A feminist interpretation of Engelhardt's bioethics: more a moral friend than a moral stranger.

Is the theory that grounds H. Tristram Engelhardt's The Foundations of Bioethics and the practices it suggests compatible with the theory and practices found in feminist approaches to bioethics? Is The Foundations ofBioethics a work that teaches "that the subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience of women is as worthy of respect as that of men?"' Or is it instead a work that cannot or will not teach that gender inequity is wrong that cannot or will not address women's interests in freedom and well-being as forcefully and passionately as it addresses men's? Are there within The Foundations of Bioethics the conceptual and methodological tools to do what Alison M. Jaggar says any feminist approach to bioethics must do; namely, seek "(1) to articulate moral critiques of actions and practices that perpetuate women's subordination; (2) to prescribe morally justifiable ways of resisting such actions and practices; and (3) to envision morally desirable alternatives that will promote women's emancipation ... ?"= Or is The Foundations of Bioethics an essentially nonfeminist treatise? By reading Engelhardt's bioethics through the conceptual lenses of some representative works in feminist bioethics, I hope to show that although feminists, and Engelhardt are not what he terms "moral friends," they are far from being what he terms "moral strangers." Rather, feminists and Engelhardt are what I term "moral acquaintances" who might have more moral assumptions in common than Engelhardt suspects.