Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett (review)

Abstract

Let’s try a thought experiment. Animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer or disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson? Are you confused? What if they were both in a burning building and you could save only one of them? How about this one: animal rights or disability rights? You might wonder if those must be the only choices. Maren Tova Linett’s Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human wants us to choose both of them, but not necessarily Peter Singer’s version of animal rights. Singer is notorious for arguing that the lives of certain animals can have more value than certain humans with disabilities. Linett’s new book argues instead that we should value all forms of human and nonhuman life equally, including both humans with disabilities and nonhuman animals. According to Linett, literary texts can function as what she calls “bioethical” thought experiments, dramatizing both problematic and defensible ethical positions. Novels in particular can provide much more complex sites for exploring these issues compared with oversimplified thought experiments that philosophers like Singer often propose. Linett’s aim is to bring together critical disability studies and critical animal studies by evaluating how various novels construct moral issues related to disability and animality. The book engages with moral philosophy, biopolitics, and posthumanism, all of which Linett suggests can be encompassed within a broader definition of bioethics, although some readers might prefer to maintain distinctions between these diverse fields. Linett’s selection of novels for exploring these questions might also raise some questions; she moves from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Rather than emphasizing these texts in relation to their particular historical and cultural moments, or the generic conventions of either science fiction or speculative fiction, Linett focuses her four chapters on these novels as examples of “textual laboratories,