The Sovereign between life and law
of Stephanie Comai
Victim of millennial insulting, profane counterpart of a transcendent spirit of citizenship, the body is the biological support and the epidermal border of our person. As the border is what defines materially, through the body are manifested in a more or less intentional states of mind, health status, source geographical, ethnic origin or family history. On the other hand, while marking the extraordinary complexity and dynamism of each inward movement, it is nevertheless the tool that not only allows the expression of our personal self but a condition of any potential relationship with the surrounding world, which it belongs and which is opposed. Clearly, if inner / outer, subject / object categories are conceivable as separate spheres and opposing, a boundary that must exist physically give reason for the opposition. It 's true, however, that just where you put the limit of a distinction, as it is to define the identity of the parties and establish tools for their mutual - and I would say vital - communication, an alphabet of the five senses of man which is a watertight compartment between the forms of living but a sensitive and relational. The awareness of the link that inherently binds man to his environment, entails, among other things, not little consequence in relation to its responsibilities and act in the world which puts head.
course a stable state of the body is not so easy to define themselves as intuitively it might appear. On the contrary it may sound rather paradoxical that in order to indicate structurally indivisible is still a subject of so uncertain definition. You first body and soul a material component juxtaposed with it constitutive of the person? It is defined properly in terms of a substrate of the subject, a synecdoche of the person? "This is the body that I" or "this is the body that are" as the expression is the most congenial? "This is my body is tantamount to saying" this is what I am here myself, "or rather is the reference material to an appendix, an object that pertains, or - the point - an object that There belongs of our property ?
What at first might seem a pedantic word game or rhetorical hand, is a particularly symbolic portent of key questions. The words, at least for those who are still religiously devout, have a thickness that requires accuracy and accountability. Partocolarmente This is true, not surprisingly, in legal language. The ownership of real property as fundamental right is expressed in the faculty of being able to have and enjoy. If the body is my , you can boast about it these powers? If the body is my , the extent to which they master it, to what extent they are sovereign?
"On himself, on his mind and his body the individual is sovereign" - John Stuart Mill writes in one of the texts that constitute the roots of modern liberalism, the essay On Liberty 1859. That the body has been crucial in the evolution of the relationship between state and individual power and freedom, the show is no coincidence that the pillar of Anglo-Saxon criminal law: the ' Habeas Corpus Act, promulgated in 1679, enshrines the right of 'individual not to be arbitrarily arrested, detained, without possibility of withdrawal subject to suffer abuse and violence of an absolute power. As if to demonstrate that the protection of an area of \u200b\u200bindividual freedom and the constituency an area removed from the arbitrary ruler begins coincidentally just after the freedom of the individual. Not to consider perhaps the most painful and emblematic key intersection between the physical and political, the body subjected to torture, the suffering inflicted by flesh and blood for catharsis or extortion, sometimes still emerging from the dark corners of the globe (not necessarily peripheral) , holes blacks democracy.
Today the body-voltage power is enhanced by new and complex scenarios that opened from the seventies. In part, are crucial social transformations that occurred at the hands of feminist movements, not only faces - trivially - the claim of equal dignity rooted on the autonomous status of the liberated woman, but rather the need to build a new political practice, a modern conception of family life and society. In Italy this is the season of the referendum on divorce (1974), the reform of family law (1975) 194 of the Act on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (1978).
The seventies, however, constitute a decisive step for turning an additional reason, the introduction and rapid development of technological applications to life in its most critical and meaningful stages: from birth to death, through the procreation and disease. So long as to be problematized in the need to incur have to redefine some of the categories established by the roots of human history. The concepts of life and acquire a thick death problematic. Consider the issues raised around the abortion debate, the question of the relationship to the embryo-person view of life as well, but each one in the sixties the acceptance of a statement of death to be determined according to the criteria of brain death and no longer based on circulatory arrest (and its consequences in the field of transplantation).
The same status of the body then takes these characteristics hitherto unimaginable to become a new and controversial political player, legal, social. The body is not primarily a stable and unchangeable, but may undergo alterations, additions or deletions as a whole or a part thereof. Just consider the cosmetic surgery, transplants, amputations, the use of artificial devices, the implants of a different nature to a common contact lens. In terms that the sovereignty over the body stands in front of his potential disintegration? If the my body is a structure composed of tissue removed, transferable organs, blood transfusion, the genetic material transmitted to where my right to extend the protection on it and its components?
Progress introduces further complications of genetic research: the extent to which the gene is identified as a database of person information storage and potential of its development, the right to privacy, which already are to ensure the confidentiality of personal data and privacy, is extended to guarantee the processing of genetic data, even more so given the fact that it is not unique to the individual but the entire biological family. The material jurisprudence of recent decades, recognizing the potential meaning and use of genetic information by insurance companies for example, or the employer of the individual concerned, attests to the fact the risk of genetic discrimination. Real risk if we consider, as happened recently in the United States, the explicit renunciation of many women, motivated by the fear of potential redundancy, to undergo predictive genetic testing of potential predisposition to breast cancer. To discrimination on physical facts, ethnic, religious, gender, builds on the possibility of a potential unequal treatment based on probabilistic calculations on a potential future.
course is now under consideration on the other hand, a further threat of genetic reductionism, another highly debated topic, fraught with problems consequences. DNA is as unique and personal to each individual and provides the structure and functioning of an organism. But to what extent it may be that the person solve it and determine its development and its choices? The media day announcing the discovery of new genetic bases (the gene for loyalty, longevity, beauty, intelligence), raising the possibility of a manipulation operation not far away. Among cinquan'anni will be, he argues, all beautiful, brilliant, morally blameless, perhaps even immortal. Fortunately, the same genetic denies these simple editorial attractions. Our bodies, on closer inspection, an organism is far more fascinating and complex, work on which play significant role the environment, lifestyle, our free will and, not least, the case. This makes it perhaps more difficult to determine the potential developments and to prevent possible deterioration, but at least leave the life that little bit of vagueness on which to exercise freely their opinion and choices. But who judges and who therefore choose? This is the question that still struggle to answer.
Today the body seems more prominent subject of a sovereignty dispute, the gray area of \u200b\u200blaw. Faced with the dilemma, the call is directed to a desired legislative action, which acts as a clear resolution. Complaining, however, the silence of the written law and resorting to an urgent last-minute legislation does not go to the maybe-proliferation meeting uncontrolled regulation increasingly widespread? If the policy is to act as final judge of our bodies, our lives, not something we should finally? Finally, do not go to the same law in their fundamental assumptions, written in black and white on the constitution? It goes without saying that there may be gaps in a legal code, although that law is a cultural product and as such, constantly evolving. However, these defects can not be filled ignoring (and therefore often violating) the agreement of incorporation which account not only the existence of a legal system but the same State. Freedom and equality for the full development of the human person (Article 3), inviolability personal liberty (Article 13), the right not to be subjected to medical treatment except under the provisions of the law (see, for example, cases of medical treatment required), its respect for human dignity and inviolability of the law (Article . 32): Consent of laws in ad hoc , the Constitution and the reference to international law continue to be sources of law for the court today.
In a multi-ethnic and multi-ethic like today, the agreement on shared values \u200b\u200bis trudging up the slope on which jurists, legislators and politicians. However, the absence of a shared morality does not permit the application of fact, like a Hegelian ethical state, a unique belief that doing so would be sanctioned and legitimized by law. This assumption is based on reading a "right to open and light" (Stefano Rodota) or a "mild law" (Gustavo Zagrebelsky) that do not open the doors, among other things, biological anarchy but, as far as possible devoid of moral guidance, rather than have the technical and procedural aspects of the law, leaving a single degree of freedom in determining the values \u200b\u200bof content, based on which direction to their work, their living and their dying.
