Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett

Abstract

Let’s try a thought experiment. Animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer or disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson? Are you confused? What if they were both in a burning building and you could save only one of them? How about this one: animal rights or disability rights? You might wonder if those must be the only choices. Maren Tova Linett’s Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human wants us to choose both of them, but not necessarily Peter Singer’s version of animal rights. Singer is notorious for arguing that the lives of certain animals can have more value than certain humans with disabilities. Linett’s new book argues instead that we should value all forms of human and nonhuman life equally, including both humans with disabilities and nonhuman animals. According to Linett, literary texts can function as what she calls “bioethical” thought experiments, dramatizing both problematic and defensible ethical positions. Novels in particular can provide much more complex sites for exploring these issues compared with oversimplified thought experiments that philosophers like Singer often propose. Linett’s aim is to bring together critical disability studies and critical animal studies by evaluating how various novels construct moral issues related to disability and animality. The book engages with moral philosophy, biopolitics, and posthumanism, all of which Linett suggests can be encompassed within a broader definition of bioethics, although some readers might prefer to maintain distinctions between these diverse fields.Linett’s selection of novels for exploring these questions might also raise some questions; she moves from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Rather than emphasizing these texts in relation to their particular historical and cultural moments, or the generic conventions of either science fiction or speculative fiction, Linett focuses her four chapters on these novels as examples of “textual laboratories, seeking fresh ways to think about questions of value” (4). The idea thus seems to be that the examples matter less than the method: “Exploring literary treatments of bioethical questions can supplement conversations within bioethics proper, helping to reveal our existing assumptions and clear the way for more considered views” (2).But “bioethics proper” is distinguished from Linett’s own definition: “I am using ‘bioethics’ broadly; rather than treating practical issues of medical ethics, I take ‘bioethical questions’ to mean (1) questions about the value and conditions for flourishing of different kinds of human and nonhuman lives, and (2) questions about what those in power ought to be permitted to do with those lives as we gain unprecedented levels of technological prowess” (3). The second set of questions here might seem more like “bioethics proper” if they are explored in relation to specific policies, cases, and histories in which biomedical and technological advances have led to difficult and complex ethical questions in medical, legislative, juridical, and political spheres. But the readings Linett provides in her chapters are considerably less focused on those kinds of connections when compared with the first set of questions in her definition, which are more engaged with moral philosophy and biopolitics. A difficulty for some readers, though, might come from the structure of this kind of argumentation: if the book were to be aimed toward bioethics in a more “proper” sense (as in the second set of questions above), then it might seem necessary to argue that literary and cultural texts can be relevant in general. If, however, it is aimed toward academic audiences in disability and animal studies, or literary and cultural studies more broadly, then there is presumably no need to justify focusing on literary and cultural texts. But the differences—if not contradictions—between moral philosophy and poststructuralist biopolitics, for example, would also need to be addressed much more rigorously. There are also significant differences within animal studies and disability studies respectively.According to Linett, “Animal studies and disability studies have a simple common tenet, one they share with other social justice-oriented fields of study: difference does not justify exploitation” (16). But what exactly is “animal studies” here, or “disability studies,” and how are these fields apparently seamlessly aligned with other “social justice-oriented fields of study”? I’m not sure there’s a simple common tenet that unites everything that might be considered animal studies, let alone both animal and disability studies. As Linett notes, “animal rights and disability rights have not yet been able to join forces” (17). But the emphasis on rights points toward the assumption that everyone in animal studies must necessarily conclude that animal rights, liberation, and veganism are the only properly moral forms of animal advocacy. This line of argument follows closely the recent work of Sunaura Taylor in Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017). But Linett’s suggestion that theorists as diverse as Cary Wolfe and Martha Nussbaum can be simply woven together in relation to Taylor’s logic is an oversimplification at best, particularly when Wolfe has been an influential critic of rights discourse within animal studies for decades. Wolfe and others have also been deeply skeptical of the kinds of universal pronouncements about justice made by Nussbaum and others in moral philosophy. As Wolfe has argued as far back as Animal Rites (2003), the logic of animal rights generally includes a line drawn in the sand around sentience as the definition of living beings deserving of moral consideration, extending a humanist conception of rights “down” to nonhuman animals because they seem to exhibit humanlike traits. A hierarchy of value can thus be reinforced, in other words, based on characteristics recognizable in humans: central nervous systems and the ability to experience pain the way that we do. Wolfe’s critique of the underlying humanism reinforced in this logic can be more easily integrated with Donna Haraway’s insistence that we “stay with the trouble”—her general call to explore complexities in situated contexts. Instead of proclaiming universal prohibitions against eating all sentient animals, we can take into consideration more complex contexts and histories, such as indigenous hunting traditions in situated historical and cultural moments.The achievement of Linett’s book, however, is to draw attention to some of the complicated ways that animality and disability have long been interconnected—including disturbing forms of dehumanizing people with disabilities—and how they might be explored more productively in relation to each other in literary and cultural texts. According to Linett, novels “have the virtue of presenting vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, casting new light onto those values; and the more plausible and well-rendered we find these imagined worlds, the more thoroughly we can evaluate the justice of those values” (3). While there are plenty of novels that might not easily match this description, the texts selected by Linett do, indeed, raise important questions and provide good opportunities for readers to engage with disability studies and animal studies together, exploring the ways that fiction can construct both problematic and more progressive discourses.The chapters move from “Beast Lives” (on Wells) to “Old Lives” (on Huxley), “Disabled Lives” (O’Connor), and “Cloned Lives” (Ishiguro), clearly indicating the primary focus in each. The chapter on Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) traces parallels between the infamous experiments done by the titular doctor attempting to make animals into humans and the vivisection of animals more generally. Historical contexts for debates about vivisection are referenced primarily through Wells’s other writings outside the novel, as well as brief references to Darwin and T. H. Huxley. There is very little engagement with other work in animal and animality studies that has revealed the complexities of evolutionary debates and the historical background of the humane movement in turn-of-the-century Britain. According to Linett, while Moreau appears to blur the line between humans and animals, raising ethical questions about vivisection in particular, the novel ultimately reinforces humanist hierarchies elevating humans over all other creatures. Constructing the vivisected animals as disabled or “deformed” humans as well, the novel can also be read as attempting to eradicate disability (and animality) within humans, a transhumanist fantasy with a legacy that continues to be influential up through today. But connections with current debates about genetic engineering, for example, are only briefly mentioned, such as the ability to “insert human DNA into the cells of other species in embryo” (50).The possibility of relating novels much more explicitly to contemporary bioethical contexts related to genetic engineering and experimentation is only briefly referenced as well in the second chapter on Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The chapter’s previous publication in Journal of Medical Humanities might suggest a particular audience for both the chapter and the book as a whole, specifically in relation to bioethics “proper.” But Linett’s apparent assumption that bioethics and biopolitics are essentially synonymous makes it difficult to determine whom she mostly wants to address. The analysis of Huxley’s novel focuses on the fact that the genetically engineered lives of the young and the able-bodied in this dystopian future world are valued more than the old and the disabled, a clear biopolitical hierarchy that is certainly disturbing. But Linett also brings important attention to the misogyny in the text directed primarily against the aging character of Linda, which might be harder to discern. The links between Huxley’s society of “near total intolerance for deviation from norms of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory youthfulness” and contemporary forms of “anti-aging medicine” (79) would be particularly interesting to explore further. But that link is confined largely to a digressive endnote (one of very many long discursive notes throughout the book) in which Linett describes and responds to an article by Nick Bostrom on human genetic enhancement. Pointing only to Bostrom’s claim that germ-line enhancement could also benefit people with disabilities in certain ways, Linett rejects the claim outright, rather than exploring more complex thought experiments that could be engaged through the novel itself.The third chapter on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960) continues the emphasis on disability over animality, while jumping ahead and abroad to the 1950s in the United States. Once again, there are biopolitical hierarchies to explore, “down” to the intellectually disabled boy, Bishop Rayber, who is murdered by his teenage cousin, seemingly with impunity. O’Connor’s Catholic belief that all life is sacred can thus be seen as undermined in the text in specifically ableist terms, even as Linett reads the novel against the grain to recover the agency of Rayber. In that sense, the novel can be seen as more complex than a simple “thought experiment” about whether to value a nondisabled child over a disabled one, which is what Singer suggests in an example quoted by Linett. Singer writes, “Suppose that there are two infants in the neonatal intensive care unit, and we have the resources to save only one of them. We know nothing about either of them, or their families, except that one infant has no disabilities, and the other has . . . a disability that will limit the child’s ‘welfare and opportunities’” (quoted in Linett 107). According to Singer, it seems “rational” to value the nondisabled child more highly, and therefore to choose to save that life. Linett suggests that the thought experiment in general is far too oversimplified, far too distant from the complexities she wants to explore. She pulls back from more specific bioethical examples, however, to suggest instead that Singer’s ethical principles generally line up with the perspective of the murdered child’s father in O’Connor’s novel, in which the disability of the child is valued less. This way of thinking is then discussed through the work of other philosophers such as Jeff McMahan, Eva Kittay, and Nussbaum. Linett does briefly mention more concrete examples, such as “a deaf lesbian couple who chose a deaf sperm donor to conceive their two children” (101) and abortions of fetuses with Down syndrome, but, again, the specific way that a novel could help us to work through bioethical cases in more productive ways than philosophical thought experiments remains somewhat elusive.In the final chapter on Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Linett makes explicit links between a fictional dystopian world—in which certain humans are cloned and raised to die after they have donated their vital organs—and our own world, in which certain animals are born and raised in order to die as food for humans. Some readers might find the comparison with factory-farmed animals less logical than comparing the cloned humans in the novel with animals experimented on in labs. We might expect more of a focus in the chapter on bioethical questions about the treatment of animals in biomedicine, including perhaps research that has benefited people with disabilities. But Linett prioritizes biopolitics over bioethics once again: “While the narrative may not be particularly plausible—we will certainly grow organs in nonhuman animals or far preferably in labs rather than growing entire human beings from whom to harvest organs—it offers important insights into the ways certain beings can be excluded from moral consideration, while showing how unstable and in constant need of shoring up that exclusion can be” (118). More specifically, Linett is focused primarily on “what it means to provide humane treatment to beings who are only valued instrumentally, and more broadly, about the ethics of humane farming.” Linett thus follows Nussbaum, Carol J. Adams, and Sunaura Taylor with the suggestion that there is no room for debate, supposedly, about animal welfare as opposed to animal rights. According to Linett, killing animals for food is simply just as wrong as cloning humans for their organs, even if there is humane treatment in both cases. Some readers might find that conclusion itself to be oversimplified.More complex considerations can be found in the work of others in disability studies grappling with “cure” discourses, for example, such as Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection (2017). Linett engages with not only Clare but also Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s reading of Ishiguro’s novel in order to engage with other complexities within the text. According to Garland-Thomson, “Perhaps the most perplexing and therefore arresting of the story’s strange inversions is that the uber-fit and healthy young Hailsham donor clones . . . are biologically fiercely able-bodied but socioculturally disabled in the disordered world of the story. In other words, they paradoxically possess normate embodiment and disabled status” (quoted in Linett 142). This point helps Linett to develop an interesting argument about the clones, engaging also with Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theorization of zoë as opposed to bios in Homo Sacer (1998). Linett reads the clones as not being relegated to bare life or zoë, at the bottom of a biopolitical hierarchy in which they can be simply killed with impunity. Instead, their deaths are given a sacrificial meaning, in the sense that they are performing a service for the good of society as a whole, which makes their lives more valuable than Agamben’s formulation of zoë. And yet the complexity of this kind of “sacrificial” logic might return us to different possibilities for thinking about both humans with disabilities and nonhuman animals in various situated historical and cultural contexts. We can recognize that the death of an animal can have a sacrificial meaning, for example, within various indigenous hunting traditions.Linett’s “Epilogue” offers a brief survey of historical developments related to eugenics, involuntary sterilization, and genetic enhancement initiatives. Some of the examples mentioned here are tantalizing as opportunities for framing other novels in relation to bioethical questions beyond Linett’s own selections. She describes a report indicating that for “pregnant women whose fetuses are diagnosed with Down syndrome in Iceland,” for example, “close to 100 percent decide to abort the fetus” (154). A note points toward statistics in the United States that are not quite as high but still disturbing, even if we don’t always know all the complexities of why various people make often very difficult decisions about abortions. As Linnet suggests, some people might assume that “by preventing people with Down syndrome from being born, we are reducing suffering and increasing the overall happiness of the human species” (154). But that logic requires “taking a complex social situation (that disabled people are ‘worse off’ in some contexts and environments) as a hard and fast ‘condition of human life.’ They are ignoring the great extent to which the suffering of disabled people has its origins not in their bodies or minds, but in the social and environmental exclusion they experience” (154). After coming to the end of Linett’s book, however, we might wonder about other literary texts that could offer more direct alternatives to assumptions about the supposedly “worse” lives of people with Down syndrome and the ways that networks of care and support—enabled by state programs and policies, for example—can change the picture entirely. The general idea that novels can thus “flesh out” philosophical thought experiments continues to be promising, in other words.In the end, Linett concludes, “All sentient beings deserve to be treated as ends in themselves—as subjects rather than objects” (158). She argues that “we must work against exploitation, abuse, and murder for all beings who are conscious, who are capable of experiencing the world, who are capable of suffering.” But what do we do when the lives and interests of some forms of life conflict with others? What about humans with disabilities, illnesses, or injuries that render them unconscious? And what about nonhuman forms of life that might not be easily identifiable as sentient but nonetheless have value? Conflicts and complexities can certainly be explored more deeply in various kinds of literary texts. But when we try to come to conclusions about specific biopolitical and bioethical problems and contexts, and how to distinguish between them, some readers might want to stay with the trouble a bit longer, rather than assuming that we always know in advance the right way to think about disability and animality, regardless of the circumstances.