"How Are We Defining Our Terms Here?": The Defining the Semantic Meaning of Terms in Bioethical Debates

Abstract

All the papers in this final issue of thirty-third volume of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy share a common theme concerning the role that the definitions of certain key terms play in bioethical debates. Each paper included herein discusses the role that certain terms, such as, life, death, sovereignty, disability, potentiality, personhood, and autonomy play, in particular, bioethical debates and how those definitions shape those very same debates. The first paper included in this issue is “Biopolitics, Terri Schiavo, and the Sovereign Subject of Death” by Jeffrey P. Bishop (2008). He explores the discussion that cropped up surrounding the famous case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state for over fifteen years whose husband and parents had a legal dispute over the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube, commonly referred to as a feeding tube, from her stomach, with the assistance of the philosophical writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. According to Bishop, the Terri Schiavo case illustrates a set of circumstances where life and politics become indistinguishable from one another, “wherein life is completely inscribed within the law” (2008, 539). The state, thereby, politicizes “bare life,” life understood only in its most basic purely biological sense, a process which Bishop argues has been documented by Michel Foucault in his writings. However, Foucault has failed to understand the logical conclusion of such a process because he ignores, as Agamben points out, the “fundamental aporia at the heart of constituting and constituted power.” The ultimate possibility that is raised here is a medical totalitarianism where the political state has complete power over determinations concerning life and death. The most obvious example that Bishop takes from the writings of Agamben is, of course, that of the Nazi concentration camps. Bishop writes, “Agamben notes that the most notorious place where life was fully politicized was the camps of Nazi Germany, where lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life, was completely politically inscribed” (2008, 542). What is illustrated by the case of Terri Schiavo is someone whose life, such as it is, and Bishop argues that in actuality before she eventually died, she occupied a space between life and death, was entirely politicized. The risk that is opened up for the rest of us, who, unlike Terri Schiavo in the fifteen years prior to her physical death, are genuinely capable of actualizing our lives in something, at least, potentially fuller than the barest form of mere biological existence, is manifest in the various manners in which both social liberals and social conservatives have politicized life by inscribing it within the law whereby all of us live within a totalizing biopolitics of one variety or another that controls the indistinct boundaries between life and death.