“How could anybody think that this is the appropriate way to do bioethics?” Feminist challenges for conceptions of justice in bioethics

This chapter argues that conceptions of justice in bioethics are often not amenable to feminism. They are unable to capture how policies and practices in public health, healthcare and medicine exacerbate the subordination of those perceived to be women and girls and how injustice impacts their health. The chapter identifies three problems with conceptions of justice in the bioethics literature that interfere with their potential to be feminist. They tend to adopt the ahistoricism and distributivism characteristic of theories of justice that have been dominant in political philosophy, and they often rely on gendered conceptions of health leading to troubling comparisons of men and women’s health. The final section presents characteristics of what a feminist conception of justice needs to look like. The chapter emphasizes the centrality of actual structural injustices, relational egalitarianism and the assessment of values in conceptions of health and the health sciences.