The unmodified body is a crucial political principle, argues Clare Chambers. She argues that the pressures to modify undermine equality of gender, race, and disability. Chambers presents a subtle, nuanced argument for the unmodified body. However, it remains difficult to square her argument with actual practice.
Clare Chambers’s A Defense of the Unmodified Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) argues that the pressure to modify our bodies sends a message to women and others that they are not good enough as they are. This reinforces inequalities of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class and is a dangerous form of social control.
It can be difficult to make a case for the unmodified body when there are many ways to modify our bodies, including through diets, exercise routines, plastic surgery, or other cosmetic procedures. Nevertheless, in the course of her examinations of these modifications, Chambers offers some very interesting arguments about why some of them are morally permissible.
But her argument is often hard to follow, especially when she tries to sort out the different kinds of acceptable modifications and those that are not. She is also needlessly scholastic, with long digressions and many gratuitous distinctions.
In an age of overwhelming social and political pressure to alter one’s physical appearance, a body that is not modified - i.e., a body that isn’t augmented, enhanced, or surgically altered in any way, shape, or form - stands out as a worthy oenophile pursuit. In the book Intact, acclaimed philosopher Clare Chambers demonstrates that while the unmodified body isn’t for everyone, it can be and should be the norm.
The book also explains how these ideas combine to make an elegant and useful model for living in the twenty-first century. In particular, the book traces how those above the natural and normal body, the oh-so-simple gizmo, are linked to the most important pillars of the modern cosmopolitan community: science, technology, and economic opportunity. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in how technology and human agency interact to create a truly inclusive society. Those wishing to be a part of that society will need to find a way to resist the push for modifying our bodies to enhance them.
In her essay “A Defense of the Unmodified Body,” philosopher Clare Chambers argues that we should embrace an unmodified body. Rather than being the thin, blonde beauty standard cooked up by oppressors, she proposes that an unmodified body is natural and normal.
One important ethical implication of the unmodified body is that it protects our autonomy. Regarding medical or health-related decisions, we have the right to decide how we want our bodies to look and feel – including modifying them.
This autonomy can be threatened by genetic interventions that involve heritable genome alterations since these changes may affect the future generations of people whose genes they modify. Heritable genome alterations can also have implications for our collective identity, as they could change the trajectory of our evolutionary history. For this reason, it is vital to consider how heritable genomic interventions could affect our collective culture and ethics.