Some of Your Favourite BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Posts of 2020

By popular demand, I once again present you with a list of some of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY’s most read/listened to posts of the past year. The year was memorable in a host of heart-wrenching ways, many of which our blog captured. In 2020, you wanted more of: January: Notes on Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism and the Problematization […]

Capitalism and Chronic Fatigue (guest post by Michelle Ciurria)

The essay below was presented at Philosophy, Disability and Social Change on Friday, December 11, 2020. _____________________________________________________________________________ Capitalism and Chronic Fatigue By Michelle Ciurria In this presentation, I am going to offer a biopolitical explanation of chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS. First, I’ll explain what CFS is. Then, I’ll explain why I consider CFS to […]

The Morality of Risk and Harm

there is not one such thing as being right. We use normative language like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for many purposes – to talk about what we should do from a first person perspective and to talk about how to judge other people’s actions from a third person perspectives (singular and plural), about who to praise and who to blame, about how to deal with the consequences of our actions and about how to assign responsibilities, etc.

Opposition to Bill C-7 and Too Many Letters of Reference

No, this post isn’t taking on the important work done on The Philosophers’ Cocoon blog by advising philosophy job applicants about the appropriate contents of their dossier. Rather this post draws upon past interventions that I’ve made on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY and on the earlier Discrimination and Disadvantage blog (here, here, and here) to reiterate that […]

Letter to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs of the Government of Canada in Opposition to Bill C-7

This morning, as per Catherine Frazee’s request, I submitted a letter to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs of the Canadian Government. The letter articulates my opposition to Bill C-7, which would expand access to medically-assisted suicide (“MAID”) for disabled people. Given the dearth of disabled philosophers (of disability) in Canadian philosophy, […]

Bioethics, Catherine Frazee, and MAID in Canada

In a previous post, I discussed the role that bioethicists in Canada, including feminist bioethicists, have played in the development in Canada of legislation and public policy designed to facilitate medically-assisted suicide and subsequent expansion of it. This set of events should be recognized as the incremental normalization of power relations that I discuss in […]