Voluntary Amputation: The Future of Bioethics Thinking?

Bioethics ideology is generally relativist and roughly utilitarian. “Choice” is the keyword for “persons,” e.g., those with sufficient cognitive capacity to possess what the rest of us call human rights. (Persons can be non humans in this thinking.) If one is not a person, however, they may not have the right to life or even, to bodily integrity. Recall my debate with biothicist Bill Allen when he said Michael Schiavo should have been able to consent to Terri’s organs being harvested before she was actually dead.

A few bioethicists are so smitten by autonomy, that they are now promoting the notion that people obsessed with becoming amputees should be able to have healthy limbs cut off and willing physicians should be able to do it. This is not the mainstream view—yet. But given the nearly anything goes tide that sweeps bioethics discourse forward, it may only be a matter of time.