Sean Aas

Each of us ought to decide what others can do to our bodies. This is so obvious it does not cry out for explanation; and philosophers have not given it much. What few philosophical explanations there are of our rights in our bodies tend to appeal to claims about identity—my body, so they say, is mine because it is me, or is part of something that is me. I argue that, given the kind and degree of metaphysical specificity that would be required to make it work, this “Identity-Based” view is prima facie inconsistent with plausible constraints against introducing controversial metaphysics into public reasoning. In the second half I consider and reject recent Kantian attempts to frame an Identity-Based view of our body rights without reference to fundamental metaphysics. Then, drawing on what still seems right in these Kantian proposals, I sketch a view of how public reason can construct persons as loci of body rights, on the analogy of how international public reason constructs its constituent “peoples” as the loci of territorial sovereignty. The result is an argument for a novel view of our rights in our bodies, a view that, among other things, provides materials to defend public reason liberalism against the charge that issues around embodiment make contentious metaphysics unavoidable in politics.

In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and make the case that philosophy and philosophers still have a very important and meaningful role to play in contemporary bioethics, (2) to discuss some of the current challenges to the meaningful integration of philosophy and bioethics, and (3) to make suggestions for what needs to happen in order for the two fields to stay richly connected. We outline how bioethics center directors, funders, and philosopher bioethicists can help.

This paper argues for Serious Distributive Egalitarianism – the view that some material inequalities are seriously objectionable as such; not merely, say, because such inequalities tend to generate inequalities in status. Social justice requires equality, I argue, because basic social institutions produce important goods and are produced in turn by the relevantly equal contributions of all those that comply with them. E.g., basic social institutions make it much easier to produce cooperatively than it would be in their absence; therefore, these institutions produce, among other things, opportunities to participate in particular productive enterprises. But basic social institutions are themselves produced, in large part, by the compliance of those subject to them; these subjects, therefore, contribute to the production of the goods that basic institutions produce. This gives (at least) every compliant subject of basic social institutions a claim on these goods. And, I argue that, though some do contribute more to the maintenance of basic institutions than others, those who contribute more are too responsible for the fact that others contribute less to point to the consequences of this difference as a reason they should get greater returns. I conclude that all subjects of basic social institutions have equally forceful and forcefully equal claims on the goods these institutions produce; claims that render inequalities in the Distribution of these goods Seriously objectionable as such.