Since when does ANYONE, even a grown, adult human, have the right to use someone else’s body?

Never. And since not even adults get this right, why should a fetus?

Case closed.

I compliment you on this one, it is really quite clever. It is also a kind of wedge issue, in which you force people who might otherwise recoil in horror at transhumanistic ambitions to join your side.

But you set the facts up just a bit too neatly for my taste when you say “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.”

The problem is that you restrict the harms that one might cause to others as those that arise directly. Why do your responsibilities to others end with direct harms? I suspect the answer is because your argument would be weakened (perhaps not fatally, but certainly substantially) if indirect harms to other are taken into account.

Let’s take the example of healthcare resources. I don’t know if you have been to a hospital lately, but in my experience they are all running on empty, whether in the USA with its vaunted private healthcare system or here in Canada with its oft derided public system that provides quantitatively measurable excellent outcomes. Healthcare costs are among the most rapidly rising expenses that society faces. Diverting resources from those who are ill to those who are well has effects, albeit indirect, and some of those may be detrimental. Hence your hedge about ‘direct’ effects. As this is a comment stream, I will be brief here, but I will point out that this is but one example among many that merit the attention of the ethical branch of the transhumanist community.

If the community were really serious about this issue, perhaps they could follow in the footsteps of the physicians and take a pledge: First, do no harm.

Kyle was right on all points of his article. I would like to add its always ULTRA conservatives who are against ind. rights ironically. Life is short and there are billions of humans on the planet, get out of others business. We all know the truth. The people who oppose the initial topics brought forth in this article and who oppose transhumanism/extropianism are Super religious, uneducated or just not that intelligent. Im not saying all, its just highly probable they are one of the three. Some far right conservatives are so indoctrinated, their not dumb but believe so much bs. Im not being political here in no way. Just saying what i here and observe.

Thanks Kyle

I’m interested in your claim that the pre-Elightenment view of the body was not one of discrete corporeality. Can you point me to some of your sourcing for that comment? I would argue that that may have some bearing on Islamic views of the body and even the views of the body in Confucian societies, both of which are not as highly individualistic as Western societies, though Asian nations are having to adopt individualist practices to gain the ‘Asian tiger’ economies that they have had the last 40 years. I’d like to read some more on that concept.

On your second point, I would say that harm causation could only matter if the harm was direct and obvious. The only gray area should be when there is a social or contractual obligation that the somatic freedom contradicts, such as the parent to child obligation or the obligation in certain sporting events to not use performance enhancing drugs.

This is, by the way, where I have to disagree with the author on his article. In my view, a woman’s right to her body does not give her right to terminate the life of another, even if that other is growing inside of her. She has a perfect right to avoid getting pregnant, but once pregnant, I feel that her right to take a life ends. This, once again, begs the question of when a fetus becomes a life, which is where the debate should stay.

My (mostly former) faith says that it is at conception (though plenty of members of my faith have disagreed), but I won’t seek to impose my faith on anyone else. I don’t have an answer to this, so I’m staying out of it entirely and leaving it to wiser ethicists than I (who is not really an ethicist in any wider of a context than that we are all ethicists in our daily lives).

Finally, I agree that the social context (as I mentioned above) is important, but not determinative. We are the society that we want to be, whether we like it or not. If we don’t choose to be the society we would LIKE to be, then we are stuck with what we collectively want. I would rather push for a society of greater freedoms and less requirements on the individual for “society’s good”. Frankly, I think that society should be for the good of everyone, which means that it should only very rarely have to squash or burden a minority for the sake of the majority.