If you pay some attention to Canadian philosophy Twitter, you might have gotten the impression over the last week that the most pressing issue for Canadian philosophers was the closure due to the Emancipation Day holiday on Monday of stores that sell high-quality coffee beans. If you scrolled through Twitter a bit longer, however, you […]
Why Do Disability Bioethicists and Feminist Bioethicists Sustain the Status Quo of the Apparatus of Disability?
This past weekend, I wrote a comment on a Twitter thread according to which disability bioethicists extend the biopolitical normalization of the apparatus of disability rather than challenge it, sustaining the status quo. It would have been more astute for me to have written, as I have in a few places (including here), that disability […]
Whataboutisms, Exclusion and Silencing
Behind every whataboutism is a claim of exclusion. As such, they are easy to dismiss as irrelevant and distracting, since they are never already part of what is at issue.
Philosophy, Disability, and the Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic
Despite what governments of the world with their bottom-Iines want us to believe, the pandemic rages on. The WHO reports that COVID-positivity rates have tripled across Europe in the past six weeks. Fifty-three countries in the European-Central Asian region reported nearly 3 million new cases last week, with nearly 3,000 deaths each of the last […]
Nathan Moore on the Exclusion of Disabled Philosophers From Philosophy, MAiD, and the Relation Between Them
On Monday of this week, Canadian disabled philosopher Nathan Moore, who was interviewed in the Dialogues on Disability series in October 2020, wrote a thread on Twitter about the exclusion of disabled philosophers from Canadian philosophy, in particular, and the profession of philosophy, in general; MAiD and the culture of eugenics in Canadian philosophy and […]
Bioethics De-Mystified
In “Bioethics as a Technology of Government,” the fifth chapter of my monograph, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I assert that bioethics emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies. In particular, disability is constituted as a problem for a […]
Notes on the Limits of Philosophical Discourse About Abortion
I suppose it was somewhat predictable that various so-called “analytic” philosophers would continue to uncritically accept and promulgate the arguments that liberal feminists (including liberal feminist philosophers) have made about “choice” and “personal autonomy” with respect to abortion. These arguments are very friendly with neoliberal ideas about the mobility of capital which outstrips national borders […]
Is Resistance to MAiD a Feminist Issue?
The refusal of feminist bioethicists, (so-called) disability bioethicists, and feminist philosophers in general to address the expansion of MAiD (medically assisted suicide) and eugenics in Canada, albeit predictable, is nonetheless egregious, unethical, and goes against everything feminists should aim to cultivate. Indeed, this refusal should make disabled philosophers (and other disabled people) question the professed […]
About the Ableism that Conditions Your Criticisms of Zoom
Recently a very accomplished philosopher at an Ivy League university shared a post on Facebook about how they “hate” Zoom conferences and would no longer “pretend” otherwise. Because of the way that prestige bias operates in philosophy and the way that the combination of prestige bias and algorithms operates in the virtual reality of philosophy […]
Guerrero and the Effects of Claims About “Ignorance” for Change in Philosophy
Over at Daily Nous, Alexander Guerrero has written a very instructive guest post that provocatively builds upon interventions that, in the past, he has made about the eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, and Anglo-American concentration of philosophy curricula. Guerrero’s post is both informative and challenging, providing recommendations and advice to philosophers about how they can expand the purview […]