- Title Pages
- Series Foreword
- Foreword: Biological Feedback
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
-
I Theory and Practice: Biology as Ideology -
1 Interview with Richard Lewontin -
2 Living the Eleventh Thesis -
3 Interview with Richard Levins -
II Life.science.art: Curating the Book of Life -
4 Biotech Patronage and the Making of Homo DNA -
5 Soft Science -
6 Observations on an Art of Growing Interest -
III The Biolab and the Public -
7 Outfitting the Laboratory of the Symbolic -
8 The Ethics of Experiential Engagement with the Manipulation of Life -
9 Labs Shut Open -
IV Race and the Genome -
10 Selective Arrests, an Ever-Expanding DNA Forensic Database, and the Specter of an Early Twenty-First-Century Equivalent of Phrenology -
11 Discovering Nature, Apparently -
12 The Biopolitics of Human Genetics Research and Its Application -
13 In Contradiction Lies the Hope -
V Gendered Science -
14 Common Knowledge and Political Love -
15 Producing Transnational Knowledge, Neoliberal Identities, and Technoscientific Practice in India -
16 Genes, Genera, and Genres -
17 True Life Science Fiction -
VI Expertise and Amateur Science -
18 Uncommon Life -
19 AIDS Activists and People with AIDS -
20 The Politics of Rationality -
21 Reaching the Limit -
VII Biosecurity and Bioethics -
22 From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment -
23 How Do We Insure Security from Perceived Biological Threats? -
24 Bioparanoia and the Culture of Control -
25 Chinese Chickens, Ducks, Pigs, and Humans, and the Technoscientific Discourses of Global U.S. Empire -
VIII Interspecies Co-Production -
26 Training in the Contact Zone -
27 Playing with Rats -
28 Animal Welfare in the Laboratory - Contributors
- Index
From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment
From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment
- Chapter:
- (p.389) 22 From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment
- Source:
- Tactical Biopolitics
- Author(s):
Paul Rabinow
Gaymon Bennett
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
This chapter rejects all attempts to purify overlapping notions of science, ethics, and human dignity, and argues that definitions of scientific truth and notions of the human have always constructed each other. Even well-meaning attempts at addressing “bioethics” forget this, positioning ethics as exterior to science, constituting it via rules and people-independent moral systems. Well-meaning attempts at protecting people, nature, and the future from admittedly horrific histories (eugenics, capitalist exploitation, colonialism) tend to seek refuge in a metaphysical humanism that neglects to ask: What is the good life today? What is the nature of scientific truth today? What is the human today? Since none of the hypostatized, “eternal” answers are satisfactory, attention must shift to emerging technical meaning construction and new biosocial practices. To answer these questions in the broadest interdisciplinary sense, we need to rethink the meanings of collaboration, equipment, and human-nature ethics without reducing them to instrumental relationships or metaphysical essences.
Keywords: science, ethics, human dignity, scientific truth, bioethics
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Series Foreword
- Foreword: Biological Feedback
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
-
I Theory and Practice: Biology as Ideology -
1 Interview with Richard Lewontin -
2 Living the Eleventh Thesis -
3 Interview with Richard Levins -
II Life.science.art: Curating the Book of Life -
4 Biotech Patronage and the Making of Homo DNA -
5 Soft Science -
6 Observations on an Art of Growing Interest -
III The Biolab and the Public -
7 Outfitting the Laboratory of the Symbolic -
8 The Ethics of Experiential Engagement with the Manipulation of Life -
9 Labs Shut Open -
IV Race and the Genome -
10 Selective Arrests, an Ever-Expanding DNA Forensic Database, and the Specter of an Early Twenty-First-Century Equivalent of Phrenology -
11 Discovering Nature, Apparently -
12 The Biopolitics of Human Genetics Research and Its Application -
13 In Contradiction Lies the Hope -
V Gendered Science -
14 Common Knowledge and Political Love -
15 Producing Transnational Knowledge, Neoliberal Identities, and Technoscientific Practice in India -
16 Genes, Genera, and Genres -
17 True Life Science Fiction -
VI Expertise and Amateur Science -
18 Uncommon Life -
19 AIDS Activists and People with AIDS -
20 The Politics of Rationality -
21 Reaching the Limit -
VII Biosecurity and Bioethics -
22 From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment -
23 How Do We Insure Security from Perceived Biological Threats? -
24 Bioparanoia and the Culture of Control -
25 Chinese Chickens, Ducks, Pigs, and Humans, and the Technoscientific Discourses of Global U.S. Empire -
VIII Interspecies Co-Production -
26 Training in the Contact Zone -
27 Playing with Rats -
28 Animal Welfare in the Laboratory - Contributors
- Index
