Anna Gotlib

The ongoing trauma of COVID-19 will no doubt mark entire generations in ways inherent in an unmanaged global pandemic. The question that I ask is why this ongoing trauma seems so particularly profound and so uniquely shattering, and whether there is anything that we could do now, while still in the midst of disaster, to begin the process of social and moral repair? I will begin by considering the trauma of isolation with unknown time-horizons, and argue that it not only damages our experiences as social selves, but its languages of overwhelming grief rob us of hope of self-restoration. Second, I will examine some reasons for the “why us”-type of trauma experienced by so many in the Global North, and suggest that such laments are predicated on the misalignment among our socio-historical awareness, disaster-imagination, and our sense of ourselves as uniquely unfortunate. Finally, relying in part on Viktor Frankl’s notion of “tragic optimism,” I conclude by considering how we may begin to reconsider our traumas as not just endings of what is, but beginnings of what still might be —as repair without a master plan.

Among the myriad longstanding political, socioeconomic, and moral debates focused on the fair distribution of health-care resources within the United States, those addressing intergenerational justice tend to produce the most heat and, often, the least amount of light. The familiar narratives tend to be binary ones of opposing generational stakeholders. While a great number of proposed solutions focus on reconfiguring rationing priorities, this paper will instead shift the discourse to intergenerational interdependence, suggesting that these conflict-born moral dilemmas are in important ways false. The alternative view of intergenerational relations defended here is grounded in an interdependent, rather an oppositional, model of human relationships. I argue that this interdependence can best be realized through a deliberate movement toward intergenerational narrative understandings, as well as through physical proximities. I conclude by considering several ongoing intergenerational projects directed at just such a goal.

In "Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity," Mary Walker and Catriona Mackenzie engage with discourses surrounding the morality of neurotechnologies, arguing that these debates have been largely mistaken in their focus on worries about the effects of emerging technologies on human authenticity. They offer an alternative, autonomy-centered approach that problematizes concerns about authenticity as necessarily "essentialist or existentialist views of the self" that "transcends socialization". Instead, they suggest that, although authenticity is a condition for self-governance, autonomy itself is the more helpful way to frame current debates about neurotechnologies.The goals of their...

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”The American election of 2016 was, in its vitriol, polarization, and outcome, unlike any in recent memory. This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine and confront the fact that some of this election cycle’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric was reserved for Syrian refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. This anti-refugee rhetoric, I suggest, both contributed decisively to Donald Trump’s victory and created potentially lasting toxic...

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility.

This section of the journal consists of reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic by feminist bioethicists. We wanted to have a record in IJFAB of the ways in which feminist bioethicists/feminist bioethics were and are affected by the pandemic and also record how our community sees feminist approaches to bioethics as providing resources for understanding and addressing ethical themes raised by the pandemic. The contributions we received cover a wide range of personal, professional, and theoretical issues and approach them in different ways. We are deeply grateful to the authors for sharing their experiences, and hope that our readers find their contributions engaging and...

Losing the sense of oneself is no trivial matter regardless of the reasons. But when these reasons have to do with the doubly-marginalizing circumstances of serious physical illness and subsequent hospitalization, the loss can be devastating in ways that extend beyond the patient’s release. Because the hierarchical practices and juridical moral theories that govern physician-patient hospital relationships in the United States largely disregard such losses by paying insufficient attention to power differentials and to the unique dilemmas presented by individual cases, patient care calls for better, nonideal approaches to the well-being of this vulnerable population. Specifically, the medical and administrative norms that pervade patient care both harm and alienate those subject to their power by damaging whatever sense of personal identity that an otherwise seriously ill patient might still have. By stripping away not only patient self-trust and voice, but also any semblance of agency itself, the current normative models of hospital care mark those already burdened by illness as mere bodies—not as morally equal participants in the pursuit of healing. Moving toward any semblance of change requires a fundamental re-assessment of the relationship between the patient and the institutional arrangements and priorities. For such a reevaluation to take place, nothing less than an institutional shift toward nonideal, narratively-grounded approaches to the overall well-being of the patient is required. Only then might the status of the patient as a person begin to matter as an essential part of meaningful practices of hospital care.

COVID-19 has meant that the past year has been difficult for everybody and terrifying and heartbreaking for many. We here at IJFAB found ourselves, for the first time, separated by physical distances and pandemic-era planning that precluded those necessary in-person meetings and less formal interactions during conferences and other social occasions that connect so much of the feminist bioethics community. The editorial team has been variously in lockdown, shielding because of health vulnerabilities, or ill, in our different cities and continents. Alongside so many of our readers, contributors, and reviewers, Zoom became the space where we tried to continue to bring you what we consider...

One of my favorite sentences in Hilde Lindemann’s lucid and remarkable book, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities is this: “To have lived... as a person is to have taken my proper place in the social world that lets us make selves of each other”. With this phrase, as with the rest of her book, Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the same time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for beings like ourselves—something that not just describes and categorizes the modes of being a person, but says why personhood matters morally, why it deserves closer philosophical attention, and in the..

In this paper, I address the marginalization of Russian immigrant patients within the American medical system. I argue that their already vulnerable position as immigrants with serious illnesses or conditions is exacerbated by unfamiliar social, cultural, and psychological terrain. This complex situation calls for a revision of the clinician–patient model in favor of a more comprehensive approach that takes seriously their double marginalization and its effects. I claim that one such approach, narrative medicine, can begin to address their marginalized status by attending to not only the symptoms of the body, but to the story of the illness experience.

This paper addresses and challenges the pronatalist marginalization and oppression of voluntarily childless women in the Global North. These conditions call for philosophical analyses and for sociopolitical responses that would make possible the necessary moral spaces for resistance. Focusing on the relatively privileged subgroups of women who are the targets of pronatalist campaigns, the paper explores the reasons behind their choices, the nature and methods of Western pronatalism, and distinguishes three specific sources of some of the more lasting, and stigmatizing attacks: popular culture, law and policy, and medicine itself. I then argue that because they are construed by motherhood-essentializing, and increasingly popular, pronatalist narratives as, among other things, “failed” or “selfish,” voluntarily childless women are subsequently burdened with damaged identities that can leave them personally othered and uniquely liminal in ways that are destructive to moral agency. Finally, I conclude with a challenge to the pronatalist master narratives by suggesting the possibility of counter narratives to the voluntarily childless woman's liminality that might serve as the ground of moral and political solidarity among differently situated women, regardless of their motherhood status.