What are the goals of this series?
This series aims to showcase the fascinating, impactful, and (occasionally) controversial bioethical work in which members of the APA are currently engaged. It is to be an outlet through which researchers, teachers, students, and others can share their ideas, be they developing or fully formed, with as broad an audience as the APA platform can provide. It will also act as a resource in which posts on bioethics can be found; currently, there is no central point within the APA ecosystem where such works reside, and given bioethics’ broad remit, publishing such works under a single banner seems (to me at least) sensible.
Does this series have an intended audience?
In short, no.
In long, bioethics is a field of philosophy which (and this is not to disparage other fields) impacts everyone’s lives. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re interested in; the questions bioethics considers and the answers it generates influence the lives of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Bioethics can be found wherever normative philosophy and biology interact, from reproductive rights to food production, from genetic modification to environmental degradation. If you eat, sleep, reproduce, breathe air, drink water, get sick, or will one day die, bioethics is for you, and so is this series.
It is not just that the topics which bioethics covers are vast; so too are the methodologies which can be applied to the work. Be it analytical or continental philosophy, socio-legal studies, empirical work, queer, feminist, or post-colonial methods, or countless others, there is no end of ways that bioethics can be done. So, regardless of your methodological predilections, there will be something in this series for you (and if not, then maybe consider contributing).
What motivated you to start this series?
I suppose there are three motivators.
First, I’m the series editor for the Current Events in Public Philosophy series, and I very much enjoy my role there. So, I thought if I enjoyed doing that, I’d probably enjoy editing another series (hedonistic, I know, but I’m only human).
Second, I am a bioethicist, so it made sense that if I were to take on another series, it would be one concerning the field in which I already work.
Third, it struck me as odd that, given the growing interest in bioethics as a field over the past few decades (especially since the pandemic), an APA bioethics series didn’t already exist. So, I thought, if one doesn’t already exist, I should start one.
What inspired your interest in this topic?
Honestly, I don’t have an inspiring story for this. Like many things, I kind of fell into it.
Thanks to science fiction, I’d always been interested in the wackier ideas about what technology might achieve, things like human augmentation, de-extinction, and self-replicating nanotech. Indeed, these topics led me to study philosophy in the first place, as I was curious about the ethical implications of such control of the world and ourselves. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself when I finished my undergrad, so like many wayward twenty-somethings, I decided to do a master’s, and the course that offered the chance to study the ethics of these seemingly fantastical things was titled ‘bioethics and society.’ From that point, I was hooked. I’ve found bioethics to be endlessly fascinating because it’s constantly shifting and developing. New topics emerge constantly, and old ones are forever cast in new light as revolutionary biomedical technologies or philosophical theories emerge. From artificial wombs to reproductive liberties, cybernetic implants to cryopreservation, every day in bioethics brings with it new challenges, new wonders, and sometimes, new horrors. It’s never dull, and God, I hate to be bored.
Why should others be interested in this topic?
This is a relatively easy question to answer, given what we’ve all experienced over the past few years and what many of us are experiencing today.
The pandemic drove to the forefront of everyone’s lives just how delicate the relationship with our bodies, the bodies of others, and the natural world is. It took only a few months for a virus to grind vast swaths of our world to a halt and for our governments, private entities, and other societal organizations to enact plans to curtail the virus’s spread. Limits on our freedom of movement, to focus on work from home, and the need to conserve public health resources. Considerable changes to our lives, which some embraced, and others railed against. We all saw (or better yet, felt) how important it was to understand the biological mechanisms underpinning the virus’s replication and the ethical and social ramifications of those efforts to defeat it. The latter falls within the purview of bioethics. When you had people debating the balance between liberty and security, that was bioethics. When you (reportedly) had some world leaders suggesting that the virus should be allowed to rip through a population so that the survivors could get back to work, and others calling such suggestions monstrous, that was bioethics.
Others should be interested in bioethics because they are the subject of it and have a stake in the debate. While some may find other areas in philosophy more engaging, I would say that bioethics is one of the few that impacts their lives every day.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered in this work?
During my master’s, I was introduced to elective impairment. That is, people who, for one reason or another, want to become disabled. This could be anything from blindness or paraplegia to limb loss. I became immediately fascinated by this phenomenon and ended up doing my PhD on it, where I considered the nature of disability, how neuroprosthetic limbs might be used post-amputation, and what the legal position might be on surgeons offering to disable people deliberately.
I found the fact that people wanted to become disabled to be hugely surprising. But what was equally, perhaps even more shocking, was that there was such little consideration of this possibility in the philosophical and legal literature. I’m happy that literature has grown since my master’s, and I’m delighted to say that I’ve contributed to it myself.
The Bioethics series of the APA Blog aims to share philosophical insights about unfolding bioethical research. If you would like to contribute to this series, email RichardBGibson@hotmail.com.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
