Two or three generations from now, philosophers will look back in horror and shame at the role that Canadian bioethicists and philosophers played in the normalization of medically assisted suicide (a.k.a. MAiD) in Canada. In the seventh-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability that I posted last month, Isaac Jiang, with whom I composed the installment, […]
Schliesser on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability: An Update
I’ve been busy the last few days preparing both a talk that I’m giving to the Philosophy Club at Stetson University later today and the seventh-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability that will be posted on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY this coming Wednesday. So, I haven’t had time to put together a response to Eric Schliesser’s commentary […]
Schliesser on Tremain on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability
Over at Digressions & Impressions, Eric Schliesser has written a critical commentary on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability that might interest some of you. The post also draws attention to In the Shadow of Justice by Kat Forrester. The title of the post indicates that it is the first part of Schliesser’s discussion of […]
Peter Singer and the Mystique of Bioethics: An Addendum About Academic Freedom in Philosophy
As I indicated in Part 1, many of the heated discussions in philosophy about academic freedom have revolved around the question of whether universities should extend invitations for speaking engagements to Peter Singer whose claims about infanticide and disabled infants most philosophers find reprehensible. In contrast to the reception of Singer’s work, feminist bioethics and […]
Peter Singer and the Mystique of Bioethics, Part 2
As I indicated in Part 1, although feminist bioethicists and so-called disability bioethicists too insist that Peter Singer’s claims about disability are morally reprehensible, they maintain that the field of bioethics itself is a noble and progressive enterprise within which one can selectively adopt a neutral stance on certain bioethical issues (Scully 2021). Indeed, disability […]
Peter Singer and The Mystique of Bioethics, Part 1
In recent years, philosophers have increasingly engaged with each other in impassioned discussions about academic freedom in the discipline and profession of philosophy and across academia more broadly, as well as participated in heated debates with members of the broader public about freedom of speech in society more generally. The topics around which the most […]
A Note to/About Jason Stanley; And Here Is My Presentation to Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 2
On Twitter recently, I wrote that although Jason Stanley and I share some commonalities, there are differences between us, an observation that he seems to have appreciated. One of the differences between us, I noted, is that I’m dangerous for philosophy and he’s not. (As one nondisabled feminist philosopher put it to me years ago, […]
Philosophy of Disability Contra Bioethics
Behind the scenes, we are gearing up for Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 2 (#PhiDisSocCh2) which takes place December 7-10, that is, begins two weeks from tomorrow. You can still register for the conference here: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/philosophy-disability-and-social-change-2-conference I’m extremely pleased about the line-up for this year’s conference. I’m also very happy that I will be dropping […]
Bioethics has Always Been Eugenic
A group of authors has just published a brief essay for the Monash Bioethics Review entitled “Can ‘eugenics’ be defended?” In the essay, the authors contend that bioethics discourse is polarized and politicized, and that this is a problem. While the goals of their essay seem to shift across the essay, the specific discussion they […]
(How) Is Disability Relevant to the Field of Social Ontology?
The conception of disability that currently prevails in philosophy construes it as a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait, that is, as a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. Insofar as philosophers hold this naturalized and individualized conception of disability, they assume that disability is a prediscursive […]
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