Advocacy for the Body

A s i a n B i o e t h i c s R e v i e w S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 9 Vo l u m e 1 , I s s u e 3 308 Advocacy for the Body The Body in Bioethics By Alastair V. Campbell London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009. 150 pp. + xiii pp. ISBN 978-1-84472-056-9 Traditionally the body has not received much attention from philosophy. From Plato onwards, attention has been focused on the mental capacities of human beings. It is well known that, according to Plato, the body was an unruly seat of desires and appetites which needed to be reined in by the mind or the soul. This less than positive attitude toward the body continued in modern philosophy when Descartes declared that the body and mind were radically distinct, each one having nothing to do with each other. This position naturally gave rise to a very difficult problem of how the mind and the body interacted, and Descartes postulated that the seat of the interaction took place at the pineal gland, a less than satisfactory answer because he did not give a detailed account of how such an important interaction could take place physiologically. Many religions also have a less than positive attitude toward the body. Echoing Plato, many religious traditions view the body as always having a tendency to go awry, always in need of a guide in the right direction by the mind. Buddhism, in order to train practitioners to be able to renounce attachment to bodily pleasures, has a technique of viewing the body as a dirty bag, consisting of “blood, mucus, bones, tendons, flesh, hair, urine, feces, etc.”. The purpose of this practice is to train the mind to regard the body as having nothing worthy of attachment, to get rid of attachment to bodily pleasures that stand in the way toward elimination of suffering. Other religions also roughly share the same view toward the body. B O O K R E V I E W 308–311 Asian Bioethics Review September 2009 Volume 1, Issue 3 309 In bioethics, such negative attitude toward the body can be found in many issues regarding the body and its parts, a topic which Alastair Campbell deals with in his book. A poignant story at the beginning of his book presents a vivid picture of what exactly is at the heart of the issue. A girl has been pronounced dead at a hospital and before the funeral her parents found out that some of their daughter’s organs were missing. This grieved the parents tremendously and the issue became front-page news in the UK for quite some time. For the doctors who performed the operation, this was seen to be an act of benevolence since the organs taken from the girl’s dead body could prove very useful in research and in helping other patients. However, for the grieving parents this was a gross violation of the body of their child. The doctors’ viewpoint stemmed directly from the Cartesian belief in radical distinction between the mind and the body. It is only the mind that matters, and not the body. What makes an individual a unique person is entirely the mind, and the body is only a receptacle for the mind. Thus, the body and its parts can be harvested and manipulated in order to provide benefits to others, whose “minds” are at stake since it is believed that the mind is absolutely crucial for someone’s identity. It is this ingrained mindset in today’s scientific medicine as well as in the bioethical community that Campbell would like to combat against. In the first chapter of the book Campbell refers to neuroscientific works by Antonio Damasio as well as works in contemporary feminism and phenomenology to buttress his notion of the “embodied” self, where the mind and the body are inseparably fused together. Then in the remaining chapters he spells out the ramifications of such a fusion on a number of issues in bioethics, such as commodification of the body, organ donation and trade, manipulation of human...