Mendelssohn’s; both may have drawn on the influential Vocation of Man by Johann Joachim Spalding. But in his 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, published after the death of Mendelssohn, Kant argued that the radical nature of human freedom means that a human being can undertake a change of heart from evil to good at any time, thereby undercutting any need to postulate immortality.

Diversifying Method

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-261
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
Deterministic Framework

By investigating Kant’s anthropology, this chapter presents him as a thinker who was firmly committed to a conception of the human being as shaped by its situatedness in the empirical world of history and culture. However, due to Kant’s own methodological constraints, he could recognize this situatedness only if approached through a deterministic framework that traces the causes and effects of the laws of nature. Human freedom here becomes almost unrecognizable, which makes it necessary for us to acknowledge the systematic nature of Kant’s general “scientific” enterprise. This enterprise employs different methodological strategies and disciplines that all in their own way clarify what it means to be human: a creature that is able to know and understand, but also able to act freely. Kant’s anthropology appeals to us in our capacity to act, thereby performing a function his theoretical sciences fail to cover.

Kant on Idealism, Freedom, and Standpoints

2016 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kohl
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Natural Necessity

Abstract:I propose a new way of understanding Kant’s doctrine of freedom. My reading seeks to combine features of two popular opposed lines of interpretation, namely, of metaphysical and anti-metaphysical readings. I defend the view that Kant’s idealist attempt to ‘save’ human freedom involves substantive metaphysical commitments. However, I show that this interpretation can fruitfully integrate important insights that are standardly associated with deflationary readings: first, the idea that for Kant freedom and natural necessity can be ascribed to one and the same human being; and second, the idea that for Kant the belief in freedom and the belief in natural necessity belong to two different standpoints.

scholarly journals THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HUMAN FREEDOM THEORY IN EARLY EDUCATION

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Zainal Fadri
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Holistic Manner

Early childhood education is now an obligation to prepare children for further education. Education in primary schools has levels that must be taken first with the aim that the child is ready to attend lessons first, such as education in kindergarten and early childhood education. This study aims to look at human freedom in undergoing early childhood education and the values contained in education. The theory of freedom is used to examine the harmony between the spirit of preparing for education with the pure value of human freedom, so that it can be said that early childhood education is a freedom. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. Data analysis was carried out in a holistic manner to achieve an exploration of the theory of freedom contained in early childhood education. The results of this study prove that early childhood education can be said that the implementation of freedom will support the true free human being, that is, free from ignorance and backwardness.

scholarly journals Control over the Human Body Before and After Death: The Civil Law Aspect

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 104-135
Author(s):  
L. Novoselova
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Living Will ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact

In this article, an attempt is made to determine the legal status of the human body (organs and tissue) both while a person is alive and after a person dies. The article discusses the points of view of various authors in relation to the possibility of considering the human body, its organs and tissue, after their separation from the body, as objects of a person’s property rights, and also as an object of a person’s non-property rights. The article argues the impossibility of qualifying the human body and the organs that were not separated from it during life as parts – and perhaps critical parts – of the existence of the total human being, as objects of real (property) rights including the rights of the persons themselves. The human body as a single object is a personal non-property benefit. The organs and tissue separated from the body may be considered objects of real rights, but on several conditions: if they were indeed separated from the body and if the person gave permission for this in a will. The specific characteristics of the legal status of the separated organs and tissue of a human being are analyzed as things (possessions) with limited turnover. The specific characteristics of the legal status of the organs and tissue separated from the body as possessions in limited turnover are reviewed as well as the impact of personal non-property rights on this status. The main focus of the article is on the legal status of the human body and the organs separated from it after death in view of the fact that transplantology and postmortem organ donation are becoming more and more widespread. This issue is analyzed in terms of the body as a whole and as it applies to the organs and tissue that are not used for transplantation. The proposal is to base our analysis on the status of the human body after death which as a rule cannot be the object of property rights. The human body is disposed of within the framework of the protection of the personal non-property rights of the deceased, including the right of physical inviolability that covers the organs and tissue separated from the body. The article characterizes the legal nature of living wills when people give instructions as to the procedure of their burial and other means of handling their body, including donation of their bodies to science. The article examines the possibility of the right of ownership to organs and tissue separated from the body after death. This right can exist if a complex legal construct is present, including a direct or assumed living will of the person. The specific characteristics of living acts concerning the possibility of after-death organ and tissue harvesting for further use, including for transplantation purposes, and the differences between such acts and last wills are determined.

Why Couldn’t Kant Be A Utilitarian?

1998 ◽  
pp. 242-247
Author(s):  
Toshiro Terada
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Universal Law

In his essay "Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?", R. M. Hare tries to show that Kant's moral theory contains utilitarian elements and it can be properly asked if Kant could have been a utilitarian, though in fact he was not. I take seriously Hare's challenge to the standard view because I find his reading on the whole reasonable enough to lead to a consistent interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy. Still, I hardly believe that it is necessarily concluded from Hare's reading that Kant could have been a utilitarian. In this paper, I will first show that Hare's interpretation of 'treating a person as an end' as treating a person's ends as our own is reasonable, and so is his reading of 'willing our maxim as a universal law' and 'duties to oneself,' which is based on that interpretation. Then I will argue that Kant couldn't be a utilitarian despite the apparently utilitarian elements in his theory because caring about others' ends (of which happiness is the sum) is a duty. This is so, in Kant's view, not because happiness is valuable in itself, but because it is the sum of those ends set freely by each rational human being who is valuable in itself, that is, an end in itself.

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