John Locke Bundle Of Rights Analysis

That “every man has a property in his own person” is a widely accepted premise of John Locke’s property argument. The limits of that premise were on trial in Moore v. Regents of the University of California, in which John Moore sued the University of California (“UC”) after its doctors, under the guise of treating him for hairy-cell leukemia, collected Moore’s cells, patented a cell line from those cells, and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing so. In the suit, Moore claimed, inter alia, “that he continued to own his cells following their removal from his body” and that he therefore had “a proprietary interest in each of the products that [UC] might ever create from his cells or the patented cell line.” The key question presented …show more content…
To discern the scope of such rights, Attas, drawing from the writings of several natural-right philosophers, argues that A’s bundle of rights over X depends on the extent to which X “promot[es]…values such as need, welfare or the realization of self-consciousness for [A].” “The [bundle of rights] that ensues is justified merely as a consequence of respecting the sort of entitlements [e.g. the entitlement to self-ownership] that best promote [sic] these particular individual values.” In simpler terms, we begin by asserting that A naturally owns X. Next, we justify A’s ownership of X by “point[ing] out the…values [that ownership of X] tends to protect or enhance for [A].” Then, we use these values to decide which rights compose A’s bundle of rights over X. Our task here is thus to decide what values self-ownership protects, and then to ask if income rights follow from these …show more content…
The bundle of rights that follows from these values covers much ground; autonomy gives us the right to let our bodies and minds be free from the coercion of others; self-preservation gives us the right to protect and defend our bodies, and attainment of needs gives us the right to use our bodies to engage with the surrounding environment. But is there a value that grounds the right to profit from our bodies? The best candidate, in my view, is the value of attainment of needs. This value seems to allow us to trade our physical bodies—to prostitute ourselves, for example—in order to survive. But the need value would only allow us to sell our bodies for basic components of survival—“eat[ing] and drink[ing],…wear[ing] protective clothing and inhabit[ing] a dwelling.” The need value hence does not grant any right to profit; it grants a much smaller right: to sustain our lives. We do not need profit to sustain our lives, so the right to profit does not follow. In sum, there is a natural right to earn income via our bodies, but that right exists only insofar as the income we receive is essential to our