A Critique of Distributive Global Justice w/Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra

Episode description

What does interdisciplinarity mean when your discipline is interdisciplinary? In this episode, bioethicist and global health ethicist Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra talks about using philosophical theories alongside scientific epistemologies and feminist approaches to shape our understanding of ‘global health ethics’. Specifically, she gets into her critique of the popular model of distributive justice.

How to reach Agomoni

Website: https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/dr-agomoni-ganguli-mitra

Twitter: @GanguliMitra

Texts mentioned in the episode (All links are affiliated to Bookshop.org UK and any purchases made through them will generate a small commission that helps to support the podcast):

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

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Transcript

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 0:15

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Casting Call, the podcast that features underrepresented philosophical talent. I’m Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, your host and producer. Today’s guest is someone whose work I have been following for years, long before we became colleagues. Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra is a senior lecturer in bioethics and global health ethics at the Law School of the University of Edinburgh as well as the deputy director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Science and the Law. I’m disabled philosopher using feminist theories to work on health care ethics, so let me tell you that bioethicists of Ago’s calibre are few and far between and I always cherish them when I find them. In this episode, we discuss the role of political philosophy in applied ethics as well as Ago’s critique of distributive justices, especially in the context of ‘global health’. A couple of content warnings: We discuss surrogacy, abortion and general eugenics. Are you ready? On with the show!

Hello, Ago, welcome!

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 1:40

Hi, thank you so much for having me, Élaina.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 1:43

Thank you so much for being here. Would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 1:48

Yes, of course. My name is Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, or Ago. I am a bio ethicist and my sort of, I guess, one of my professional identities is that I am a bioethicists based at the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 2:04

How do you feel that your work is interdisciplinary or how does interdisciplinarity factor in your practice?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 2:12

So, I guess the kind of bioethics I do is very heavily informed by, I suppose, philosophical discussions, moral philosophy and political philosophy. However, in my professional life, I've never actually worked in a philosophy department. So I've always worked in what you might call an interdisciplinary kind of context, which has either been part of a medical school, or law school as it happens right now. So I guess the reason I'm saying that is that in my head, my work has always been interdisciplinary. In that I think, the kind of bioethics that I do and I'm interested in and the kind of people that I come across, that I work with, are not only just either trained or interested in philosophy, but also might be interested in sociology, anthropology, and medicine, nursing, and other kinds and science and engineering as well. So I suppose the idea of interdisciplinarity, for me is coming together on a sort of common platform, which might be a topic or an area of work, where you bring the skills of different disciplines, the scholarships of different disciplines and the philosophies and outlooks of different disciplines together, to essentially, I suppose, find a solution to the problem at hand, or a diagnosis of the problem at hand are a framing of the problem at hand.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 3:44

How would you say like, the different relationships that you've had to forge, with people in the medical profession with people in the social sciences, etc., how has that shaped the kind of bioethics you do and the kind of approaches you have to your work?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 4:02

Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess one of the one of the features of interdisciplinarity is that you sort of, it's sort of a liminal space, I suppose it's a space where you, you feel like you're in between kind of disciplines in between approaches, in between views. So that the result of which is that you'd never quite feel like an expert in any of the contexts because whatever context you're in: if you're trying to talk about the science, there's going to be a scientist who knows more about the science than you do. Or if it's a philosophical topic, there will be a philosopher who know more, potentially, about at least the foundations of what what you're thinking about what you're doing. So I guess I always ... it's a state of constantly feeling a little bit uneasy, but I also quite like the challenge of that, as well. So I guess that's sort of the background to saying that I always like to take on and to learn from the different perspective and the different tools. Before I came to bioethics, I did the degree my first degree was in biology. So I understood at least the basics of the scientific method very well. So I understand when I speak to scientists or speak to doctors, I sort of understand where they're coming from and what they're looking for. And I understand that especially also working nowadays, I'm also working sometimes with engineers, and I understand very much this kind of, here's a problem. How can we find a solution? I quite like that I quite like the idea of this very applied kind of look at an issue at a problem and say, right, how do we make things better? How do we solve things? How do we fix things?

At the same time, over the last few years, I've come across and worked more closely with social scientists, with humanities people with people who have a background in sociology who have a very different approach to looking at things who are so embedded in the contextual, right. So they, they take a long time to really dive in to the specifics of what's going on to really understand the complexities, and so on. So, and I've learned a lot from that as well, in that, from the philosophical training, what used to happen is that you'd have if it was a good idea or a framework, and then you sort of try and apply it to various kinds of problems, which, in many ways, works well and is interesting, but at the same time, there's a tendency to generalise those tendency to miss out on the complexities on the nuances. And working with sociologists, for example, social scientists, you really learn to stop and really try and understand what's going on, and try and see things from different kinds of perspective from the perspective of the context. And then really try and bring more nuance, rather than trying to apply whatever principle or moral theory or value that you think should be applied in different contexts.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 7:02

As you were talking, I was already seeing the difference between what you're saying and other people I've interviewed where you're just like, "It's solution based, we diagnose we identify with find it, and then we find a solution". And then I've talked to historians, and anthropologists who are just like, it's not about finding the solution. It's about like exploring, and it's about understanding and taking care of the people that are affected. And you're all working on the same topic, if you will, even if it's within like medical sciences or medical humanities. But it's a completely different approach vis-à-vis, like, how do we solve this injustice? Like everyone agrees, like, there is justice, it is bad, we need to change it. But then the approaches vary widely.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 7:53

And I like having to work with both of those kinds of approaches. Right? I also like, knowing that, yes, we we care about injustice, we don't just care about injustice, because we want to describe injustice, we want to describe injustice in order to address and get rid of injustice, right? So there is something that we're focusing towards, right. So there's the whole normative approach, for example, we want to make things better, we want to get rid of injustice. But having said that, there's a lot more complexity and exploration and different ways of thinking about injustice, different conceptualization of what counts and what matters most. And which kind of injustice is should we address first and so on.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 8:35

And you've worked a lot on global health, correct?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 8:39

Yes. Various topics within Global Health. Yeah, yeah.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 8:42

Can you describe the landscape of what it's like to do bioethics in global health toda, in the year 2023?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 8:52

Yeah, wait, how much time have you got? It's a really exciting field to be in. And it's a really hard field to be in at the moment, because there is a whole kind of reckoning around what global health even means. Who gets to describe what global health is? How do we address and then change the way global health has been? What it has been? Right, so how do we address the coloniality of global health? How do we recognise the history of global health? And see how that currently affects how we think about global health? Right? This idea that what happens here, for example, in the UK, or in Western Europe, or in North America is "health". And then when it is happening to poor brown and black people, that's "global health", right? So this this very much Us and Them approach to global health, which is very much at the core core of global health, right. So there are even scholars who are saying, should we even continue calling Global Health Global Health given its legacy? Right? So this is why it's both a really hard time to call myself a global health bioethicist, but also really exciting time because I love, again, I love challenges, and I love learning from people. And I love being sort of, you know, given difficult things to overcome. So I quite like being part of this conversation, or at least hearing about the conversation. I'm not sure I'm part of the conversation just yet. So I guess I think to a certain extent, I think much of standard bioethics still slightly lags behind this conversation, which is happening more in, I would say more in the humanities and social science, sociology, and people who would call themselves global health practitioners, and so on in that field. And you can see that if you if you still read some of some of the classics of bioethics, for example, I've worked on sex selection, which, for a very long time, used to be two completely different stories.

So there was one story being told about, so I'm talking about sex selection for what you might call non medical purposes for social purposes, right. So there was there were two very different conversation being had one was about, say, sex selection being done by Indian or Chinese parents, very much in this idea that there is a cultural so called cultural and cultural, again, is one of those really problematic terms that we use, so called cultural preference for a son, or at least one son in the family, which was very much seen as a product of history of culture of tradition, and a problem that other people had, versus, say, any tendencies of sex selection, that might happen in France and Belgium, and Italy, or so on on the in the UK, or in America, which was seen as a family balancing issue, right, you've had, you've had two boys, you want a girl, or you've had two girls, and you want a boy, and that's somehow morally speaking, the story goes, two very different things, right. And this, for me, if you if you look at if you really want to do I think global bioethics, Global Health properly, it's very problematic to see those things as two different stories, right, rather than seeing them both as within a continuum of gender based injustice across the world, right expression, different kinds of expressions of gender based expectations, values, norms, and so on across the world. So I guess one of the things that I'm really keen on doing is to diagnose some of these problems, the ways we have been talking about the global differently to the way we talk about the local for those of us who are positioned in the Global North. Similarly, if you think about issues in public health, again, we learn about and teach public health ethics, for example, very much as if it's devoid of broader global historical structures and legacies. And I think one of the things that I'm keen on doing, again, through my research and teaching is to show students and to sort of bring more into the scholarship, how much public health today, even in somewhere like the UK, is informed by, and is shaped by legacies of racism, of sexism, of colonialism, and so on.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 13:25

And since, you know, justice, is your bag, are there any types of frameworks that you find more or less useful, or maybe frameworks that you've used in the past that you no longer want to use or things that are exciting you in different ways of approaching it? Because obviously, a concept like justice is so huge, and especially right now, you know, epistemic justice and all types of... Yeah. So it's kind of become a buzzword in a way like, this injustice, that injustice. Is there a framework that you find more interesting right now, given your focus?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 14:07

I'm also really excited to hear it's a buzzword because I never work on anything exciting, right? I'm not one of those bioethicists working on the latest technology. So, fantastic to hear that I'm fashionable! I think lots of things to say about justice there. Right. So one of the things that we might start by saying is that there's been less attention to justice in bioethics as a whole, then you might wish there were right, because there is very much this tendency of bioethics either working within certain jurisdictions, right. So bioethics is working very closely with medical ethics, therefore, medical law, and therefore within the purview of certain jurisdictions versus others, or there's very much this idea that justice, you know, for following kind of the principles based approach, that justice is another principle to think about when we think about what is the right thing to do?

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 15:03

Yeah, and just for people who don't know, the principles approach usually has like four pillars, which is like personal autonomy, justice, non maleficence and beneficence.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 15:16

That's right. So those are sort of, as you say, the four pillars, that has been considered for a very, very long time in medical ethics for very important values, or, you know, really important cornerstones of thinking about ethics and medical ethics and bioethics in general, there has been less attention to thinking about how political philosophy should inform what we do in bioethics. Right. So having said that, the areas where there has been a lot of work on justice is very much in terms of thinking about allocation of healthcare resources, or distribution of health care, distribution of health, even when you think about engaging also with social determinants of health. And so but there again, the tradition has been very much based on roles, and understandably so given that Rawls has been, you know, the the political philosopher when it comes to justice. And you cannot talk about justice, if you don't talk about Rawls. What has happened, however, is that because people have been working in either the Rawlsian tradition, or had been speaking to Rawls, so to say, when they do when they develop their ideas, much of what we think about justice, and therefore, injustice has remained within the confines of what we call distributive justice. So, put very simply, who, who gets what, who gets the benefit to get the burdens, how much of it and so on, who decides, etc, right? The problem with that is that, when we do this, we sort of assume, and again, this is not something that I am bringing to the table. This exists in the sort of the critical scholarship around justice, is that if we do that, we assume that everybody is starting from a similar point, and that everybody is going to be able to use resources in the same way, or that everybody is treated very similarly, within society.The problem with that is that of course, if we remain within the confines of thinking about justice as primarily an issue of distribution, so who gets what how much of it who decides, is that we fail to see or systematically at least fail to see where people are positioned in society, where they're starting from in society, how their gender, their race, their histories, their positionality is going to affect whether they're able to flourish in life. So, for a very long time, even when thinking about global justice, the big discussions were about whether, for example, justice belongs to the states or whether justice belongs beyond borders and things like that, which is fine, which is a really important discussion. However, as feminist philosophers have said, for a long time, so people like Iris Marion Young, the way that they have criticised this vision of justice, is by saying, "Look, if we only think about justice as distribution, or if we start with the position that justice is about distribution, what we're missing are things like structure, where people are positioned in those structure, the kind of in justices that might arise from those systematic patterns of those structures, where power lies in those structures, how power is kind of used, and felt by people in society, we're missing that whole picture". Right? So again, increasingly, in bioethics, there is a better understanding that we have to think about justice, or at least have to think about injustice as something that is not just about the distribution of resources. Yeah, that we're really missing the picture if we do that. And there again, I agree with many of the scholars that what is more important than thinking about justice, especially thinking about justice as an ideal that we have to, that we have that we must reach and thinking about what an ideal society looks like, etc., is that we must think about where injustices lie. So we might think of... diagnose what kind of injustices there are, what are the existing kind of patterns of disadvantage and of injustice and inequality in society, and that's where we need to start from, and that's going to tell us where, you know, where we need to put our moral attention, really.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 19:54

So if I understand correctly, if I could do a very crude analogy, so you're saying it's not about giving everybody one bag of rice. And like everyone has one bag of rice, because that's what's fair. So we have all of the resource, which is the rice and we distribute it, so that no one has more than others. But it's about saying, you know, okay, well, who has only rice to eat versus who, you know, can have takeaway and can go buy fruit or like, can do all of these other things. And we should assess when we look at what we have, where people are starting it, like so it's not just, let's divide it equally, but it's saying, "Okay, let's assess the needs, and take into account the power relations that exists?"

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 20:46

Yeah, absolutely. So, it's also about or other it's starting with thinking about things like, are people in a position in society where they can actually go and get rice in the first place? Right, you know, what kind of obstacles might they face in life in general, before they can even get to the place where they can access rice in the first place? Right? So, why is it that systematically, a certain neighbourhood somehow always has more trouble accessing rice than others do? What's causing some of that, right? And some of the sort of the more relational egalitarian, for example, approaches to thinking about these things is very much thinking not just what people have, but how people are treated. Right. So yes, socioeconomic disadvantage is important. What you have is important, your income is important, your education is important. Wealth is important, yes. But it is also about how we systematically view certain people in society, how we treat people in society, which is also going to affect, you know, what they can access, but also who they can be in society, and how they're seen in society, and, you know, what is open to them, and whether they can flourish or not in the first place? Right. So if we think about racism, for example, as a as a structural issue, it's not just about individual people being racist to each other, although that might also exist. It's also the ways in which we have structured society so that people of certain races will systematically be at a disadvantage.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 22:28

It's a complex issue, for sure. But yeah, I like this idea of like, well, it's also how can we access it? And also, what are the different costs, for example, like if you're a black woman trying to access or if you're a trans black woman trying to access health care, there are so many factors that you need to consider, like, is it safe for you, is not only like the expense, but this idea of like, okay, well, can I have a space to recover after any intervention? Or like all of these things that factor into it. How will this change the standing i with my family, my like blood family, with my chosen family? Like all of these things that have to come into account before you even get to accessing the healthcare.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 23:18

Absolutely. And this is where I think coming back to interdisciplinarity, is that I think, where we must do a lot more work, coming from the perspective of political philosophy or thinking about justice, in interdisciplinary work, because there are such great tools from critical theory, for example, critical race theory, for example, thinking about positionality, thinking about intersectionality. And as you said, if for example, you are a black, disabled woman, what are the specific kinds of obstacles that you will systematically face, which means that it's not just about whether healthcare is freely accessible? And therefore, why don't you just come and get it? Issues that you need to think about how whether somebody has time or whether they have five jobs and do not have time to come and sit at the doctor's clinic for an hour and a half and wait to see the doctor and so on? Right? So taking the example of the pandemic, for example, at the the early on, there was a lot of talk around the distribution of ventilators and the distribution, you know, triage when it comes to healthcare emergencies, and crises. And again, a lot of the talk in bioethics was about what is the most just way of distribution in healthcare in this context, distributing ventilators and so on. There was less talk, and this is where I think, again, I'm not saying nobody was talking about it, I'm saying that the mainstream failed to really address those things very, very carefully and rigorously from the beginning, which was to say, "How is gender going to affect some of these things? How is your residential status, how is your language going to affect some of these things?" Right? It makes a difference. If you're only seeing a doctor for two minutes, and they need to decide whether you've got covered or not, it makes a difference in how well you can speak the dominant language, whether you're able to express yourself well, and so on, right? So all these things are systematic issues, that is going to fail that person, not just in in the COVID context, but across their lives, right. And similarly, when we think about vaccine uptake, we have to go beyond thinking, "Oh, here are some populations that are vaccine hesitant" or, and I'm not even using more problematic terms like anti vaxxers, and so on. Right? So why are people less willing to take on vaccines? For example? Why is it that black and minoritized populations in the UK, for example, are less were less likely systematically, again, to take the vaccine, it is not a problem of access in the way we think about access, not a problem of resource distribution, it is a historical and ongoing issue around the mind notarization of certain population, the way we treat them, the history of their of medical encounter of these populations, with the establishment with doctors.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:18

And so yeah, there's definitely a lot of work that still needs to be done about the harm, and sometimes violence in the medical encounters and how that really shapes lots of decision making for generations moving forward. And you know, you were talking about triage and our thinking of the work by Joseph Stramondo about, you know, how disability figured in the triage equation. And this idea of like, well, you know, if disabled people who use a ventilator, right, we're having them taken away, and given to able bodied people who now have COVID because their lives were seen as worth saving. And Joe's point was, it's not a question of, "Oh, well, we need to make hard choices". It's a question of what is the situation that led up to this where we think, "Oh, yeah, of course, a disabled person doesn't need to live beyond this pandemic. It's okay." So yeah, it's exactly what you're talking about. And I'm wondering, when you're looking at these ideas, these ways of addressing injustice, and the ways that we perceive certain populations? And in the back of my mind I'm thinking, well, does it mean like, we see certain people as not having either not the capacity for agency, or we don't see, we don't recognise the value in their agency, and therefore, like, we don't need to give them options? And I'm thinking about, you know, the charity model. So if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, and the idea of, quote, unquote, global health and this idea of like, "Let's do a fundraiser for starving kids in Africa", and like doing all of these things, and this idea of like, oh, "Well, if I try and stop sex selection in India, you know, I'm a feminist. And I'm like advocating for the rights of women and all of these things. But I'm not going to think about the framework of personal choice. In a country like the UK, where it's like, it's my personal reproductive choice to pick the gender of my child." So I don't see parents in a place like India having like this idea of personal choice, but I apply that to myself. And yeah, this idea in the disability activism, it's this idea of like rejecting this charity model of saying, "Well, I'm in a position where I have the beneficence to give you these things like health, but I also don't trust you to use your agency."

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 29:01

Yeah, absolutely. And and I think you've really pinpointed something really important that which, in that which is there is a very common theme running throughout what you've just discussed, right with goes from with be it when we talk about disability and health in the UK context, or we're thinking about things like surr ogacy in the Indian context for a jump, for example, which is the harsh reality of how we view things is that certain lives are of less value. Certain people matter less, as does their agency and decision making. Right? SAnd we do it, again, not necessarily in a sort of, "Yes, I'm going to treat people differently, and I'm going to discriminate against them", but we do it because that is the way we have been trained to think about things, right. Why is it that disability would even become a question when we think about the distribution of ventilators and so on, right? It is because you're suggesting that it is about life is of less value in some way or the other. Right? And even if you're not trying to do that, that is what it's coming down to. Similarly, when it comes to thinking about, as you said, sex selection in the context of India, for example, there's a lot of talk around whether Indian women have the autonomy, the agency to make decisions for themselves, or whether they're being pressured by their families, by their husbands and so on. So don't get me wrong: there's plenty of examples where that's happening, right? I'm not trying to question that, right. There's plenty of examples where there is a lack of autonomy or lack of agency, or at least there is oppression to the level where agency where a woman is not able to exercise her agency. And in that way, however, we shouldn't assume systematically that because it's happening in a certain context, and decisions are made, or certain people that those decisions aren't rational, whatever rationality means, or they don't count us decisions in the same way as we would count decisions here in the UK. Right. And it's really problematic, then to sort of read things like well, okay, then, you know, should should Indian women then have access to abortion at all, given that there is a chance that culturally they're going to have sex selective abortions, which for me, it's incredible, like, why are we even considering... Like, how are we doing gender justice if we're even considering those kinds of questions, right? That is not how we're going to address the gender justice, injustice, right, that you cannot cure an injustice by implementing another form of injustice, which is restricting somebody's reproductive choices and freedom, right? And why do we assume by default, that an Indian woman wouldn't have the same kind of agency or that she's just not making a very difficult decision tin a very difficult context, full stop, right? Why would we assume, therefore, she's not able to make that decision? It's really problematic, right? But I think all of these things are very much part of the language and part of the frameworks and part of the views we have on freedoms and liberties and decision making and agency and all these things and bodies and how people choose to use their bodies and so on. So I'll have I was mentioning surrogacy early on every year when I teach when I, I don't teach surrogacy at the moment. But when I used to teach surrogacy, especially global surrogacy, there was very much for my student decide students this idea, and systematically so every year, this idea that if someone is making that choice in the UK, yes, it's problematic in many ethical sense. And, you know, there's ethical nuances and how we might think about those decisions and things like that, if it's happening in India, we're going to assume that the brown Indian woman has less agency and she's not making an autonomous choice, right. It's the assumption that's problematic. It's the default assumption that's really problematic. And, you know, it's at the core of what transnational feminists have been getting at for a very long time, this idea of missionary feminism, this idea that there is one idea of justice, one idea of feminism that has to be kind of imposed across, and if you're not making the right kind of choices, then you're failing on the basics of what we consider agency or autonomy to be.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 33:36

The more I think about it, the more I think we just need to decentralise these ideas, even things like justice or decision making. And because the same dilemma posed to me, will be completely different pose to another woman halfway across the world in a different circumstance. So when I talk to my students, and they're like, well, this isn't helped me like, have a clear answer, if that is kind of the point, because you're not supposed to approach all your patients with the same thing, because they're all different, and they have different circumstances. And so it goes back to what you were saying about being in in the liminal space of living with uneasiness. Because I think, personally, we need to embrace that, that if we're like, okay, we're looking at justice. It can't just be like justice, capital J platonic form, floating justice. It doesn't. In my view, it doesn't devalue it, it doesn't minimise the importance of it, but it's also this idea of, can we accept that what is a just environment or it just decision will look different in different places it for different people, and even in a person like across your own fifetime might change.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 35:01

Absolutely. And this then is not to say that we can't criticise certain decisions, or that we can suggest that certain things are not, in fact, just right. So it again, it's it's that kind of very difficult position to be in where we sort of recognise injustice, but might not always have, as you say, the right answer in terms of what would then count as just throwing, again, things like internalisation of oppression, or what we might call adaptive preferences, and so on are really interesting and difficult things to think about when we when when it comes to thinking about justice, and what the right thing, what is the right thing to do. universal norms are really problematic, right? So that I don't want to suggest universal norms in the way that we have been traditionally taught to think about universal norms. However, we can, there might be certain agreements that what transnational or cross border feminism is, is a fight against various patriarchy. Right? Right.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 36:06

This is another thing where people are like, "Well, if you don't accept the universal norm, then you fall into relativism". And I think that's it that's not the inevitable conclusion. And as you say, we can say, "This is not fostering agency, or this is a very limited kind of agency". But for me, it's about recognising "Okay, who has decided what agency looks like? And can we understand that before we make a final decision?" And if it's like, well, this decision can only be a agentic if it follows these very specific criteria, and you're like, "Well, who decided the criteria?" And then maybe we examine it, and we're very happy with the criteria; criteria is great, let's go ahead. But sometimes you're like, "Wait, why is this like, level of like, this criteria of purity involved? Or why is this like this assumption that every woman wants to be a mother involved in the criteria we have?" And I think it's just healthy to reexamine that regularly.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 37:19

Yes. And as as you know, feminist philosophers have said for a very long time, is anybody really able to live up to those whatever criteria is of agency in the first place? Are these the right criteria to talk about, right? What is what isn't? Is even agency in this kind of, you know, this abstract kind of sense, where, you know, where we imagine this perfect person, individual who is not related to anybody around them, who is not affected, infected, influenced by anybody else around them. And making decisions that way. Nobody makes decisions that way that says, This is what you know, the relational autonomy scholarship is all about, right. So and if we accept that, then we also have to accept that, yes, agency might take very different forms in very different contexts. And perhaps the best we can do is to see see instances of agency instances of resistance instances of fights and instances of, you know, pushing back against oppression and subjugation, things like that.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 38:24

Yeah, I feel we could talk forever. We really couldn't have to bring this to an end. So I asked all my guests, what are you reading or watching or listening to right now that is giving you life?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 38:37

Yeah. So very coincidentally, I'm reading really compelling novel at the moment, which is a great read, if a very alarming read. It's called The School for Good Mothers. I don't know if you've come up...

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 38:52

That's on my list!

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 38:53

Yeah. Okay. It's great. I keep wondering why I'm, why I'm reading it and why I can't stop reading. It is very compelling. So it really, you know, really goes to the it's a dystopian novel about motherhood and the expectations of motherhood and parenting and all of that. So it's great and it sort of pushes all my buttons so I'm really enjoying that. So I recommend that. And I am also sort of binge hate-watching The Handmaid's Tale at the moment.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:26

Relatable mood.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 39:27

Yes. So, again, I'm very much now invested in the characters and need to know what happens to them. But at the same time, I'm very annoyed at some of the the importance of biological kinship and parenting and things like that, that that almost creeped in, I think, because it's now become such a long series.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:51

And how can people find you or your work on the internet?

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 39:54

So I have my sort of my usual kind of institutional website, the University of Edinburgh Law School. I think if you typed my name, that's the first thing that might come up. I'm also on Twitter @GanguliMitra. That's my Twitter handle. As long as anybody is on Twitter, I guess, these days.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:16

People are still on Twitter. Right? I think so.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 40:18

Yeah. That's what it seems.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:18

There was was a big like "Everyone is leaving!", and I'm sure lots of people did. But yeah,

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 40:24

I think people looked at different things and everybody found they're too tired to starting yet a new thing.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:31

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much. It was lovely to have you!

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra 40:36

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:39

Oh, great. Yeah, have a great rest of your day. Thank you and bye bye.

Thank you so much Ago for this great insight into non-traditional bioethics. If you want to contact Agomoni or read some of her work, please check out the details in the show notes. If you want to support Philosophy Casting Call, the best way is to rate the podcast and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Also tell me if you use Philosophy Casting Call in your classrooms, cause I would love to know! If you are in a position to donate, you can also become a monthly supporter on Ko-Fi.com You can follow the podcast @philoccpod on Twitter and Instagram and all the transcripts live on my website at www.elainagauthiermamaril.com. You can also email me at philosophycastingcallpod@gmail.com Until next time, bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai