Thread by @CiurriaMichelle

A thread on methods of teaching #bioethics:
Most bioethics textbooks use ideal theory. They start with ethical theories that can be applied to case studies... 1/6

Ideal theory, says Charles Mills, is “a distortional complex of ideas, values, norms, and beliefs that reflects the nonrepresentative interests and experiences of a small minority of the national population.”... 2/6

Ideal theory focuses on ideals to the exclusion of non-ideal social conditions. It asks us to look at cases/scenarios detached from our dystopian (white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, eugenic) reality... 3/6

I start my course with eugenics. Then I talk about how eugenics intersects with white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. That is, I use non-ideal theory. This lays the groundwork for discussions about how modern biomedical practices are situated in a eugenic reality... 4/6

And this leads to discussions about whether bioethics itself is eugenicist in nature (as Shelley Tremain argues)... 5/6

Most bioethics textbooks do things backwards. They start with ideals and then move to cases detached from the biopolitical context. This, says Mills, is unequivocally the wrong way to do ethics. 6/6
#academia #philosophy #teaching #ethics #ableism #eugenics @bioethics_net

@justin_garson