A Body of One's Own: Samaritanism, Sex, and Self‐Ownership

ABSTRACT Robust Samaritan theories hold that citizens may be pressed to share whatever others need for minimal flourishing. Cécile Fabre extends that duty to organs, labor, and even sexual services, while Cohen's ideal of an “egalitarian ethos” asks citizens to internalize such claims. I show that coupling these ideas with a rejection of even minimal selfownership yields a trilemma: Bodily resources can be commandeered, everyone is motivated to comply, and rape loses its status as a wrongful taking. Efforts to cordon off sex because of concerns with trauma, autonomy, or cash compensation either become ad hoc or smuggle rights back into the body. What survives is a narrow but decisive principle of self‐ownership that forbids compelled use of another's person, while still leaving room for redistributive justice in external goods. Defending this minimal self‐ownerhsip as sovereignty does not entail libertarianism; but it preserves the practical and conceptual wrongness of rape and sustains the moral significance of sexual consent.