Projects per year
Abstract
It is a common refrain amongst phenomenologists, disability theorists, and feminist legal theorists that medical practice pays insufficient attention to people’s embodiment. The complaint that we take insufficient account of people’s embodiment isn’t limited to the clinical interaction. It has also been directed at healthcare regulation and welfare policy. In this paper, I examine the arguments for taking embodiment seriously in both medical practice and welfare policy, concluding we have good reasons to take better account of people’s embodiment. I then set out two challenges to taking embodiment seriously in public policy. First, given the amount of variation in how people are embodied, there is strong possibility that adjusting policy to benefit particular individuals based on an appreciation of their embodied experiences could be detrimental towards other individuals. The second challenge concerns how to ensure that people’s testimony about their first-person embodied experience is subject to adequate scrutiny without this resulting in epistemic injustice. I argue that the solution to both of these challenges is to devise a just procedure for soliciting people’s testimony and taking it into account in the policy development process. As such, I also provide an outline of what a just procedure should look like.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | Monash Bioethics Review |
Early online date | 4 Nov 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 4 Nov 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding:Work on this paper was supported by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award in Humanities and Social Sciences 2019–2024 (Grant No 212507/Z/18/Z).
Keywords
- Embodiment
- Medical practice
- Health Policy
- Participation
- Epistemic injustice
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Everyday Cyborgs 2.0: Law's Boundary-Work & Alternative Legal Futures
1/09/19 → 1/09/25
Project: Research