Abstract
What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting that embodiment is moralized all the way down: to be a body part is to be the sort of thing that ought to be protected, in a certain way, by social practices.
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Notes
Here I also follow suggestions from the literature on disability and equality; see for instance (Anderson 2008).
This is so even if, as some courts have found, interference with a tool in active use can constitute assault and battery rather than mere vandalism. Though the law is not entirely settled here, in paradigm cases these acts are identified as batteries because they involve an indirect or mediated application of force to the body narrowly construed. For discussion see (Ramachandran 2010, p. 255n1).
See De Preester and Tsakiris (2009) There are accounts of the sense of ownership that are less restrictive than De Preester’s; I focus on hers because (1) she explicitly uses it to provide a (limited) defense of prosthetic incorporation; (2) most other pheomenological accounts are more inclusive; thus, if, as I argue, hers is over-inclusive, the others are as well; (3) the ways in which her account turn out to be underinclusive will be characteristic of alternative accounts too. For a review of relevant issues, see (de Vignemont 2011).
There is some controversy about this finding, apparently. De Vignemont op. cit., 88f, point to evidence that multiple rubber hands can be incorporated. The argument in the text (my argument, not necessarily De Preester’s) survives this controversy for reasons discussed in n4, above.
Proponents of the extended mind view in the philosophy of mind have proposed alternative restrictions to deal with this sort of ‘bloat’—for instance, that to be a part of a cognitive system, an item must not only play a certain role but do so because this is it’s ‘proper function’, where the latter is in turn understood in terms of some sort of naturalized teleology, on analogy with evolutionary theory. See here Clark (2008), Rowlands (2009); for criticism (Allen-Hermanson 2013). I take it these proposals, in the context of moral protection for prostheses, raises similar issues as those discussed below, regarding evolutionary theories of organismality.
I thank a blind reviewer for focusing my attention on this specific problem for Cater and Palermos.
Carter and Palermos suggest at one point that a pen and paper are only integrated into the cognitive system if they are “carried around” and used for “default information storage and retrieval” (550). It is, however, not clear that the idea of continuous reciprocal causation in the performance of a cognitive task requires this kind of standing relation to a thing, over time—on the account detailed in Palermos (2014), there seems to be no obvious reason why an object could not be integrated in this way on a short-term basis.
It may be a different matter if the saboteurs extract or destroy information; that might be an assault for a different reason, an encroachment on my extended mind that is wrong directly or as such, not because of anything to do with a correspondingly ‘extended body’. More generally, the points here are not strictly inconsistent with Carter and Palermos’ contention that we can be battered by way of interference with items that realize extended cognition. What I doubt is that these acts ought to count as offenses against the person because they are interference with items that realize cognition; rather, in some cases, they may be wrong simply because they interfere in cognition.
For reason explained in n9, above, this point is consistent with Carter and Palermos’ plausible claim that the hypothesis of extended cognition gives cloud service providers especially strong reasons to safeguard our data (ibid., 556)—my claim, in response, would be that these are better understood as reasons to safeguard the integrity of our (extended) mind directly, rather than reasons to do so by safeguarding some (very widely) extended body.
The same could be said, perhaps, for certain prostheses—an implantable cardiac defibrillator may never be activated, serving as a backup against a form of heart failure that never materialized; yet, we might think that hacking it or disrupting it with a powerful magnet would still be a battery [though see Sulmasy (2008) for a (broadly biologistic) argument to the contrary]. Like the antibodies, this sort of item could not plausibly be regarded as part of my ‘cognitive’ system’.
For a similar (though perhaps more restrictive) proposal, see again Sulmasy (2008).
By a ‘broad reading’, I mean a reading that captures many or most of our considered conviction about the morally sacrosanct, bodily, status of at least some substantial number of inorganic prostheses. Note that Liao’s own arguments (op. cit.), aimed at defending a thesis in metaphysics, not moral theory, may not require the broad reading—it may be, for instance, that a prosthetic brainstem (his specific concern) could be a part of the organism even if a prosthetic hand or a pacemaker could not be.
Some of Elselijn Kingma’s recent arguments against sharp distinctions between biological and ‘engineering’ functions suggest that proponents of this view might offer a broader definition of ‘reproduction’, allowing that a phenotypic trait counts as reproductively relevant even if its prevalence in future generations is explained by intentional human selection instead of natural selection. Thus, such a view might say, useful prostheses are indeed reproductively correlated with other parts of the user’s body, since future users are more likely to use useful prostheses than less useful ones. This view, however (the imagined extension of Kingma’s view, not necessarily Kingma’s actual view) is more radical than it might appear. For the same can be said about apparently non-bodily technologies, like clothing. In a culture that relies exclusively on wool for clothing, we might think of woven wool as a kind of part that has ‘cooperated’ with human bodies successfully, in a way that explains it’s instances continued presence on those bodies. Yet, we would not necessarily be committed, by this, to granting items of wool clothing the moral status of body parts (Kingma 2018, esp. p. 11f).
It remains to be seen whether there is a plausible way to restrict the ‘cognitive systems’ account by adding further necessary conditions, from biology. I take it this is a scientific question, about the proper role of biology and biological notions in defining a ‘cognitive’ system; answers will have to await further developments in these fields.
One could assert that all such cases involve the restoration of a missing body part (i.e., that a trans man’s ‘body model’ invariably represents an initially absent penis that is then ‘restored’ by phalloplasty); this would allow the mooted view to recognize bodily status for parts reconstructed in GAS procedures. The empirical evidence for this is, however, preliminary at best [for contrasting views see Ramachandran and McGeoch (2008, pp. 5–16)]; though cf. Lawrence (2010, pp. 195–196). And indeed, however this empirical controversy is resolved, it not clear that these phenomena should be described in terms of a (naturalistically) ‘unhealthy’ pre-operative body coming to match a ‘healthy’ brain, as would need to be the case to verify bodily status for constructed penises on the test proposed in the text. The nosological status (if any!) of the mental and bodily states involved in pre-transition gender identity ‘mismatch’ remains a profoundly controversial matter, even (indeed perhaps especially) among trans people and their allies [for some relevant discussion, see (Wahlert and Gill 2017)].
The rubber hand illusion is far from the only illusion in the phenomenology of the body; for a review of several others (eighteen, though not all relevant for present purposes) see de Vignemont (2018, pp. 207–211). Further responses to illusion cases are of course possible: we might for instance refer not simply to ‘normally functioning’ representation, but also to ‘normally functioning representations in optimal [i.e., non-illusion generating] conditions’. This sort of move, however, raises well-known concerns about circularity.
Thanks to Bryce Huebner for discussion of this point.
I am inspired here by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s suggestion that our body rights are based in a claim “to any resource, whether internal or external to one’s self, on which one’s life depends”; the account offered here sketches the particular kind of dependence that grounds the distinctive set of claims we have in the resources that constitute our ‘bodies’ (Lippert-Rasmussen 2008, p. 116).
For a recent, influential statement of this view, see Murphy and Nagel (2002).
Replaceability, of course, comes in degrees—and whether something is replaceable, for a particular person, may depend on their situation (whether they live near a good clinic, whether they can afford replacements beyond what public financing provides for). But that does not necessarily mean that bodily status will be a matter of degree, or of interpersonal variation, as well (though it could be). It might make sense for body-defining institutions to draw a bright line at some partially-arbitrary point of the replaceability spectrum, and to do so on a ‘per-prosthesis’ rather than ‘per-person’ basis. This flexibility reflects a more general virtue of a social constructionist approach to bodily boundaries—unlike naturalist alternatives, it can be substantially vague at the level of principle, so long as it is informative enough so that we can use it to guide decisions about which body-defining conventions are sufficiently just as to deserve deference.
Part of this task, I should note, will be to explain why the transiency and replaceability of eyeglasses, server parts, etc. ought to block bodily status for these things, if the transiency and replaceabiltiy of (e.g.) hair and blood products ought not to (Carter and Palermos 2016, p. 555). I won’t be able to do this here, either, except to note that nothing in the socialized/moralized account precludes appeal to highly contingent features of our relationship to blood or our hair in developing this distinction; it might make sense to grant these organic items bodily status simply because of (in the case of blood-) where they are typically found; or (in the case of hair) how intimately people tend to identify themselves with them. A world where we did not typically bear these relations to these items might well be a world in which we should not have ‘personal’ rights in them.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers, David Wasserman and Bryce Huebner for helpful comments on drafts, and to audiences at Brown University, the University of Washington, Georgetown University, the National Institutes of Health, and the Manchester Center for Political Theory for discussion of predecessors to this paper.
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Funding was provided by The Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program.
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Aas, S. Prosthetic embodiment. Synthese 198, 6509–6532 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02472-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02472-7