Beyond The Anticipatory Corpse-Future Perspectives for Bioethics

This essay explores the two main objectives of Bishop's book, which he analyzes in the context of the care for the dying: (1) the medical metaphysics underlying medical science and (2) biopolitics as governance of the human body. This essay discusses Bishop's claims in view of newer developments in medicine, especially the turn to the construction of life, and confronts the concept of the patient's sovereignty with an alternative model of vulnerable agency. In order to overcome the impasses of contemporary bioethics, the essay argues that practical reason requires a two-fold ethics: first, it must develop a new hermeneutics of illness and disease, and second, in order to protect the individuals in the process of dying, moral claims concerning death must be based on the concept of human rights.