On Fetishes

I think it is safe to say that I am generally of a fairly Kantian bent; I'm all for all that secularized puritanism - what's so bloody great about happiness anyway? So you'd have thought that I'd quite like Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. I don't, and I think Ripstein may be a bit mad. Ripstein's reconstruction of Kant's view starts with an exploration of Kant's idea of innate right. I don't know whether Ripstein is right about the interpretation of the relevant bits of Kant, since I don't know the relevant bits of Kant, but what he says seems to me wrong, at least as claims about the coercively enforceable rights we have over our bodies. Ripstein's claim I think is that because we are entitled not to be subject to anyone else, we are entitled to set our own purposes, and that because we are entitled to set our own purposes, we are entitled to exclude others from any control over our own bodies. If others controlled our bodies at all, they would be setting our purposes by eliminating certain ways in which we could act and so making us unable to pursue certain ends.

Now, this, independently of anything else Ripstein says seems to me implausible. I do not lose my ability to act if you can choose whether to make my left ear twitch at five minutes intervals. I simply do not need full control rights over my body in order to be able to act as I please; some instances of control by others over my body are simply irrelevant to my ability to act, because there are many things my body does or can do which have no impact on my use of it to pursue any given project. If my left ear involuntarily twitches at five minutes intervals, this does not impact on my ability to act as I please and so it can hardly impact on it if you can choose whether it twitches or not. You may be using me as a means, but I can still set my own ends.

When added to other things that Ripstein says, it seems even more crazy. Ripstein apparently thinks that no-one else having control over your body is not only necessary but sufficient for you to be setting your own ends. If he did not, then he would not be able to restrict innate rights to rights against having your body controlled by others; indeed, he would have to admit some rights of others to control your body by requiring you to do provide others with control over objects other than their bodies necessary for them to act. Not only does Ripstein want to say that if I can make you twitch one ear, you are under my control, but also that I can set my own ends even if I am so crippingly hungry all I can think of is food. The distinction Ripstein draws between our capacity to act and the world in which we act in order to sustain this sort of claim clearly does exist - that I cannot achieve an end I set myself does not mean that I cannot set it - but it is either it is not as sharp as he imagines or not in the place he imagines. He says, for example, that although "[p]urposive beings that were unable to manipulate or modify physical objects could not have property in them, because those objects would not be available to them as means", such beings "would still have a right to their own person". What kind of right could this be? How could I have a right to a physical body that could not manipulate or modify physical objects? What could possibly explain or justify such a right?