Bioethics, Philosophy, and Philosophy of Disability.

Blumenthal-Barby et al. (2022) list several areas of philosophy that may contribute to bioethics. Missing from their list and explicit discussion is the philosophy of disability. Whereas mainstream bioethics and philosophy have been criticized for their treatment and portrayal of disability and disabled people, this exclusion is lamentable, particularly given the examples the authors discuss. Meanwhile, philosophers of disability have often contributed to bioethics, as demonstrated in the inaugural 2021 issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Disability and the 2021 “Philosophies of Disability and the Global Pandemic” issue of the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies. This commentary supports the authors’ general position while addressing this omission by outlining three ways in which engagement with philosophy of disability stands to benefit bioethics. Two initial clarifications. First, “philosophy of disability” here refers to the subdiscipline of philosophy focused on disability, similar to how “philosophy of mind” or “philosophy of biology” pick out their topics of mind and biology respectively. Second, while philosophy of disability is excluded from the authors’ explicit discussions, it is not entirely absent from the article: their citations engage philosophy of disability, and several authors also do so in their other works. But this does not preclude a need for more direct engagement here, particularly given that disability appears explicitly in their examples of disability classification, abortion of putatively disabled fetuses, and prosthetic embodiment. Philosophy of disability thus seems relevant both generally and locally to their article.