Earlier in September, the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project hosted a panel as part of the Mancept Workshops at the University of Manchester. The panel, organised by project researcher Joseph Roberts, brought together philosophers and bioethicists to discuss how we might take better account of embodiment in ethical theorising, political philosophy, public policy, and law.
The rationale for the panel centred on the fact that everyone has a body, and what our bodies are like can have deep and pervasive effects on how we live our lives. How we perceive the world, how we act in it, what we are vulnerable to, and how others perceive and interact with us are all affected by how we are embodied. As such, given the extensive influence our embodiment has on our lives, one might expect questions about our embodiment to feature prominently in ethical theory and political philosophy. This, however, has not been the case. Critics of dominant approaches to ethical theory and political philosophy argue that they pay insufficient attention to the deep and ubiquitous effects embodiment has on our lives.
Short summaries of the papers are presented in the panel report which can be downloaded here or by clicking on the icon (right)
Funding: This workshop was supported by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award in Humanities and Social Sciences 2019-2024 (Grant No: 212507/Z/18/Z)