RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 In critique of anthropocentrism: a more-than-human ethical framework for antimicrobial resistance
JF Medical Humanities
JO J Med Humanit
FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and Institute of Medical Ethics
SP e16
OP e16
DO 10.1136/medhum-2021-012309
VO 48
IS 4
A1 Jose A Cañada
A1 Salla Sariola
A1 Andrea Butcher
YR 2022
UL http://mh.bmj.com/content/48/4/e16.abstract
AB Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often framed as a One Health issue, premised on the interdependence between human, animal and environmental health. Despite this framing, the focus across policymaking, implementation and the ethics of AMR remains anthropocentric in practice, with human health taking priority over the health of non-human animals and the environment, both of which mostly appear as secondary elements to be adjusted to minimise impact on human populations. This perpetuates cross-sectoral asymmetries whereby human health institutions have access to bigger budgets and technical support, limiting the ability of agricultural, animal health or environmental institutions to effectively implement policy initiatives. In this article, we review these asymmetries from an ethical perspective. Through a review and analysis of contemporary literature on the ethics of AMR, we demonstrate how the ethical challenges and tensions raised still emerge from an anthropocentric framing, and argue that such literature fails to address the problematic health hierarchies that underlie policies and ethics of AMR. As a consequence, they fail to provide the necessary tools to ethically evaluate the more-than-human challenges that the long list of actors involved in managing AMR face in their everyday practices. In response to such shortcomings, and to make sense of these challenges and tensions, this article develops an ethical framework based on relationality, care ethics and ambivalence that attends to the more-than-human character of AMR. We formulate this approach without overlooking everyday challenges of implementation by putting the framework in conversation with concrete situations from precarious settings in West Africa. This article concludes by arguing that a useful AMR ethics framework needs to consider and take seriously non-human others as an integral part of both health and disease in any given ecology.Data sharing is not applicable as no public data sets were generated and/or analysed for this study.