From Bodily Rights to Personal Rights

Abstract

The right to bodily integrity (RBI) may seem inapt for inclusion in this volume, which is supposed to address new human rights, for as A. M. Viens notes, the RBI is a longstanding fi xture in the philosophical and legal discussion of rights. However, Viens does, I think, make a good case for the right’s inclusion here. Not only does he note the increasing recognition of a new right to genital integrity derived from the more general RBI, he also argues for a new conceptualisation of the RBI itself: he argues that we ought to decompose the RBI into several constituent rights, delineated according to the different values from which they derive – rights to bodily autonomy, bodily dignity, bodily ownership, wellbeing, and so on. As he writes: