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11.
Such a modification, as already noted, affects
the historical dimension of the person, and thus the individual's communicative
structure as mediated by his corporeality.
In light of a renewed appreciation
of the body and of the symbolic understanding of it that much of contemporary
anthropology offers, it should be observed that not all organs of the human
body are in equal measure an expression of the unrepeatable identity of the
person. There are some which exclusively perform their specific function;
others, instead, add to their functionality a strong and personal symbolic
element which inevitably depends on the subjectivity of the individual; and
others still, such as the encephalon and the gonads, are indissolubly linked
with the personal identity of the subject because of their specific function,
independently of their symbolic implications. Therefore one must conclude that
whereas the transplantation of these last can never be morally legitimate,
because of the inevitable objective consequences that they would produce in the
recipient or in his descendants,(61) those organs
which are seen as being purely functional and those with greater personalized
significance must be assessed, case by case, specifically in relation to
the symbolic meaning which they take on for each individual person.(62)
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