As I have pointed out in numerous posts on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, liberal feminist bioethicists/philosophers have been at the forefront of the eugenics movement in Canada for quite some time. So, I wasn’t surprised to see the publication announcement of Amy Mullin and Kayla Wiebe’s recent article in which these liberal feminist bioethicists in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto (affiliated with the Joint Centre for Bioethics at U of T) argue that we should uphold MAiD as a good option for disabled people living in poverty in Canada.

Although we should recognize that the use of MAiD in such circumstances is “tragic,” they write, we should nevertheless additionally recognize that the “decision” to undergo MAiD may be the best option under current social arrangements: social change may be a long time coming and disabled people should not be made to endure intolerable conditions until it arrives. Furthermore, these liberal feminists argue, the provision of MAiD to disabled Canadians who choose to avail themselves of it due to the dire social conditions in which they are forced to live is acknowledgement that these conditions themselves do not preclude the exercise of autonomous decision-making. Although we can’t, at present, guarantee disabled people improved living conditions, they claim, we can protect their right to make autonomous decisions about the conditions under which they live at present: exercise of one’s autonomy must be allowed to prevail.

In order to advance their (flawed) argument, Mullin and Wiebe rely upon the (liberal) feminist notion of relational autonomy, a conception of autonomy that is outdated and misunderstands how neoliberal power operates, namely, by enabling people to act in order to constrain and control them, that is, by guiding and limiting their actions in accordance with their choices and their decisions. Mullin and Wiebe’s article, in addition to its reliance on an outdated conception of autonomy, is flawed insofar as these feminist bioethicists seem to lack anything more than naïve familiarity with the processes that MAiD involves, that is, are uninformed about how MAiD actually operates in practice and the history of eugenic policies and disabled people, Indigenous people, and poor people in Canada that it extends. In short, their analysis lacks the political understanding of (the apparatus of) disability that philosophers of disability are better equipped to provide.

It is deeply troubling that this highly circumscribed (mis)understanding of MAiD and of disability in Canada is likely the totality of what philosophy students in courses offered in the Department of Philosophy at Canada’s leading university are currently taught about disabled people and MAiD. In this regard, I should point out that each of the three University of Toronto campuses employs philosophy faculty that actively promote MAiD–that is, actively promote euthanasia for disabled people–on social media, in the popular mainstream press, and at philosophy conferences, as well as in their classrooms. None of these campuses employs a full-time tenured or tenure-track disabled philosopher of disability in philosophy. Indeed, my own experiences of ableist discrimination and hostile treatment as an untenured faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto can serve as additional testament to the structural ableism that conditions the philosophy department there and Canadian philosophy more generally.

When Michael Cholbi enthusiastically retweeted the announcement of Mullin and Wiebe’s article on Tuesday, he prefaced it with this remark: “surprising how prevalent the belief is that background injustice makes autonomous choice impossible!” Cholbi is a bioethicist in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh who has made euthanasia and assisted suicide part of his dossier and thus this reductive interpretation of the criticisms that opponents of MAiD articulate is unsurprising. (Let me note that Cholbi’s PhilPapers page offers no evidence to suggest that Cholbi is apprised of philosophy of disability). Cholbi’s pronouncement is instructive, nevertheless, because it puts into relief some of the ways in which Mullin and Wiebe misunderstand and misrepresent power in general and in the context of MAiD in particular.

Notice how Cholbi’s remark implies that power relations that impinge on the subject stand apart from the individual, forming a “background” of circumstances to one’s life and life choices rather than constituting the very subject itself and putting in place (producing) its possible choices and the limits of its possible actions. This (neo)Kantian understanding of the subject’s relation to power, an understanding of power that conditions bioethics and indeed precipitated its emergence, has been produced in accordance with neoliberal relations of power that increasingly condition society, relations of power in which subjects are construed merely as sites for transactional exchange: a sum of opportunities, choices, options, investments, and developments. That Mullin/Wiebe and Cholbi assume this conception of power relations and thus this conception of the constitution of the disabled subject demonstrates how little they understand about the constitution of subjectivities under circumstances of institutional, systemic, and structural oppression in general and about the constitution of disabled subjectivities under the grinding and demoralizing institutional, systemic, and structural rule of the apparatus of disability in particular.