In my previous post, I noted that one philosopher in attendance at my Syracuse presentation claimed that I had confused the causal relation between bioethics (and bioethicists) and the popularity and normalization of prenatal testing and screening. As I noted, furthermore, my interlocutor pointed out to me (in a somewhat patronizing fashion) that prospective parents do not avail themselves of prenatal testing because bioethicists tell them to do so. On the contrary, he argued, the technology has been developed; prospective parents want access to the technology; and bioethicists write, teach, and advise about the ethical issues that have ensued from the introduction and wide-spread use of the technology. This understanding of the causal relation between prenatal testing and bioethics, he asserted, accorded with common sense.

Scholars of Foucault (among others) will recognize the quaint assumptions about the operations of power that underpin my interlocutor’s remarks, assumptions according to which bioethics is (merely) an unmotivated domain of inquiry rather than a technology and instrument of the eugenics that has made this field of inquiry and its reproduction possible. Indeed, an analysis of bioethics that draws upon Foucault would reverse this relation of entailment and identify the eugenic status quo in which bioethics effectively participates and to which it tangibly contributes. My work (in a variety of contexts) on the biopolitical character of bioethics primarily endeavours to serve this critical intellectual purpose and is therefore distinctly designed to do so.

As I indicated in the previous post, I attempted to make this interlocutor at Syracuse recognize that my claims in the presentation with respect to the role of bioethics and the contribution of bioethicists in the production of a eugenic culture within philosophy and the broader milieu concerned a longer historical trajectory than he inferred. Bioethics (and its practitioners), I reiterated, has played a crucial role in the creation of the historical conditions of possibility for prenatal testing and its institutionalization and normalization, conditions that satisfy specific biopolitical aims and agendas.

So, too, with euthanasia/assisted suicide, which its proponents euphemistically refer to as medical assistance in dying, MAiD. As I argue in “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, bioethicists have contributed to the historical conditions of possibility for the incremental expansion and normalization of MAiD through (1) their steady production of intellectual resources which are subsequently taken up by (among others) legislators, other bioethicists, journalists, and students and (2) their active engagement in the correlative gatekeeping of disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability that ensures the contrived hegemony of bioethical discourses with respect to a range of social, political, economic, and ethical concerns and the manufactured centrality of bioethicists themselves in certain professional discussions.

Indeed, the incremental normalization of MAiD, philosophical and bioethical discourses that enable this institutionalization of the intervention, and various critical and philosophical responses to these discursive practices have combined to throw into stark relief the extent to which bioethicists (including feminist bioethicists and disability bioethicists) in particular and philosophers and academics in general are complicit in the concerted governmental effort to prematurely end disabled people’s lives. They are complicit in at least these ways:

First, through their contributions to the inculcation of (neoliberal) subjectivities designed to act in particular ways, including through their contributions with respect to the notions of informed consent, autonomy, and quality of life; second, insofar as they continue to tacitly endorse and even reproduce (e.g., in their research, writing, and teaching) trite, skewed, and superficial pro-MAiD arguments that earlier bioethicists introduced, perhaps decades ago, arguments that served to create the mystique of bioethics and the impression that bioethicists possess a specialized knowledge and expertise.

In the aforementioned chapter, I discuss the former technique, that is, the inculcation of a particular type of subjectivity that dovetails with the claims to epistemic authority that bioethicists make. Thus, I want readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY to be cognizant of the rather outrageous argumentation that bioethicists continue to employ to counter objections to the advancement and expansion of MAiD in Canada, trite and skewed argumentation that is in turn tendentiously rehearsed by government officials, the media, and so on. Indeed, some of this argumentation is so skewed and manipulat(ive)(ed) that it behooves me to understand why philosophers would want to continue to be associated with it in any way, let alone reproduce it.

That these bioethical arguments, these discursive weapons, have been adopted and invoked by Canadian Senator Stanley Kutcher, a psychiatrist whose professional views and research practices have been widely discredited publicly by a number of his peers, should, itself, provide philosophers with good reason to distance themselves from the arguments. As a steadfast comrade of feminist law professor Jocelyn Downie (every feminist bioethicist’s hero), Kutcher was a driving force behind the successful enshrinement of Bill C-7 and is at the forefront of Canadian politicians (and bioethicists) who argue that “withholding access to” MAiD from people deemed “mentally ill” constitutes “discrimination” that perpetuates the social “stigma” that accrues to these disabled people.

As I have indicated, this argument (among others) has been generated by a number of bioethicists who continue to invoke it and regularly teach it as a sound objection to criticisms of assisted suicide/euthanasia. (Nondisabled) Feminist philosophers who claim to be allies to disabled feminist philosophers and disabled people in general should challenge this argument and indeed the legislative processes that involve MAiD and its institutionalization and expansion in Canada and elsewhere more generally. In the near future, therefore, I will explain why these arguments are skewed and pernicious, as well as how the continued refusal of feminist philosophers to challenge them is more evidence that ableist assumptions about gender continue to condition feminist philosophy.