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Our Bodies, Whose Property? by Anne Phillips
Book by Phillips, Anne
- GenresFeminismPhilosophy
Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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92 people want to read
About the author
Anne Phillips
58 books15 followersAnne Phillips is a professor in the department of government at London School of Economics and Political Science. Her areas of research include gender, democracy, culture, and economics.
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December 27, 2020
Reviewing the article “It’s My Body and I’ll Do What I Like With it: Bodies as Objects and Property”
Author: Anne Phillips
This article is part of the book “Our bodies, whose property?” published by Princeton University Press. Anne Phillips, the author is a Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics, and Director of the LSE Gender Institute. She works in the field of feminist political theory, and has written on equality and difference, democracy and representation, citizenship and multiculturalism.
In this article, the author asks a simple question, “What is the problem with treating bodies as objects or property?” given the fact that body ownership rhetoric is a part of a common-sense language for asserting personal rights. Her answer to this question digs deep in the language specifically the “property metaphor”, the concept of “payment” and then the concept of “market”. The author wants to look again at notions of the self as proprietor, and the body as property without any recourse to religious, romantic, or essentializing arguments. Deconstructing the three problems leads at the end to a suggestion of a system that includes special rhetoric regarding the body, monetary compensation for bodily services, and elimination of any market for bodily services. All of this combined creates a safer and just world where our bodies are equal.
The first key problem deconstructed was the “language”. In this section the author asked, “Does the property metaphor matter?” Her direct answer was, yes, it matters. The property language distinguishes between “me” the owner, and “my body” the property. Where, in the author’s opinion, we are our bodies, we don’t owe them. She argues that this separatism puts us in danger of exploitation after signing a bodily services contract. As a consequence of this separatism, our bodies in the period of the contract are not ours, and we don’t have autonomy over them. Adopting the property language can seduce us into what Carole Pateman calls “the political fiction” of capacities being treating as separable from the person, which minimizes the difficulties of distancing oneself from one’s body.
Employers hire persons, not a piece of property, you can’t send capacities or services by themselves to an employer. The real drama, as per the author’s argument, starts after signing the contract of service. Where employers seek to exert their authority, and the fact that we are present throughout the deployment of our capacities is then obscured. This exertion of authority can take horrific forms in sex work.
This language of property exchange becomes even more harmful when employees internalize it and come to think of their labor as if it were indeed a separate entity, they then live their working life in a state of alienation. They dissociate their daily life from their own-self-conception. A person agreeing to work for another always makes herself vulnerable to a loss of personal autonomy, and when the arrangement involves the body, the vulnerability is higher. But representing agreement in property terms makes vulnerability less apparent.
The language of property exchange can reduce our vigilance when new demands are put on us, and limit our capacity for resistance. Fictions of property are damaging in those contracts where the body is not just incidental, but the whole point. Metaphors of property can significantly reduce awareness of the dangers attached to intimately bodily services, even if it doesn’t push towards the commodification of the body.
But here appears another problematic issue, through insisting on self as “embodied” it is hard to distinguish between activities that involve the “mind” and activities that involve the “body”. This takes us to the dilemma of refusing to pay for explicitly body services whilst conditioning it for those to which the body is more incidental.
This takes us to the second key problem, “What’s wrong with payment?”
It wouldn’t make sense to embargo any monetary exchange involving the body, for to do so would imply an embargo on any kind of labor contract. This argument is exactly the feminist defense on sex work.
Also, professions like dancing and football are body-based and are not problematic. So, we can conclude that there is no initial rejection on making money out of activities where “the body is the whole point” as Pateman formulates it.
Then, where is the problem located? One of the major ethical objections to activities like selling body organs is that the payment for body products or parts reduces the pool of donors and increases the cost of treatment. It’s better to live in a society with a sense of civic duty towards other members than living in a society where interactions are based on pure utility. But here arises another problematic issue, which is that surrogate mother, or donation of eggs or kidneys are too draining and intrusive medical procedures to be considered as a civic duty. So, if surrogacy is permitted, it seems exploitative not to recognize the work involved and offer some reward as “compensation”, not “payment”. Compensation for the actual cost plus a monetary recognition of the generosity of the donor, but not a market-driven payment, reflecting overall supply and demand.
This leads us to the distinction between “payment” and “market”. There have to be more than 2 individuals involved before talking about a market. The market is open to buyers and sellers with whom I have no familial connection.
The manifestation of the difference between paying compensation and a fully commercialized market appears in the difference between the surrogacy process in the UK vs. the US.
In the UK, it might be apparently incoherent on the surface, but a concrete logic lies underneath this surface. Commercialized surrogacy is banned in the UK. However, there exist matchmaking surrogacy agencies with “fees” allowed. Surrogates are paid “reasonable” expenses, that are not so different from sums paid in the explicitly commercialized markets in the USA. This actually discourages the development of markets in reproductive services but with reasonable compensation, recognizing that pregnancy is a major commitment to be treated as a pure gift.
One of the concerns on creating a market of female eggs is the different prices of different races, classes, IQ levels (all related to genes of the parent), or even SAT score and athletic achievements. When eggs are priced according to supply and demand rather than on the basis of compensation, this allows for disturbing differentials between different categories of people.
What else is problematic about having markets in reproduction, sex, and organs?
According to Debra Satz, the case against markets of sexual and reproductive labor or human kidneys rests on “contingent” not “essential” features, meaning that under radically different conditions, there might be no problem at all. So, what are these conditions? For example, in the kidneys case, markets are based on vulnerable and poor sellers, and in the sexual and reproductive services, markets are based on a background of complete inequality between sexes, reinforcing gender hierarchies and perpetuating images of women as subordinate to men.
Back to the author, the main objection on markers in bodies, is that they are based entirely on inequality. Markets in general, are built on specialization, where I specialize in something and trade is with you for another thing that you are specialized in. But what would make someone specialize in kidney vending? What -other than inequality- can make someone specialize in the provision of sex or childbearing if most people can do it? Not to mention the fact that it is a reassuring fantasy to think people work in the sex trade because they enjoy sex. If compared to any other profession, we are usually not obligated to work in any field professionally, regardless of how much we enjoy it, unless there is a financial need.
The inequality that attends such markets is not just contingent, it’s an intrinsic feature. The market of organs seems almost designed to ensure the division of the world into two kinds of beings, with the fact of payment relieving the purchasers of any obligation to think themselves into the sellers’ shoes. The donation, on the other hand, encourages people to think more explicitly about moral equality and put themselves in others’ shoes.
This market is built on a systematic inequality between recipients and vendors, neither the will, taste, or talent of vendors or recipients can be involved, only inequality. The same applies to sex workers.In the case of surrogacy, it’s most probable that the commissioning couple has more access to wealth than the surrogate herself.
Policy Making
The author did not take her argument about the intrinsic dependence on inequality to justify the prohibition of markets in body parts or intimate bodily services while permitting markets in everything else. She does not believe one can derive neat policy recommendations from philosophical premises, for these are matters where the context makes a difference.
The arguments set out here provide only one part of the considerations that would need to be brought to bear in any policy discussion, and one should expect different kinds of recommendations for the different kinds of markets involved in prostitution, surrogacy, the sale of human eggs, the sale of human kidneys, and so on.
She says that her inclination—as indicated—is to favor some form of compensation but to draw as clear a line as possible between this and the development of commercial markets. Where markets in kidneys are concerned, she finds the point about body markets resting intrinsically on inequality particularly decisive, and her favored alternative is a well-advertised and carefully regulated system of presumed consent, with people actively opting out of becoming organ donors rather than actively opting in. Each of these policy recommendations requires a more detailed argument. At this stage, the main point of the illustrations is to clarify that an argument about markets in bodies being more intrinsically dependent on inequality than other kinds of markets is not intended as a knock-down way of settling which markets should be encouraged or permitted. She does, however, claim it as a significant, non-essentializing but also noncontingent, feature.
Author: Anne Phillips
This article is part of the book “Our bodies, whose property?” published by Princeton University Press. Anne Phillips, the author is a Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics, and Director of the LSE Gender Institute. She works in the field of feminist political theory, and has written on equality and difference, democracy and representation, citizenship and multiculturalism.
In this article, the author asks a simple question, “What is the problem with treating bodies as objects or property?” given the fact that body ownership rhetoric is a part of a common-sense language for asserting personal rights. Her answer to this question digs deep in the language specifically the “property metaphor”, the concept of “payment” and then the concept of “market”. The author wants to look again at notions of the self as proprietor, and the body as property without any recourse to religious, romantic, or essentializing arguments. Deconstructing the three problems leads at the end to a suggestion of a system that includes special rhetoric regarding the body, monetary compensation for bodily services, and elimination of any market for bodily services. All of this combined creates a safer and just world where our bodies are equal.
The first key problem deconstructed was the “language”. In this section the author asked, “Does the property metaphor matter?” Her direct answer was, yes, it matters. The property language distinguishes between “me” the owner, and “my body” the property. Where, in the author’s opinion, we are our bodies, we don’t owe them. She argues that this separatism puts us in danger of exploitation after signing a bodily services contract. As a consequence of this separatism, our bodies in the period of the contract are not ours, and we don’t have autonomy over them. Adopting the property language can seduce us into what Carole Pateman calls “the political fiction” of capacities being treating as separable from the person, which minimizes the difficulties of distancing oneself from one’s body.
Employers hire persons, not a piece of property, you can’t send capacities or services by themselves to an employer. The real drama, as per the author’s argument, starts after signing the contract of service. Where employers seek to exert their authority, and the fact that we are present throughout the deployment of our capacities is then obscured. This exertion of authority can take horrific forms in sex work.
This language of property exchange becomes even more harmful when employees internalize it and come to think of their labor as if it were indeed a separate entity, they then live their working life in a state of alienation. They dissociate their daily life from their own-self-conception. A person agreeing to work for another always makes herself vulnerable to a loss of personal autonomy, and when the arrangement involves the body, the vulnerability is higher. But representing agreement in property terms makes vulnerability less apparent.
The language of property exchange can reduce our vigilance when new demands are put on us, and limit our capacity for resistance. Fictions of property are damaging in those contracts where the body is not just incidental, but the whole point. Metaphors of property can significantly reduce awareness of the dangers attached to intimately bodily services, even if it doesn’t push towards the commodification of the body.
But here appears another problematic issue, through insisting on self as “embodied” it is hard to distinguish between activities that involve the “mind” and activities that involve the “body”. This takes us to the dilemma of refusing to pay for explicitly body services whilst conditioning it for those to which the body is more incidental.
This takes us to the second key problem, “What’s wrong with payment?”
It wouldn’t make sense to embargo any monetary exchange involving the body, for to do so would imply an embargo on any kind of labor contract. This argument is exactly the feminist defense on sex work.
Also, professions like dancing and football are body-based and are not problematic. So, we can conclude that there is no initial rejection on making money out of activities where “the body is the whole point” as Pateman formulates it.
Then, where is the problem located? One of the major ethical objections to activities like selling body organs is that the payment for body products or parts reduces the pool of donors and increases the cost of treatment. It’s better to live in a society with a sense of civic duty towards other members than living in a society where interactions are based on pure utility. But here arises another problematic issue, which is that surrogate mother, or donation of eggs or kidneys are too draining and intrusive medical procedures to be considered as a civic duty. So, if surrogacy is permitted, it seems exploitative not to recognize the work involved and offer some reward as “compensation”, not “payment”. Compensation for the actual cost plus a monetary recognition of the generosity of the donor, but not a market-driven payment, reflecting overall supply and demand.
This leads us to the distinction between “payment” and “market”. There have to be more than 2 individuals involved before talking about a market. The market is open to buyers and sellers with whom I have no familial connection.
The manifestation of the difference between paying compensation and a fully commercialized market appears in the difference between the surrogacy process in the UK vs. the US.
In the UK, it might be apparently incoherent on the surface, but a concrete logic lies underneath this surface. Commercialized surrogacy is banned in the UK. However, there exist matchmaking surrogacy agencies with “fees” allowed. Surrogates are paid “reasonable” expenses, that are not so different from sums paid in the explicitly commercialized markets in the USA. This actually discourages the development of markets in reproductive services but with reasonable compensation, recognizing that pregnancy is a major commitment to be treated as a pure gift.
One of the concerns on creating a market of female eggs is the different prices of different races, classes, IQ levels (all related to genes of the parent), or even SAT score and athletic achievements. When eggs are priced according to supply and demand rather than on the basis of compensation, this allows for disturbing differentials between different categories of people.
What else is problematic about having markets in reproduction, sex, and organs?
According to Debra Satz, the case against markets of sexual and reproductive labor or human kidneys rests on “contingent” not “essential” features, meaning that under radically different conditions, there might be no problem at all. So, what are these conditions? For example, in the kidneys case, markets are based on vulnerable and poor sellers, and in the sexual and reproductive services, markets are based on a background of complete inequality between sexes, reinforcing gender hierarchies and perpetuating images of women as subordinate to men.
Back to the author, the main objection on markers in bodies, is that they are based entirely on inequality. Markets in general, are built on specialization, where I specialize in something and trade is with you for another thing that you are specialized in. But what would make someone specialize in kidney vending? What -other than inequality- can make someone specialize in the provision of sex or childbearing if most people can do it? Not to mention the fact that it is a reassuring fantasy to think people work in the sex trade because they enjoy sex. If compared to any other profession, we are usually not obligated to work in any field professionally, regardless of how much we enjoy it, unless there is a financial need.
The inequality that attends such markets is not just contingent, it’s an intrinsic feature. The market of organs seems almost designed to ensure the division of the world into two kinds of beings, with the fact of payment relieving the purchasers of any obligation to think themselves into the sellers’ shoes. The donation, on the other hand, encourages people to think more explicitly about moral equality and put themselves in others’ shoes.
This market is built on a systematic inequality between recipients and vendors, neither the will, taste, or talent of vendors or recipients can be involved, only inequality. The same applies to sex workers.In the case of surrogacy, it’s most probable that the commissioning couple has more access to wealth than the surrogate herself.
Policy Making
The author did not take her argument about the intrinsic dependence on inequality to justify the prohibition of markets in body parts or intimate bodily services while permitting markets in everything else. She does not believe one can derive neat policy recommendations from philosophical premises, for these are matters where the context makes a difference.
The arguments set out here provide only one part of the considerations that would need to be brought to bear in any policy discussion, and one should expect different kinds of recommendations for the different kinds of markets involved in prostitution, surrogacy, the sale of human eggs, the sale of human kidneys, and so on.
She says that her inclination—as indicated—is to favor some form of compensation but to draw as clear a line as possible between this and the development of commercial markets. Where markets in kidneys are concerned, she finds the point about body markets resting intrinsically on inequality particularly decisive, and her favored alternative is a well-advertised and carefully regulated system of presumed consent, with people actively opting out of becoming organ donors rather than actively opting in. Each of these policy recommendations requires a more detailed argument. At this stage, the main point of the illustrations is to clarify that an argument about markets in bodies being more intrinsically dependent on inequality than other kinds of markets is not intended as a knock-down way of settling which markets should be encouraged or permitted. She does, however, claim it as a significant, non-essentializing but also noncontingent, feature.
February 21, 2021
I felt like this book give great overviews and problems of arguments dealing with property commodification objectification sergeancy and r*pe through those property rights lens
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews