Last week, once again in the context of discussion about MAiD, I returned to the subject of how bioethics and bioethicists continue to shape philosophy departments in Canada and Canadian public policy with respect to the lives of disabled people and the limiting effects that this institutional formation has on the range of views that […]
Philosophy, The Apparatus of Disability, and the #EugenicsSyllabus Project
In the fifth chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I argue that bioethics is a strategy of modern eugenics. In earlier articles—such as “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero” and “Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing From the Stem Cell Debates”—I pointed out ways in which the […]
Remembering Disabled People on the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
The sterilization and extermination of disabled people by the Nazis during the Second World War are often overlooked in remembrances of the Holocaust. Indeed, although many disabled people died in Auschwitz and other camps, thousands of disabled people were sterilized and murdered before the establishment of the camps, as disabled author Kenny Fries, among others, […]
The Bioethics of Enhancement – Now In Paperback!
Melinda’s book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics, is now available in paperback and will be on display at SPEP! Here is a description of the book: In a critical intervention into the bioethics debate over human enhancement, philosopher Melinda Hall tackles the claim that the expansion and development of human capacities is […]
Neoliberalism, Bioethics, and the Apparatus of Disability in a German Context
In the fifth chapter of Foucault and the Government of Disability, I assert that philosophers and theorists of disability should recognize that the subfield of bioethics is a neoliberal technology of government, that is, a concerted biopolitical enterprise whose aim is normalization (and hence control) of populations. Given the scope of my critique of bioethics […]
