Old Lives

Chapter 2 takes a disability studies approach to aging by viewing Brave New World (1932) as a thought experiment that explores the value of old age. Reading the novel alongside Ezekiel Emanuel’s claim that it would be best for everyone to die at around age seventy-five, before their abilities begin to decline, the chapter reads the absence of old people in the World State as an aspect of its dystopia. The chapter first argues that the persistent youth embraced by the society robs life of its narrative arc and thereby of an important aspect of its meaning. It then explores the reasons suggested by the novel that such a sacrifice of life narratives is not worthwhile, even to avoid periods of possible disability or frailty. Brave New World makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs.

Disabled Lives

Chapter 3 inserts Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960) into contemporary bioethical discussions about the value of disabled lives. This novel portrays the murder of an intellectually disabled boy, Bishop, by his fourteen-year-old cousin, a murder that serves as the culmination of debates about his value staged in the novel. Considering points of view about the worth of intellectually disabled human beings expressed by O’Connor’s fictional characters alongside those expressed by Peter Singer and other philosophers and bioethicists, the chapter demonstrates a revealing convergence of (ableist) views held by the intensely secular Singer and the fervently Catholic O’Connor. In staging debates about Bishop’s worth in a rationalistic world, O’Connor accepts eugenic positions she purports to critique.

Introduction

The introduction sets up the method of literary bioethical analysis used in this study. It discusses differing points of view about the ethical power of reading literature, arguing that while reading literature is not necessarily an ethical process, resistant reading methods allow us to view characters sympathetically even when the texts in which they appear seem to dismiss their subjectivity. The introduction then discusses varying ways of conceiving the category of the human, advocates a closer alliance between animal studies and disability studies, and provides a preview of the chapters that follow.

Epilogue

The epilogue analyzes some of the ways the ideologies considered in the study play out in contemporary, real-world devaluation and exploitation of nonhuman beings, old human beings, and disabled human beings. It then compares some of the logic shared by the old eugenics and the new “liberal eugenics” advocated by many contemporary philosophers. It ends by suggesting that efforts to secure human rights are not threatened by efforts to secure animal rights—that both aims should be pursued together.

Beast Lives

Chapter 1 combines animal studies and disability studies to explore the complicated negotiation with human exceptionalism woven within H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). It argues that the novel’s critique of human exceptionalism founders on what disability studies scholar Alison Kafer has called the “curative imaginary”—a view that seeks perfection in human beings, or as I apply it to the case of Wells’s scientist, in animals. The chapter reads Wells’s Moreau as a proto-transhumanist, seeking not just to turn animals into human beings, but to transform human beings, to purge our animality in an effort make us “perfectly rational creatures.”

Cloned Lives

Chapter 4 reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) as a thought experiment about the ethics of humane farming. In this novel cloned human beings are raised as sources of organs for noncloned human beings; they are killed in the donation process early in their adulthood. The government homes where most of the cloned human beings live in “deplorable conditions” suggest factory farms, while the boarding school at which our protagonists live evokes a humane, organic farm. These parallels raise issues of animal ethics. Is it enough to have, as influential food writer Michal Pollan believes, a good life and a respectful death even if that life is dramatically shortened? This chapter demonstrates the cognitive dissonance and logical incoherence inherent in the fictional scenario and illuminates the ethical contradictions of the humane meat movement.