RELIGION TAUGHT that our bodies are on loan from God, who forbids us to tamper with his property. My body is therefore one of the cards that Providence has dealt to me. The decline of religion has cast doubt on that way of seeing things, while technology has brought the body under human control. By means of plastic surgery I can repair the damage to my old face and also acquire a new one. Cosmetic adjustments are now a routine part of sexual display, much as clothes used to be. And the old idea that there are some things you can do with your body and some things you can’t is increasingly dismissed as a quaint survival of Victorian morals.

In the postmodern perception it is not God who owns my body, but I. What I do with it is my business. This shift in attitude is gradually influencing events. For years the political process in America has been held up over the question of abortion, with feminists arguing that a woman’s body is personal property, to be protected under the Constitution as hers — a view that their opponents simply cannot swallow, even though they lack the language to deny it. The political process in Britain has got into a similar jam over cannabis. If I can abuse my body with alcohol, tobacco and junk food, why can’t I do the same with cannabis? Whose body is it anyway?

And if this body is mine, why can’t I hire it out for sex? Aren’t those old laws against prostitution just another survival from the age before the great discovery that my body really is mine? And if I can hire my body out, then I can also give it away — bits of it at least, maybe an ear here, a finger there. The bizarre case before the Frankfurt court, of a man whose one desire was to be eaten by a cannibal, and who finally achieved what he wanted, shows how far a person can go in asserting rights of ownership. Here was someone whose body had become, in his own eyes, a pure object, a piece of meat, and who longed to give it to the person who could make a meal of it.

Sure, the case is an extreme one. But it merely takes to its logical conclusion an attitude that we often encounter in the street. The girl with a ring through her lip is saying “this lip is mine; I can do what I want with it”. And that way she makes a place in the world for the private individual that she is. “Mine” means “not yours”; the word clears a space where Self can stand.

Ever since Descartes’s cogito, the idea of the Self as an inner homunculus has cast its shadow over our views of the human person. It is as though I went through life dragging an animal on a lead, forcing it to do my bidding until, at the last, it collapses and dies. I am a subject; my body an object. I am I, it is it. In this way the body becomes a thing among things, and the only way I can rescue it is to assert a right of ownership, to say this body is not just any old object, but one that belongs to me.

There is another and better way of seeing things, however, and it is one that explains much of that old morality that people profess to find so puzzling. On this view my body is not my property but — to use the theological term — my incarnation. My body is not an object but a subject, just as I am. I don’t own it, any more than I own myself. I am inextricably mingled with it, and what is done to my body is done to me. And there are ways of treating it that cause me to think and feel as I would not otherwise think or feel, to lose my moral sense, to become hardened or indifferent to others, to cease to make judgments or to be guided by principles and ideals. When this happens it is not just I who am harmed: all those who love me, need me or relate to me are harmed as well. For I have damaged the part on which relationships are built.

Surely it is this that disturbs us in drug addiction. The addict treats his body as a pleasure machine. But by possessing it in that way he becomes possessed by it. His moral sense is flushed away by the drug, and in the final stages he is all body, all craving, all physical need.

Likewise the old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and — at its height — an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul.

Roger Scruton is a philosopher and author; his latest book is Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life

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