Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives

Abstract

Abstract: In Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human , Maren Tova Linett posits literary fiction as uniquely valuable terrain for bioethical inquiry. By depicting phenomena like animality, disability, and aging in richly imagined worlds, she argues, literary narratives can promote more nuanced engagement with bioethical questions than do the sparse and decontextualized thought experiments commonly employed in philosophical bioethics. Linett reads several novels written across the long twentieth century as literary-philosophical laboratories for testing bioethical claims about the value of different kinds of lives, demonstrating the importance of literary ways of knowing for bioethics. In doing so, she also makes a compelling case for allying animal studies and disability studies, fields that have historically found themselves at odds but that together have much to say about how we can achieve justice for sentient lives of all kinds.