Comments - Bruce Jennings

Comments - Bruce Jennings

 

  1. The mainstream categories of science and technology policy in a regime of liberal democratic governance are focused on risk, harm, and equity in the distribution of burdens and benefits. Mainstream bioethics has largely embraced this universe of discourse.
  2. Similarly, mainstream liberal democratic policy analysis and policy making are circumvented by the doctrine of liberal neutrality. Again, mainstream bioethics in the United States has largely accepted this stricture.
  3. My first thesis that these categories, while essential, are not sufficient to provide an adequate ethical response to synthetic biology. They tend to legitimate more than they limit.
  4. My second thesis is that critical public and democratic discourse regarding synthetic biology (and biotechnology more generally) is hamstrung by the doctrine of liberal neutrality.
  5. How and on what basis can ethical critique go beyond harm and equity? Only through a worldview based on the notion of right relationship and on a substantive conception of the human and the natural good.
  6. How can we have a meaningful democratic discourse on such fundamental conceptions in a pluralistic society? The doctrine of liberal neutrality rules such discourse out of the domain of public policy and governance. The overlap between cultural and value movements devoted to environmentalism and conservation, on the one hand, and parallel movements critical of biotechnology, on the other, provide an opening for breaking out of the confines of liberal neutrality and pushing beyond a mainstream bioethics of harm and equity.
  7. We need to nurture that convergence between progressive, critical conservationism and critical biotechnology studies. We need to respond to synthetic biology by articulating a bioethics of the good to supplement, although not to supplant, a bioethics of the right and human utility. Unfortunately, little if any attempt has been made in the recent reports on synthetic biology to develop such a discourse explicitly. How can that hesitancy be overcome?