I want to let readers/listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY know that there is a new Netflix documentary, entitled “Tell Them You Love Me,” about the circumstances leading up to the arrest of philosopher Anna Stubblefield for the sexual assault of Derrick Johnson, a disabled Black man; Stubblefield’s trial and conviction; and the aftermath of these events. […]
Ableism in Philosophy According to ChatGPT
I have copied below the discussion I had with ChatGPT about ableism, philosophy, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. My requests for information are in bold. I found the ChatGPT responses instructive insofar as they seemed merely to rehearse conventional, (neo)liberal definitions of what disability is, what ableism is, what counts as ableist, what bioethics is and […]
Eugenic Thinking in Australasia: An Anti-Eugenics Centennial, University of Western Australia Online, Sept. 3, 10, 14, 2021
Eugenics is often thought of as a social movement ending around 1945 with the end of the Second World War. Whether or not one accepts this view of eugenics, eugenic thinking has a reach into contemporary thinking and public policy. Eugenic thinking is the confluence of a goal with a way of achieving that goal. […]
Senator McPhedran and Bill C-7 Amendment
Here is a must-watch speech by Senator Marilou McPhedran in the current Canadian Senate debate on Bill C-7, proposed legislation to remove the foreseeable death clause from current MAiD legislation. Senator McPhedran, who has a long history of work on policy instruments with respect to international treaties, human rights, and minority populations, both disputes a […]
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, […]
Bramble, Pandemic Ethics, the Nursing Home-Industrial Complex, and the Scope of Mainstream Philosophy
This post comprises a comment that I contributed to the discussion at PEA Soup of Ben Bramble’s Pandemic Ethics. Bramble’s book, which is open access, online here, was discussed across three PEA Soup posts. My comment below appears on the third of these posts. I wanted to point out what I regard as a grave […]
The Singer/Lindauer Entry Won! But Why?
As per comments that I have made in the Teaching Practical and Applied Ethics Facebook group, let me say this: The winner of The Splintered Mind contest (go here) that solicited arguments designed to convince people to donate to charity, namely, the Singer/Lindauer entry about an effort to prevent “blindness,” reproduces ableism and ableist biases […]
COVID-19, Nursing Homes, and Public Philosophy
At the beginning of April, I wrote an essay (here) for BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about COVID -19, nursing homes, and vulnerability, in which I argued that the escalating number of deaths in nursing homes was a consequence of the nature of the institutions themselves rather than due to some inherent vulnerability, that is, some property or […]
From Scarcity to Abundance: Reconfiguring The Means of Production During the Pandemic
Disabled activists and philosophers have made a number of interventions on social media, blogs, podcasts, and so on with respect to the pandemic and disabled people. Most of these contributions to critical discourse about the pandemic and disability have been concerned with distribution, disability, and discrimination: who should get medical attention, who should have access […]
I’m Disabled and Need a Ventilator to Live. Am I Expendable During This Pandemic?
In the fifth chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I develop the argument that bioethics is a eugenic technology of government that facilitates normalization of the population through strategies such as “quality of life” assessments. I also argue that the intentional and nonsubjective forms of power that motivate bioethics require the exclusion of […]
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