Abstract
In this chapter, I propose that conceptions of justice in bioethics must be feminist, meaning
they must be able to capture how the domains of health, healthcare and medicine exacerbate the
subordination of those perceived to be women and girls and how injustice impacts their health.
After providing context in the first section, I identify three problems with conceptions of justice
in the bioethics literature that interfere with their potential to be feminist. They tend to adopt the
ahistoricism and distributivism characteristic of theories of justice that have been dominant in
political philosophy, and they often rely on gendered conceptions of health that result in troubling
comparisons of men and women’s health. My argument is primarily “negative”: it is a critique of
generalist conceptions of justice in bioethics. However, in the final section I present characteristics
of what a feminist conception of justice needs to look like and indicate how feminist bioethicists are
using such a conception in assessing issues of injustice in bioethics. I emphasize the centrality
of actual structural injustices, relational egalitarianism, and the assessment of values in conceptions
of health and the health sciences.