Fight for Your Somatic Rights

[JesusA (imported)]

There are some fascinating comments about this post on the Discover website. You are encouraged to go to the original source to check them out – and maybe to add to them. There is also a link to Kyle Munkittrick’s earlier blog posts, some of which are of interest to the community here.

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Your Body, Your Choice:

Fight for Your Somatic Rights

Kyle Munkittrick

Discover

June 20, 2011

“My body, my choice.” We hear that slogan constantly, but what the hell do those four words mean?

Many of us have one or two political issues surrounding our bodies that get us fired up. Many of you reading this right now probably have some hot-button issue on your mind. Maybe it’s abortion, or recreational drug usage, or marriage rights, or surrogate pregnancy, or assisted suicide, or sex work, or voluntary amputation, or gender reassignment surgery.

For each of these issues, there are four words that define our belief about our rights, “My body, my choice.” How you react to those words determine which side of any of those debates you are on. That’s just the thing, though – there aren’t a bunch of little debates, there is just one big debate being argued on multiple fronts. All of these issues find their home in my field of philosophy: bioethics. And within the bioethics community, there is a small contingency that supports a person’s right to choose what to do with their body in every single one of those examples. Transhumanists make up part of that contingency.

If you are pro-choice on abortion or think that gender reassignment surgery is an option everyone should have, you agree with transhumanism on at least one issue. Many current political arguments are skirmishes and turf battles in what is a movement toward what one might call somatic rights. In some cases the law is clear, as it is with marriage rights or drug usage, and the arguments are over whether or not to remove, amend, or change the law. Other cases are so ambiguous that the law is struggling to define itself, as with surrogate pregnancy and voluntary amputation. And sooner or later (I’ve given up on guessing time-frames), instead of merely arguing over what we’re allowed to do with the body we’re born with, there will be debates about our rights to choose what kind of body we have. By looking at the futuristic ideas of genetic engineering and robotic prosthetic technology, we can understand how transhumanism maximizes the “my body, my choice” mantra.

We have a lot of laws about what you can’t do with your body. On the other hand, think about how many different things can be defended with “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want!” Why do we say that? The answer seems painfully obvious: because we’re the only ones who know what it’s like to have our body and it’s probably the only thing we really, truly own. No one can take your body without also taking your life – which as it turns out, is a great way to put your money where your mouth is when you’re a philosopher. Like any good philosopher, however, my job is to examine the painfully obvious. In part, because if it’s all so damn obvious, then why does every lawmaker, religious leader, and jerk with a megaphone think they have a right to tell you or me what to do with our bodies? Is it just jealousy?

Let’s say we live in the future and I have the option to get a robot body and genetically modify my brain to make myself smarter, kinder, and happier. My guess is many people would be very upset if I was traipsing around with a glorious, glistening body made of heretofore unheard of alloys with a genetically tricked-out brain. I would be a magnificent testament to science and engineering. I would be happier, healthier, and smarter. So what possible justification would the paternalists of the world have for telling me I can’t upgrade my physical body?

There are three responses:

Response One: “Your life is just too important for me to let you ruin it, let me set some ground rules to make sure you don’t make a decision you’ll regret later.” The paternalist rule-makers paint themselves as bearing the burden of responsibility for our lives. We don’t know what is good for us, but they do.

Response Two: “What about the children?” Somewhere, out there, is a person with a permanent scowl on his or her face, of whom children are frightened, who has already figured out how my robot body will hurt the children. I imagine it will involve something like “sets a bad impression.”

Response Three: “It breaks with tradition and is immoral.” Understand here that tradition and morality are not ethics. I differentiate morals and ethics in the following way. “Thou shall not kill” is a moral rule. “The biological mother should carry and raise the child, anything else is strange and wrong” is tradition. “Banning marriage between consenting adults of the same-sex is unethical because it infringes upon the life, liberty, and happiness of those individuals based on sexual preference” is ethics. See that “because?” Only in ethics do you have a logical reason following the normative claim. Morality and tradition rely upon the authority of some figure (imagined or not) or history (accurate or not).

In each case, the actual right to your body is deferred to some third party, either the paternalists, the hypothetical children, or unreasoned authority. Transhumanists and like-minded bioethicists recognize that somatic rights are individual rights. That means that, unless they harm someone else directly, you should be able to do as you please. I find it amazing that for all of our amendments protecting freedom of religion, and assembly, and the press, we lack an amendment protecting freedom of bodily self-determination.

A rough and ready version of what freedom of bodily self-determination might look like has three key principles:

1. “My body, my choice” means that if what you do only affects your body, you should have the right to do it. Period, full stop.
That includes allowing someone to do something to your body. So:

2. If you want to have something done to your body (e.g. surgery to modify your body or to allow a person to pay you to do something with your body), then you should have the right to do that.

3. If you don’t want something to happen to your body (e.g. for your body to become pregnant or for it to be kept working at all costs (both in terms of money and dignity)), then you should have that right as well.

Because you have the right to do something, you are also responsible for the results of that decision. For example, if you choose to do drugs, you are culpable for decisions you make while under the influence of those drugs. If you choose to modify your body and, later regret the decision, the fault is no one’s but your own. These simple concepts have a huge impact on not only current laws around issues like abortion, sex assignment surgery in infants, and assisted suicide, but possible future ones surrounding technologies like genetic enhancement, anti-aging medicine, cognitive enhancing drugs, designer babies, voluntary prosthetic augmentation, and cybernetics. As technology advances, we will have more and more ways to choose what to do with our bodies.

As the politics of the body continue to generate controversy, it is important those on the side of choice and freedom of bodily-determination recognize where their allies are. Transhumanists and liberal bioethicists, yes, but also feminists, marriage rights proponents, sex worker advocates, those who would end the drug war, libertarians, and the LGBT community. These groups are fast coming to the conclusion that it is important we cherish our basic biological freedoms and protect our somatic rights.

That means arguing for pro-choice body issues now, in the present. And for those out there who find themselves pro-choice on some issues (e.g. gay marriage and abortion) but anti-choice on others (assisted suicide and genetic engineering), you’d best reevaluate why you have conflicting stances. You shouldn’t. If you disagree with me, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/scien ... ic-rights/

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[moi621 (imported)]

I have an extra kidney.

Want to buy it?

You see doctor, I don't think I could ever be truly fulfilled unless one of my kidneys went to another.

Moi

Somatic Rights for all.

Even those with an extra kidney.

[janekane (imported)]

Oh, dear... I have read the thread from 2008 which is at least partly centered on aspects of this issue for people (me, for example) who will never meet the HBSOC because I have a life-long rejection of the notion of gender as being a pure dichotomy. That thread, "Male to Eunuch Standards of Care," in the second paragraph of the thead starter, reads, "

Many of you reading this right now probably have

a hot-button issue on your mind."

The Discover web site post title, "

Your Body, Your Choice: Fight for Your Somatic Rights

" is a hot-button issue for me. Why so?

If gender is a pure dichotomy, then I am transgendered in the sense of being beyond dichotomous gender. If sex is a pure dichotomy, then I am transsexual in the sense of being beyond dichotomous sexuality. To fit within the HBSOC, I would have to accept dichotomies which my whole life has excluded, and therefore, for me to be in conformity to the HBSOC, I would have to not be who I am, and would have to not live the life I am able to live.

I am reminded of the International Olympic Committee's inability to classify people dichotomously as male (exclusive-or) female.

My undergraduate and graduate education included learning about methods of diagnosing rare forms of cancer with the goal of identifying possible cancer formation at the pre-cancerous stage. Applying these methods to my own family and family cancer history, I recognized my family being of the sort for which the methods I had learned and was continuing to learn were plausibly optimal in terms of delaying or preventing death in consequence of cancer.

I informed my physician(s) of my concerns and ran into the "first, do no harm" brick wall. I understood that doing nothing to prevent the sort of cancer of my family was effectively, "first, do harm." What is doing harm with respect to one medical condition may be not doing harm in another. When there is a single rule for conditions requiring different rules and when the conditions requiring different rules are very rare, the traditional approaches of medicine may go terribly amok. Which is what happened to my dad and brother. Having made no useful progress with my primary care physician, I consulted a urologist, who was, methinks from observing his facial expression, utterly aghast. Off to a psychiatrist who specialized in sexual/gender issues, whereby I determined that, although I am somewhere in the transgendered/transsexual realm, that was not why I was seeking cancer-preventive surgeries according to need in terms of effective cancer prevention.

The physicians were willing to treat cancer once it developed, but were unwilling to do surgery to prevent it. My understanding of family history informed me that everyone who had developed cancer had terminal cancer before treatment began. That, I deemed unacceptable. Back to the urologist, who got a mild diatribe about the merits of Bayes Theorem versus Frequentist Statistics. The urologist refused to do anything for or with me, but finally did tell me what to do and how to do it. His suggested method was for me to call physicians for as many times as it would take to find someone who would attend to my concern.

After many refusals, I changed tactics. I have already mentioned getting the Elastrator(TM) and bands as a tool for being persuasive. Being a graduate student, I did one other thing. I had full access to a rather good University Library and I, in accord with fair use, photocopied a few journal articles about self-castrations which had gone dreadfully awry. That combination apparently got across to the vasectomy doctor who did the "radical vasectomy" the extent of my concern, and he who agreed to do the surgery on the condition that I agreed never to identify him.

I recently checked the license of the urologist whose "medical advice" I followed, he is now deceased.

By what moral/ethical/scientific proper standard of care is it improper to delay or prevent cancer when there is a plausible way to delay or prevent it and the probability of terminal cancer is essentially 50% if it is not effectively delayed or prevented?

In 1986, it was my body, my choice, and I did what was necessary to have the somatic right to be alive today, and not dead for almost 25 years like my brother.

How can MtE Standards of Care properly include all possible reasons (including all the reasons which have yet to arise) for which not having testicles is better than having them?

MtF is comparatively simple because the choice is binary. MtE is comparatively not simple because the choice has a veritible inifintude of aspects.

I find that my reason(s) for getting my bilateral orchiectomy are neither better nor worse than the reasons anyone else may have. Life, to me, is for being lived, not only suffered through. The experience of suffering, as I am able to understand it, is an indicator that some aspect of one's life does not belong to the one who experiences suffering. To me, resolution of an experience of suffering may be best accomplished by separating onesself from whatever it is that actually causes the suffering.

In my teen years, I developed a broken arm. I have no clue as to whether that was a sign of long term osteoporosis or not, no measurements were taken until some time after my orchiectomy. For a time, the broken arm was painful, though it did not really cause me any noteworthy suffering. Suffering or not, my way of separating myself from my broken arm was wearing a cast for many weeks and not doing anything that would further injure my arm, so, after the bone had knit adequately, I achieved separating myself from my broken arm through medical care and the natural process of bone healing.

Some of the physicians I encountered gave me "To Whom It May Concern:" letters, which I plan to put on an Internet site when I have gotten it ready. Others asked me to not publically identify them, and I will respect that.

[SplitDik (imported)]

It is interesting that this is written from a transhumanist perspective, as I'm pretty much a believer in the premises of the Singularity as presented by Ray Kurzweil. I'm not entirely confident in his timeline, but I agree whole-heartedly with the trends he says will continue. For example, what if we can add an interface to our brain to have perfect memory?

The interesting thing is how it seems to be a natural reaction to any enhancement (breasts, steroids, etc.) to consider it "cheating" and in some ways it is if you think about presenting your biological potential (i.e. you marry a girl with a cute nose and end up with kids with big noses because you didn't realize she had a nose job).

On the other hand, there does seem to be something a bit unseemly about cosmetic enhancement. It sort of flies in the face of our ideal values, although of course our real values do seem to center a lot on cosmetics. Pretty much every celebrity girl has had work done, and every sex symbol guy celeb uses steroids. Arnold Schwarzenegger became a celebrity three times over (Mr Olympia, movie star, then political star) mostly based on his steroid use.

My only worry is that some people are mentally ill and will take this stuff too far, when a whole different approach is what they need. As soon as a woman wants "the biggest breasts" and starts going to Mexico because US doctors refuse to make them larger, or these women that have essentially ruined their faces making them actually uglier but somehow thinking that just a bit more work is needed, these are mentally ill. With guys, it is often steroid abuse. And with the eunuch community, again sometimes the real issue is not with the genitals at all but some other mental imbalance.

I think generally, it should be "my body, my choice". But there also has to be some safety screening for those who are making bad choices with their body.

There are other issues too where this actually needs to be applied in reverse. For example, I think that no one should circumcise a baby -- because in those cases you are making the choice for someone else that you don't have the right to make (they can do it when they're an adult). I don't want to argue those positions in this thread, just pointing out that if we take a philosophical position on bodies and choice we need to apply it consistently.

Anyway, coming back to the main issue of concern to the EA members, voluntary castration really should be readily available (with bit of safety screening for the mental issues). There are many, many people who would make that choice for themselves and it would be the best choice for them.