Bodies, Artworks, and Use Values

People Like to Feel Useful but not to feel used, a distinction which captures something of our general ambiguity about the concept of use. Not to feel used may be to feel dumped and discarded, which is objectionable; but it may also be to feel treated as an end in oneself, which is not. Perhaps what counts is the difference between being put to use by others and being the agent of one’s own practical efforts. But this is surely not the case. For one thing, others can make use of you in constructive ways, as when they draw upon your medical skills to save their dying child. This is hardly a case of being exploited. We do, after all, speak of using someone well. “Use” here refers simply to the way we treat people, not necessarily to treating them as a means to an end. And even then, as I have just indicated, this may be entirely acceptable. To use somebody in the pejorative sense of the term is not to bend their powers and capacities to certain ends, but to do this while riding roughshod over their own interests and desires. In this sense, what is wrong with using people is akin to what is wrong with sociological functionalism. It is not that social roles and institutions do not have functions, but that they cannot be reduced to them. Nor can people be reduced to what we want from them. But we are entitled to want things from them even so, which is a matter of using them, but not in a way they can legitimately object to.

One can also use oneself in unjust or abusive ways, as when one shoots off a finger from one’s hand once a week simply for the cheap thrill of it. A tougher case is when one freely submits to being the mere tool or chattel of someone else. Someone may find supreme self-fulfilment in dressing up as a Victorian maidservant, calling themselves Milly and scrubbing five flights of stairs a day. If it is hard to see why they should be censured for this, it is equally difficult to regard it as a paradigm of the good life. That a liberal society does not prevent its citizens from using and abusing themselves does not mean that it should approve of it.

Using oneself, however, has its limits. I can certainly make use of my own body, as when I lie supine in the mud so that Brad Pitt can descend from his limousine without soiling his shoes. This is to treat my body as an instrument, which is by no means always objectionable. Think of stretching oneself across a cleft in the rocks so that one’s companions can scramble to safely over one’s spine. Nor is it always objectionable to treat other people’s bodies as instruments. If I am too cowardly or arthritic to stretch myself over the cleft, I might secure your consent to stretch your lithe, courageous young person over it instead. A martyr is one who gives his or her body away for the sake of others.

Even so, I cannot use myself as an instrument in the same sense that I can use a fork. This is partly because a body is not exactly something that I have, even if we find ourselves speaking often enough in such terms. My relationship to my body is not fundamentally an instrumental one, even though I can speak of having the use of my legs or eyes. I can objectify my flesh to some extent, and could not function as a subject if I could not, but it is not my possession. To say that this body is mine is just a way of distinguishing between it and other bodies, not a way of saying that it belongs to me, and that I am therefore free to (say) pump it full of heroin. Morally speaking, I am no more free to do this than I am to pump you full of heroin. As far as that goes, there is no significant difference...