Exploring Kant’s Perspective on (Self-)Ownership and Property Rights in Human Body Parts:Exploring Kant’s Perspective on (Self-)Ownership and Property Rights in Human Body Parts

A Discussion on the Boundaries between Personhood and Thinghood

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.21860/j.15.2.7

The paper questions the normative framework of the designation of body parts as things in civil law doctrine and the possibility of legal disposal of body parts in the context of Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant derives the formation of private legal (subjective) rights from the preliminary separation of things and persons and the second formulation of the categorical imperative. In discussing the concept of private law and property rights that are possible only concerning the human-thing relationship, Kant consequently talks about issues of self-ownership and property rights to one’s body and its parts. Although he explicitly wrote about the impossibility of self-ownership of the body and, in principle, the impossibility of disposing of its parts, it must be remembered that Kant could not foresee all the possible achievements, perspectives, and trials of modern transplant medicine. In the paper, Kant’s basic bioethical and private law concepts (primarily ownership and property rights) are placed in the context of (legal) disposal of body parts. In any exposition and discussion of the Kantian-based opinion on dispositions of body parts, we should not necessarily and exclusively be guided by Kant’s explicit writings on actual legal dispositions of body parts. We should consider the broader framework of Kant’s deontological ethics and Kant’s understanding of persons and things. Such an interpretation can lead to the conclusion that there are no obstacles to basing property rights in body parts but limited property rights, with the classification of body parts as things restricted in legal circulation, which is the opinion that prevails in certain statutory
private law provisions and writings of civil law doctrine.