Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been declared by the WHO as one of the top ten global public health threats facing humanity. Following the definition by WHO, AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines, making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death. The risks deemed worthy of consideration are often those to human health. Yet increasingly, AMR seriously endangers the health, wellbeing and survival of ecosystems and more-than-human-animals.

From a moral philosophical viewpoint, it can be argued that humans are exceptionally accountable for AMR. Yet moral components like accountability, rights, duties and principles in their dominant frameworks seem to offer dissatisfying solutions to issues such as AMR as its managed by steep injustices that are disproportionate between humans but also have more-than-human impact. Indeed, AMR presses urgent dilemmas that consistently raise the most difficult ethical questions: how to manage conflicting interests of environments, more-than-human animals and humans in an ethically sustainable way? In this talk, I suggest how these issues could be approached with justice as an ethical principle.

Crucially, however, ethically sustainable resolutions require new frameworks to define and apply the principle of justice. I begin my discussing bioethical principlism: its relation to AMR and its queer feminist critiques. I then analyze the issues with current ethical frameworks of AMR, focusing on the critique of human exceptionalism. In dialogue with the concepts of and discussions around multispecies justice and ecojustice, I then offer my queer feminist posthumanist framework. Further, I strive for bioethics in which the “bio” is not limited to human life, without losing intersectional insight into the existing social justice issues between groups of people. I also discuss future plans to elaborate my framework with the concepts of vulnerability and care.