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. […]
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 […]
Blowing the Whistle on MAiD/Bill C-7 and the Naturalization of Disability and Mental Illness
As a disabled philosopher of disability, one of the most (though certainly not the most) frustrating aspects of the recent discussions and debates about MAiD and Bill C-7 that have ensued in the Canadian Senate, on Daily Nous and other blogs, on Facebook, and on Twitter is the way that disability and mental illness have […]
The Carceral Character of Nursing Homes and How Eugenics in Canada is MAiD
This post comprises an excerpt from my article “Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex in Canada,” which is forthcoming in Philosophies of Disability and the Global Pandemic, a special issue of The International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies of which I am guest editor. Additional posts about nursing homes and about MAiD […]
The Reputation of Canadian Philosophy is in the Balance
On social media platforms all across Canada and the United States, academics, activists, lawyers, physicians, and students, have come alive to the eugenic impetus of MAiD and its latest incarnation, Bill C-7, as well as to the philosophical underpinnings of these policies. Indeed, as I have noted in previous posts on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, eugenics is […]
More on Opposition to Bill C-7 (Medically-Assisted Suicide) and the Role of Philosophers
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 […]
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 