Bioethics and Biopolitics

Jonathan D. MorenoDavid and Lyn Silfen University Professor

UNIVERSCITY OCF PENNSYLVANIACENTER FOR BIOETHICS

Biopolitics

1. A political spectrum that reflects positions towards the sociopolitical consequences of the biotech revolution.

2. The political application of bioethics.

--Hughes; Rifkin

Bioethics

the philosophical study of the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine.

--Wikipedia

The Birth of Bioethics, 1969-1972

Issues• Genetics• Life-extending technologies• Human experiments• Organ transplants

Organizations• The Hastings Center• Kennedy Institute of Ethics

“The Great Bioethics Compromise,”1973-1996

Dolly 1996

Human embryonic stem cells, 1998

Against Consensus

“…the [President’s] council shall be guided by the need to articulate fully the complex and often competing moral positions on any given issue and may, therefore, choose to proceed by offering a variety of views on a particular issue rather than attempt to reach a single consensus position" (Bush 2001)

President’s Council, 2002-2005

“Conservatives Draft a‘Bioethics Agenda’ for President”

Washington Post, March 8, 2005

“We have today an administration and a Congress as friendly to human life and human dignity as we are likely to have for many years to come. It would be tragic if we failed to take advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans on some of the most egregious biotechnical practices."

Two conservatisms

Conservatives

• Markets/negative rights/anti-utopian

Neoconservatives

• Moral values/favors ideology/societal fragility

Conservative Views of Science 1. Traditional, business-oriented

conservatives

• Marshall Institute

• Competitive Enterprise Institute

Conservative Views of Science2. Radical conservative religious

groups

• Americans United for Life

• Discovery Institute

• Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity

Conservative Views of Science3. Neoconservatives

• Ethics and Public Policy Center

• President’s Council on Bioethics (Bush 1)

A common ancestor

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Father of Anglo-American conservatism

“The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. ...”

The New Right Critique of ScienceUndermining Human Dignity

“First, the continued development of biotechnology in certain directions will require the violation of truly basic moral strictures. Second, biotechnology will initiate a revolution in how we think about family, parenthood, the relation between the generations, work and achievement, and many other areas of human life. And third, biotechnology could bring about a fundamental rupture in human history, leading us into a ‘posthuman’ age.”

— Adam Wolfson, The New Atlantis

Neoconservative bioethics

Central themes

• Alienation

• Commodification

From Old Left to New Right:Irving Kristol

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.“

"What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived."

"The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie --but only if she is paid the minimum wage."

Capitalism is the problem;it turns all into a commodity.

“Of course, most biotechnology is admirable; it is a continuation of bourgeois progress as we have long known it….At the same, however, we must face up to the fact that modern commerce is often a moral problem, the capitalism of the body most especially.”

— Eric Cohen, The New Atlantis

The new right’s source for its critique of biotechnology“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.”

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Tensions on the Left

Center FOR

Genetics AND

Society

A Progressive Bioethics?

“the American Progressive tradition [is] resolutely experimental rather than reflexively ideological, in constant search of new methods, insistent on continuous reform….” (Dionne 1996)

J. Moreno and S. Berger, eds., Progress in Bioethics (MIT Press 2010)

John Dewey at 150“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

“Science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action.”

“The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence.”

Democracy and Education, 1916

A Warning for Progressives:Buck v. Bell, 1927

The Culture Wars 2.0

The next death and dying case (“minimally conscious states”)Chimeras (lab animals with human cells)Germ cells from induced pluripotent stem cellsSynthetic biology (the “minimal genome”)Neuroscience and enhancement