A Companion to Public Philosophy

6Feminist Bioethics as Public Practice¹

YOLONDA WILSON

In thinking about feminist bioethics as public practice, the first task is to consider what feminist bioethics is. Is it a perspective? A methodology? Neither? Both? Second, what is uniquely “feminist” about feminist bioethics? Like many a philosophy professor before me, I often tell my Introduction to Philosophy undergraduates that philosophy begins with wonder. That is, the philosophical endeavor begins with a burning curiosity about the world around us: Who or what made the stars? What happens after we die? Do fish snore? And while one might be a decent philosopher without being interested in those kinds of questions, the fundamental curiosity about one’s world, one’s place in it, and one’s engagement with other beings who also inhabit the world is at least the beginning of the philosophic endeavor, or so says Aristotle (2018).

Likewise, I would say that feminist bioethics begins with critical engagement. It is both a response and a challenge to bioethics. Yet, feminist bioethics is not merely reactionary. The issues that emerged to form what is now understood to be a distinctive specialty within the field came to be as a result of thinking about both the omissions within bioethics and the advocacy work of activists, scholars, and scholar/activists who were faced with the realities of women patients whose needs were not being met. Feminist bioethics involves the conscious decision to see the field and the world we inhabit ...