Citation

Liao S, Carbonell V. Am. J. Bioeth. 2023; 23(4): 9-23.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, MIT Press)

DOI

10.1080/15265161.2022.2044543

PMID

35262465

Abstract

It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of social difference, including race, gender, class, and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems.

Language: en

Keywords

biotechnology; gender/sexuality; health policy; Historicizing Technological Hegemony; How Materialized Oppression Contributes to Bioethics; How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression; Materialized Oppression in Inpatient Psychiatric Unit Design; Medicalized Oppression: Labels of “Violence Risk” in the Electronic Medical Record; On Racist Tools and the Bioethics Lexicon; Philosophy; Preventing Bias in Medical Devices: Identifying Morally Significant Differences; race and culture/ethnicity; Racism-Conscious Praxis: A Framework to Materialize Anti-Oppression in Medicine, Public Health, and Health Policy; regulatory issues; Systems, Wrongs, and Moral Aggregation