Kayla R. Mehl

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has increasingly been pursued as a treatment for obesity over the past couple of decades. This has occurred despite limited scientific justification or a serious ethical analysis of the concerns it raises. These interventions have relied on an “obese brain” model, which treats fatness as a neurological defect that can and should be corrected—reflecting and reinforcing stigmatizing, racialized assumptions about self-control, deviance, and bodily normalcy. To show this, we situate DBS for obesity within the broader and ethically troubling history of psychosurgery. We critique the scientific basis of the obese brain model and argue that its moral justification ultimately collapses. In this narrative framing, we argue that DBS for obesity is not a therapeutic innovation; instead it is a continuation of medicine’s role in pathologizing nonconformity.

This article critically examines how anti-fat biases have been introduced into environmental bioethics, particularly in discussions of climate change. Fat bodies are often linked to environmental harm based on the flawed assumption that they consume more resources and produce higher greenhouse gas emissions. The authors argue that such claims rely on mistaken assumptions, which ultimately result in the disproportionate blaming of already oppressed individuals, reinforcing weight stigma, and exacerbating fat people’s vulnerability to various harms—especially within communities of color. Framing fatness as an environmental burden is thus both empirically unfounded and unjust.

Assumptions about obesity—e.g., its connection to ill health, its causes, etc.—are still prevalent today, and they make up what I call the medical model of fatness. In this paper, I argue that the medical model was established on the basis of insufficient evidence and has nevertheless continued to be relied upon to justify methodological choices that further entrench the assumptions of the medical model. These choices are illegitimate in so far as they conflict with both the epistemic and social aims of obesity research. I conclude the paper with a partial solution to these epistemic and social shortcomings.