You have full access to this open access article. In this paper, I discuss the bioethical principle of justice and the bioethical key concept of vulnerability, in a queer feminist posthuman framework. I situate these contemplations, philosophical by nature, in the context of antimicrobial resistance AMR , one the most vicious moral problems of our time.
Further, I discuss how gender and sexual variance, vulnerability and justice manifest in AMR. I conclude by considering my queer feminist posthuman framework for vulnerability and justice in relation to the notion of antibiotic vulnerabilities, suggesting a lacuna for further AMR research. The concept of vulnerability first emerged into bioethics from research ethics in the s that often labeled certain subpopulationsβfor example, cis womenβas vulnerable, without being very resourceful in solving ethical issues stemming from that vulnerability.
In recent decades, however, vulnerability has been reconfigured in bioethical theory. The rigid understanding that Florencia to Luna ; ; Luna and Vanderpoel calls the subpopulation approach has been challenged with morally more salient approaches, contributing new ideas to debates about the ethical dimensions of medicine and health care ten Have Vulnerability cannot be fully understood within the framework of individual autonomy, which can dominate mainstream bioethics; rather, vulnerability is perceived as created through the social and economic conditions of life ten Have ; Rogers et al.
But should that be multispecies life? It is undoubtedly still anthropocentric in the sense that it has human as one of its denominators, but by the idea of more than , I not only wish to imply moral significance in the ecocentric and biocentric sense but also to include, in a network theory rather than confessional understanding, spectral realms such as ancestors, spirits, ghosts and deities that are crucial actors in several global sense-making systems de la Cadena Making further way for the radical reorientation of human exceptionalism, by more than I wish to remain open to finding new ways of being with ethics that perhaps could be more attuned to planetary or even cosmological flourishing than current human-oriented approaches.
More-than-human interrogates anthropocentrism in moral significance and ethical analyses but does not wish to abandon or exceed the human per se in a transhumanist understanding Whatmore ; Braidotti It is crucial to note than in this framework, justice and vulnerability are neighboring concepts: in analyses of injustice, on many occasion it is precisely the detection and eradication of vulnerabilities that will pave the way to more just worlds.
