The Disability Bioethics Reader

by Joel Michael Reynolds (Editor), Christine Wieseler (Editor)

The Disability Bioethics Reader is the first introduction to the field of bioethics presented through the lens of critical disability studies and the philosophy of disability. Introductory and advanced textbooks in bioethics focus almost entirely on issues that disproportionately affect disabled people and that centrally deal with becoming or being disabled. However, such textbooks typically omit critical philosophical reflection on disability. Directly addressing this omission, this volume includes 36 chapters, most appearing here for the first time, that cover key areas pertaining to disability bioethics, such The Disability Bioethics Reader, unlike traditional bioethics textbooks, also engages with decades of empirical and theoretical scholarship in disability studies―scholarship that spans the social sciences and humanities―and gives serious consideration to the history of disability activism.

418 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2022

About the author

Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to and Fellow of The Hastings Center, and Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation. At Georgetown, they are also core faculty in the Disability Studies Program, affiliated faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative, a faculty fellow of Ethics Lab, and director of graduate placement in the Department of Philosophy. They are the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society, a book series from Oxford University Press.

Reviews

[J. Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reader is the first introduction to bioethics from a critical disability studies lens. It was created in response to other bioethics readers failing to adequately include a disability lens in topics that intimately affect disabled folks. It includes 36 chapters split into 10 sections: history of disability, history of bioethics, philosophy of medicine, start of life, wellbeing and quality of life, end of life, intersectional considerations, intellectual and mental disabilities, new directions, and finally justice in medicine.

Nonfiction edited volumes are always really difficult to do right. It’s the same problem with fiction short story volumes, but with a few added complexities. One of the things that didn’t work for me in this one is that the chapters were all modelling independent journal articles rather than independent chapters of a unified volume. By this I mean a lot of content was repeated between the chapters, including basic tenets all authors seemed to agree on. There were some really great chapters in here, for example the chapter merging disability and animal rights. But there were also several that felt like there was a picture in mind of the bogeyman bioethicist that was then applied against all sub-fields without question.