Authority without identity: defending advance directives via posthumous rights over one’s body

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 249-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govind Persad
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Advance Directives ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
The Body ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Bioethical Debate ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Medical Directives

This paper takes a novel approach to the active bioethical debate over whether advance medical directives have moral authority in dementia cases. Many have assumed that advance directives would lack moral authority if dementia truly produced a complete discontinuity in personal identity, such that the predementia individual is a separate individual from the postdementia individual. I argue that even if dementia were to undermine personal identity, the continuity of the body and the predementia individual’s rights over that body can support the moral authority of advance directives. I propose that the predementia individual retains posthumous rights over her body that she acquired through historical embodiment in that body, and further argue that claims grounded in historical embodiment can sometimes override or exclude moral claims grounded in current embodiment. I close by considering how advance directives grounded in historical embodiment might be employed in practice and what they would and would not justify.

scholarly journals Income Redistribution, Body Part Redistribution, and Respect for the Separateness of Persons

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Mazor
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
The Body ◽  
Labor Income ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Negative Rights ◽  
Separateness Of Persons ◽  
The Right

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle.  It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful.  And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful.  Instead, this article defends a solution to the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons.  This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income.  And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder.  It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle.

Choosing for others as Continuing a Life Story: The Problem of Personal Identity Revisited

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Blustein
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Advance Directives ◽  
Advance Directive ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Treatment Decisions ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Continuity Theory ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Over Time

Philosophically, the most interesting objection to the reliance on advance directives to guide treatment decisions for formerly competent patients is the argument from the loss of personal identity. Starting with a psychological continuity theory of personal identity, the argument concludes that the very conditions that bring an advance directive into play may destroy the conditions necessary for personal identity, and so undercut the authority of the directive. In this article, I concede that if the purpose of a theory of personal identity is to provide an answer to the question What is it for a person to persist over time?, then reflection on personal identity poses a potentially serious threat to the moral authority of advance directives. However, as Marya Schechtman observes, questions about how a single person persists through change are not what most of us are interested in when we think about who a person is. Rather, we are interested in what it means to say that a particular set of actions, experiences, and characteristics is that of a given person rather than someone else.

Prospective Autonomy and Critical Interests: A Narrative Defense of the Moral Authority of Advance Directives

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben A. Rich
Keyword(s):  
Advance Directives ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Advanced Directives ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Medical Directives ◽  
Staunch Advocate

In the mid to late 1980s a debate arose over the moral and legal authority of advance medical directives. At the center of this debate were two point-counterpoint law journal articles by Rebecca Dresser and Nancy Rhoden. What appeared to have the makings of an ongoing critical dialogue ended with the untimely death of Nancy Rhoden. Rebecca Dresser, however, has continued her challenge of advance directives in numerous publications, most recently in a critique of Ronald Dworkin's Life's Dominion. Like Rhoden, Dworkin has been a staunch advocate of advance directives as an exercise of what has come to be referred to as prospective or precedent autonomy. In this paper I will consider a number of the issues that Dresser has repeatedly raised about the infirmities of advance directives, and suggest that it is from an understanding of and appreciation for the narrative dimension of the life of a person that advanced directives draw one of their most powerful justifications.

scholarly journals Do New Neuroimaging Findings Challenge the Ethical Basis of Advance Directives in Disorders of Consciousness?

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-685
Author(s):  
ORSOLYA FRIEDRICH ◽  
ANDREAS WOLKENSTEIN ◽  
RALF J. JOX ◽  
NIEK ROGGER ◽  
CLAUDIA BOZZARO
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Advance Directives ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Disorders Of Consciousness ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
Ethical Basis

Abstract:Some authors have questioned the moral authority of advance directives (ADs) in cases in which it is not clear if the author of the AD is identical to the person to whom it later applies. This article focuses on the question of whether the latest results of neuroimaging studies have moral significance with regard to the moral authority of ADs in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs). Some neuroimaging findings could provide novel insights into the question of whether patients with DOCs exhibit sufficient psychological continuity to be ascribed diachronic personal identity. If those studies were to indicate that psychological continuity is present, they could justify the moral authority of ADs in patients with DOCs. This holds at least if respect for self-determination is considered as the foundation for the moral authority of ADs. The non-identity thesis in DOCs could no longer be applied, in line with clinical and social practice.

Some Problems about Resurrection

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Philip L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Time Of Death ◽  
Dna Molecules ◽  
Bodily Continuity

Suppose that a person P1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P2 and P3, each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P1. You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with P1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P2 and P3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P11 contained when P1 died, and that P2's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death just in case P3's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P1 having happened to him, and that P3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P1 having happened to him just in case P2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P2 and P3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P2 and P3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned.

Music in migrant camps as a medium creating non-narrative human relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 347-360
Author(s):  
Julien Labia
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Direct Relationship ◽  
The Body ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Problematic Situation ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Real ◽  
Musical Interactions ◽  
Expressive Activity

A migrant camp is a ‘non-place’ where personal identity is put at risk. Music is a means of personal adaptation in camps, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. The present power of music in such a place is to create strong relationships, ‘shortcutting’ both narration and the longer time needed in order to create relationships. The kind of personal advantage it is for someone to be a musician is a topic surprisingly forgotten, obscured by theoretical habits of seeing music essentially as an expressive activity directed to an audience, or as being a communicative activity. Music has a performative power different from language, as a non-verbal art having a strong and direct relationship to the body. Musical interactions on the field give migrants the ability to balance their problematic situation of refugees, shaping a real present.

scholarly journals The bodily community. The gesture and the rhythm as manners of the living-together

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Maricica Munteanu
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Formal Approach ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Common Space ◽  
Ethical Debate ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Common Practices ◽  
The Common

The present article explores the collective imaginary of the cenacle, referring to the case of Viața românească literary group from Iași, focussing on the bodily community and its representations in the common space, understood as space-in-common. This approach shifts the interest from the ideological component that is the ‘poporanism’, as promoted by Viața românească revue, to the ethical and social aspects of the community. This does not mean that the bodily community is “more real” than the ideological community, or that it translates with fidelity the common practices of the cenacle; the bodily community is in fact another form of representation, a phantasm of the living-together, analysed through Roland Barthes’s theory as the space where solitude and sociability coexist. The corporal representations of the community, always engaged in an ethical debate, is further discussed through two manners of the living-together: the gesture and the rhythm. The theoretical reference of this analysis is Marielle Macéʼs book Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie, which proposes a formal approach of life, concentrating on the ethical implications. The issues derived from this sort of reading state the relation between the body and the environment, the vicinities and the somatic interactions between the members of the cenacle, the adjustment of distances, and the maintenance of solitude inside the community. The gestures, attitudes, behaviour, verbal and non-verbal tics, clothing, the manners of speech or the rhythm of doing certain things are seen not as marks of personal identity that positions itself inside the spaces of power, but as collective signs, as form of encounter and interaction, of exposure to the others but also responsiveness of the others, of expropriation as well as appropriation, of affirmation as well as alteration of the forms of life.

scholarly journals Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Bioethical Debate ◽  
Do So

<p>In this paper, I critically assess transhumanist philosophy and its influence in bioethics by turning to resources in the work of Michel Foucault. I begin by outlining transhumanism and drawing out some of the primary goals of transhumanist philosophy. In order to do so, I focus on the work of Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, two prominent contributors to this thinking. I then move to explicate Foucault&rsquo;s work, in the early iterations of the <em>Abnormal</em> lecture series, on the concept of vile sovereignty. Foucault used the concept of vile sovereignty to critique psychiatric witnesses that had been utilized in mid twentieth-century French courts of law. Turning back to transhumanism, I analyze transhumanist discourse on the basis of Foucault&rsquo;s vile sovereignty. Transhumanists promote human enhancement in a way that rejects the body&mdash;especially the disabled body&mdash;and pose the question of what lives are worth living, as well as attempt to answer it. I conclude that because of the undeserved influence and ableism of transhumanism, it is important for feminist philosophers, philosophers of disability, and other disability scholars, who collide at the nexus of bioethical debate (especially with regard to reproductive technology and the body), to work together to intervene upon transhumanist discourse.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p><p>Keywords: bioethics; enhancement; Foucault; transhumanism; ableism</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

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