In an interview on Body Shopping

Why are you interested in medical ethics?

I think medical ethics is an interesting area for someone with a philosophical and legal background like me because it is an area in which you can actually make a difference. Marx’s dictum that ‘philosophers have analysed the world, but the point is to change it’ is relevant to people working in medical ethics. I also think that the dilemmas of medical ethicists very often highlight deep philosophical problems. In the example of body shopping, I was able to home in on the shocking point that you don’t actually own your body, either philosophically speaking or practically in law. People tend to think you do: they think it’s common sense that your body is yours, when it simply isn’t the case.

What is body shopping? 

I coined this term to refer to what I think is the commercialisation of the human body. The term is trying to link together a number of instances like egg sales, the private banking of umbilical cord blood, kidney sales, the sale of sperm, and the patenting of the human genome (something like one in five human genes now have a patent, most owned by private firms). What I want to highlight is that we are lacking legal clarification about the relationship we have to our bodies, which is relevant in different ways in each of these cases. I don’t necessarily think that clarification means that we should change the laws so that we ‘own’ our bodies in the conventional sense of property. This materialist attitude creates a number of problems, exploitation for example. After the Asian tsunami in 2004, there were a whole series of reports where Indian women, mostly villagers whose husbands had lost their fishing boats, sold their kidneys for money. These people were left much unhealthier than they were before, and had in my view been grossly exploited.

Are there not good reasons for allowing people to sell their bodies if the industry is properly regulated?

Well, some people say that things like patenting the human genome are necessary for scientific research, which I think is debatable. There is a lot of evidence that the patents are actually blocking scientific research in cases where researchers can’t get hold of the patents, which are owned by a different company. This means that they can’t then do research on a particular gene, or on a drug which targets a particular gene.

Let’s talk about your first book by Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Walden is a book that I have loved since I was 14 or 15. I actually grew up in New England, where Thoreau writes Walden from, so I suppose the book has a special resonance for me. Thoreau sets out as a young man to investigate how simply he could live. The book is about his awareness that, even in 1845, America was already becoming highly commercialised. He discusses how the original ideals that America was founded on were being compromised, and how massive industrial interests were starting to dominate. This is a trend which has continued to the present day, and is an important theme relating to my own interest in bioethics, with the commercialisation of the human body.

And what does he identify as the biggest problem with commercialisation?

Thoreau isn’t writing a political tract, but rather a pithily written and often humorous personal account. He is probably the greatest English prose stylist of his day, if not of ours, not least because many of his central points are expressed as epigrams, aphorisms or parables. His thinking about commercialisation is also put in that fashion, with a fantastical metaphor of a farmer neighbour whom he met walking down the road, pushing his barn before him. It encapsulates Thoreau’s strong sense that the once independent American character was being simultaneously overloaded and undermined by acquisitiveness and consumerism.

In an interview on The Art of Living

Well, let’s draw on it now, beginning with Thoreau’s Walden. Will you briefly introduce the book to our readers?

Well, in 1845 the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau went out to live in the woods of western Massachusetts. He lived two years there, and a few years later he wrote a book about his experiences called Walden; or, Life in the Woods. It’s an account of how he went about the practicalities of simple living. It’s about how he built his house – a log cabin – with his own hands, grew his own food and lived a subsistence lifestyle. And it’s about what he did when he was there, like observing nature and swimming in Walden Pond.

I think Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. Of course, he didn’t live in complete isolation. Every few days he walked into the town of Concord, to read the papers and have a chat with his mum. He was very open about that. But he wrote extremely eloquently about the advantages of paring down life to its essentials – of doing more than getting caught up in the commercialisation and industrialisation that was going on around him.

Which is a lesson as relevant to our lives today as it was in the 19th century.

Even more relevant now, I think. In the era of climate change, there’s increasingly a move to cut back on our carbon emissions. Thoreau would have totally fitted into that. He would have looked around today and said: If you want to live carbon-lite, a less high-consumption lifestyle, you’ll see plenty of ideas in my book for turning away from material culture – not depriving yourself, but embracing the beauties of nature and of free time, the ultimate luxury.

Thoreau’s experience in Walden taught him that he could live extremely cheaply and he didn’t have to work very much. In fact, he said that he could work as a part-time surveyor for about six or seven weeks and have enough to live on at Walden Pond for a year.

He also talks about not striving purely for ambition’s sake. What does that say about our modern obsession with bettering our material situation?

Thoreau was always sceptical of what people called “civilisation” – accumulating material goods, moving into a bigger house. He viewed those things as burdens. He saw that having a massive mortgage was just going to tie you down and limit your freedom. Somewhat romantically, he thought you’d be much better off living in a wigwam, like the indigenous native Americans.

Thoreau famously said: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” That was a message that he very much wanted to spread, at least through his own example. He saw the stress faced by farmers around him, who were trying to pay off their mortgages and improve the material quality of their lives. And he thought that it was much more luxurious and enjoyable to sit in the doorway of his cabin and listen to the birds sing, than to try to earn enough money to buy a new sofa.

Yet surely he doesn’t mean we should all follow his example, and give it all up to build ourselves cabins in the woods alongside his?

Thoreau was an extraordinarily realistic person. I don’t think he actually thought that everyone should live in the woods. What he was really saying was that wherever we live – even in urban society – we can simplify our lives. And that way, in purely practical terms, we probably don’t have to work as hard to support our lifestyle. And if you don’t have to work as much, you have more free time. Free time, for him, was the ultimate freedom.

I think he would say to us now: Even if you are living in a high-rise flat in Paris or Berlin or New York, if you simplify your life then you can learn that it may be more enjoyable to take a walk in the park than to drive an expensive car around. That’s something that everyone can do without having to go and live in the woods. So Thoreau has a very realistic message for us, especially now that a third of people feel time-stressed or time-poor. What they really want is the freedom to not be tied down to jobs they don’t want to do or debts they wish they didn’t have.

My favourite quote is near the end, when he writes: “If a man does not keep pace with his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

That’s right, and I think that idea of walking to the beat of your own drummer is a vital lesson for the art of living. What he’s saying there is that we don’t need to conform; in a way we need to break the rules. There have always been inspiring figures in history who have done that, and Thoreau is one of them. Mary Wollstonecraft is another – she became an author in an age [the 18th century] when no women did so, went to revolutionary France, had a child out of wedlock and so on. She was walking to the beat of her own drummer, and I find that personally inspiring.

From everyday things like rejecting the culture of watching TV for three hours a day and locking your TV in the cupboard, to maybe leaving your well-paid job to do something which embodies your values more, we need to walk to the beat of our own drummer if we want to live a more experimental and adventurous life.