Bioethics of Enhancement - by Melinda Hall (Paperback)

About the Book

This book is a critical intervention into debate over human enhancement and engages bioethics, disability studies, and Michel Foucault. Melinda Hall employs a biopolitical framework to argue that transhumanist thinkers present diminished images of the good life and seriously d...

Book Synopsis

This book is a critical intervention into debate over human enhancement and engages bioethics, disability studies, and Michel Foucault. Melinda Hall employs a biopolitical framework to argue that transhumanist thinkers present diminished images of the good life and seriously devalue disabled lives by linking disability with risk and death.

Review Quotes

In The Bioethics of Enhancement, Melinda Hall powerfully argues that disability underpins debates over genetic enhancement, and in turn these debates anchor contemporary bioethics, making disability, and questions over which lives are worth living, the fulcrum of bioethics. Bringing Michel Foucault's notion of biopower to bear on the transhumanist discourses of Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (among others) this book is a game changer, and a must read for anyone interested in enhancement literature, disability studies, or bioethics more generally.

Melinda Hall's The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics is both a unique contribution to philosophy of disability and a bold intervention into philosophical bioethics. It is also an important addition to the growing body of work that uses Foucault to interrogate the role that academic philosophy and bioethics play in the subordination of disabled people. The innovative arguments that Hall persuasively advances throughout the book demonstrate the prescience of Foucault's insights and the relevance of his claims for critical philosophical analyses of disability, as well as show how critical scholarship on disability can expand our understanding of Foucault's oeuvre.

About the Author

Melinda C. Hall is assistant professor of philosophy at Stetson University.