New Paper: Girlhood and Ethics: The Role of Bodily Integrity

Mar Cabezas and I have written a piece about ethics and girl's bodily integrity for a Special Issue on Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood in Girlhood Studies. I know that this journal is not the first place to go for philosophers, but sometimes, I think, it is good to cross the disciplinary boundaries. Parts of this paper are closely related to my new book Ethics and the Endangerment of Children's Bodies.

The paper is available open access (thanks to the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)) so everyone can download it for free from the publisher's homepage.

Thanks also to the editors, and the reviewers for their efforts to make this paper a better one, and to make it accesible for readers outside philosophy.

I put the abstract here, and the full text below on Scribd:

​Our concern is with the ethical issues related to girlhood and bodily integrity—the right to be free from physical harm and harassment and to experience freedom and security in relation to the body. We defend agency, positive self-relations, and health as basic elements of bodily integrity and we advocate that this normative concept be used as a conceptual tool for the protection of the rights of girls. We assume the capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum as an ethical framework that enables us to evaluate girls’ well-being and well-becoming in relation to the potential, and often subtle, threats they face. The capability approach can be understood as a theory of justice, and, therefore, as an ethical and political approach. An enriched concept of bodily integrity can help in the design of better policies to address gender biases against girls because it could contribute to seeing them as active agents and valid participants.