Article Text
Abstract
Whereas previous discussions on ownership of biological material have been much informed by the natural rights tradition, insufficient attention has been paid to the strand in liberal political theory represented by Felix Cohen, Tony Honoré, and others, which treats property relations as socially constructed bundles of rights. In accordance with that tradition, we propose that the primary normative issue is what combination of rights a person should have to a particular item of biological material. Whether that bundle qualifies to be called “property” or “ownership” is a secondary, terminological issue. We suggest five principles of bodily rights and show how they can be applied to the construction of ethically appropriate bundles of rights to biological material.
- property rights
- ownership
- biological material
- transplantation organs
- donation
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- To know the value of everything—a critical commentary on B Björkman and S O Hansson’s “Bodily rights and property rights”
- Human-tissue-related inventions: ownership and intellectual property rights in international collaborative research in developing countries
- Property and the body: Applying Honoré
- Intellectual property rights and detached human body parts
- Body parts in property theory: an integrated framework
- The argument for property rights in body parts: scarcity of resources
- Are emotional support animals prosthetics or pets? Body-like rights to emotional support animals
- Organs as inheritable property?
- Authority without identity: defending advance directives via posthumous rights over one’s body
- 'It’s not something you can take in your hands'. Swiss experts’ perspectives on health data ownership: an interview-based study