Jon Ippolito
Visitor
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Re:who owns the extended body? - 2006/05/09 09:19
Hi all,
Apart from the philosophical issues raised by Oron and Ionat's abstract, I think Inke is right to focus on the question of ownership. As the case of John Moore's
spleen demonstrates, regardless of their ontological standing snippets of organic tissue already circulate profitably in our economic and legal systems. It's enough to make me reconsider being an organ donor.
An aunt of mine died last month and her liver went to a guy who wouldn't have made it through the night otherwise. (Now the 29-year-old donee has the liver of an alcoholic 78-year-old...but, hey, beggars can't be choosers.) At the funeral another aunt of mine said she'd be happy to donate an organ directly but didn't want to have her body used for "science," e.g., anatomy lessons. She remembered dissecting a cat in high school and always felt bad that the cat never made it back into the ground to feed the worms. This aunt didn't want her parts to be left in a formaldehyde jar gathering dust on some shelf after she was dead. "I don't want to be inventory," she said.
It strikes me that we might as lay citizens want to take a proactive role in determining how the law treats our excess and effluvia. You can't sell your organs, but maybe you could license them. I'd like to copyleft my spleen, for example, to make sure its biogenetic information remains accessible to the broader public instead of paying for some doctor's yacht.
jon
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