This article is the fourth in a series, created to answer the question of what I would do — if I was in charge of everything. Each article in the series is meant to offer a specific governmental directive, explaining what the directive is, why the directive is beneficial, and how the directive could be implemented. As the first and prime directive is to maximize overall wellness and thereby minimize overall illness, all other directives are intended as means to more effectively support the prime directive.
The fourth directive I would issue, if I was in charge, is to honor personal bodily sovereignty. To be clear as to what that means, sovereignty is the ultimate authority to make choices and decisions. So, the term “bodily sovereignty” refers to the ultimate authority to make choices and decisions regarding a person’s body. Since the only thing a person innately owns is their body, as described in the third article of this series, personal bodily sovereignty is a natural consequence of one’s ability to make choices combined with one’s inherent responsibility for one’s own body.
Honoring personal bodily sovereignty involves accepting and acknowledging, both publicly and legally, that personal bodily sovereignty is indeed a fact. When the fact of personal bodily sovereignty is denied, those in denial presuppose not only the existence of a higher authority for the use of a person’s body but also that the deniers have sufficient authority themselves to decide what that higher authority is. To honor personal bodily sovereignty is then to do the opposite, accepting and acknowledging that each person has the ultimate authority to make choices and decisions regarding their own body.
As a human being, you are constantly making choices. Furthermore, you are inherently responsible for the choices you make, in that you experience consequences from those choices. Since you are the only one making your choices, you are a sovereign being, given that you have the ultimate authority to make your own choices and decisions. At the same time, you innately own and are ultimately responsible for your body. Therefore, since you are always responsible for both your choices and your body, it is not possible for any other individual nor institution to be more responsible for your body than you are. As such, there is no justification for any other individual or institution to have a higher authority over your body than you do.
The presumption that one, whether as an individual or institution, has a higher level of authority over the use of your body than you do is the basis of not only slavery but also other forms of abuse, such as physical abuse and sexual abuse. Since the prime directive of this series is to maximize overall wellness, it should be clear that abuse (literally the misuse of something) goes directly against that directive. In other words, dishonoring personal bodily sovereignty is a basis for abusing people’s bodies and consequently decreasing their ability to function. Clearly, such dishonoring goes directly against the premise of maximizing overall wellness, which means that adhering to the prime directive of this series requires that personal bodily sovereignty be honored.
Putting into effect the honoring of personal bodily sovereignty requires that any governmental action or ruling that dishonors personal bodily sovereignty be annulled. An effective way to do so is for a commission be set up and given complete permission to perform a full and binding audit on all laws, regulations, enforcement actions, and other governmental decisions to determine whether those governmental decisions dishonor personal bodily sovereignty. For any given governmental decision, if the commission deems that the decision dishonors personal bodily sovereignty, the commission would then be obliged to publicly issue an annulment of the decision, with appropriate changes made to the justice system. Due to the tremendous extent of such an audit, the rulings of the commission would need to be made promptly upon discovery of each governmental decision dishonoring personal bodily sovereignty, rather than waiting until the commission completes its audit.
The ramifications of performing such a legal audit are quite numerous. Most certainly, they would include:
Given such broad ramifications, it is important to be clear that the intentions behind many of the governmental decisions that currently dishonor personal bodily sovereignty are not inherently bad. For example, the intention of ensuring that people are healthy by being vaccinated against diseases and not ingesting addictive or toxic substances is certainly a good intention. The intention of ensuring that people are not sexually misusing their body due to duress or financial hardship is also a good one. The intention of ensuring that people value life, both their own life and the giving of life, is also quite good. However, dishonoring personal bodily sovereignty can never be a healthy way to fulfill those intentions. Rather, the prime directive of maximizing overall wellness requires the promotion of desirable behaviors rather than the penalizing of undesirable behaviors. Otherwise, governments would continue to be in denial of reality and continue to manipulate their subjects through fear.