Abstract

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.