Ethics of the Body

A remarkable group of essays that use postmodern thought to deconstruct conventional bioethics, biomedicine, and biotechnology. Shildrick and Mykitiuk succeed in convincing readers that for all its difficulties, postmodern thought is probably best suited to confront humanity's growing awareness of human difference. This book will be a significant contribution to bioethics.

Rosemarie Tong, Department of Philosophy and Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This is an exciting and challenging collection of essays. They ought to convince even the most skeptical bioethicist that postmodernist bioethics can produce radical illuminations and reflective theorizing regarding the diversity and fluidity of human emobodiment that marks the 21st century. The lucid introduction and the compelling range of essays offers critical and substantive insights into the bioethical dilemmas and choices we face as embodied individuals, as human community, and as a species whose future is uncertain.

Kathryn Pauly Morgan, Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies, and Bioethics, University of Toronto

Rather than merely applying established concepts of ethics to biomedical problems, Ethics of the Body puts the field of ethics itself in question. These essays demonstrate how the challenges and crises posed by advances in biomedicine require nothing less than new concepts of moral agency and responsibility beyond the conventional models of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue. Drawing on diverse resources phenomenology, Derrida's thought of différance, Foucault's critique of power, and Irigaray's radical feminism the contributors inaugurate a critical reconfiguring of the ethical subject, while at the same time they offer concrete and original approaches to particular moral problems in medicine and biotechnology. Anyone working in ethics or bioethics needs to confront the conceptual and practical challenges posed by this volume.

Mary C. Rawlinson, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University