Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-7-2025
Abstract
Robust Samaritan theories hold that citizens may be pressed to share whatever others need for minimal flourishing. Cécile Fabre extends that duty to organs, labor, and even sexual services, while Cohen's ideal of an “egalitarian ethos” asks citizens to internalize such claims. I show that coupling these ideas with a rejection of even minimal selfownership yields a trilemma: Bodily resources can be commandeered, everyone is motivated to comply, and rape loses its status as a wrongful taking. Efforts to cordon off sex because of concerns with trauma, autonomy, or cash compensation either become ad hoc or smuggle rights back into the body. What survives is a narrow but decisive principle of self-ownership that forbids compelled use of another's person, while still leaving room for redistributive justice in external goods. Defending this minimal self-ownerhsip as sovereignty does not entail libertarianism; but it preserves the practical and conceptual wrongness of rape and sustains the moral significance of sexual consent.
Recommended Citation
Thrasher, J. (2025), A Body of One's Own: Samaritanism, Sex, and Self-Ownership. Philos Public Aff. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12289
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Wiley
Comments
This is the accepted version of the following article:
Thrasher, J. (2025), A Body of One's Own: Samaritanism, Sex, and Self-Ownership. Philos Public Aff. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12289
which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12289. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.