ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of the rights that are relevant to transplantation. It discusses the idea of moral rights and introduces concepts, such as negative and positive rights, autonomy, informed consent, and ownership, that figure prominently in discussions of transplantation. The chapter focuses on moral rights, moral and legal rights often overlap in content and they conceptually have much in common. It explains the idea of moral rights, and argues that people have rights of bodily integrity and personal sovereignty. The chapter describes a model of personal sovereignty in the light of apparently conflicting practices and of the doctrine of informed consent in medicine. Although considerations of bodily integrity justify weighty rights over our body, those rights are limited in scope. The most common way to express the idea that people should decide what to do with their own bodies is in terms of autonomy.
