Bioethicist Eric Cohen on Science, commerce of bodies or body parts, the remaking of the body, and capitalism.
The opinion in this essay is that Capitalism is eating on the human flesh and devouring the human soul through the same process. Mr. Cohen doesn't establish a difference in biotechnologies between technologies for cure and prevention on one side, and technologies for performance on the other side. Biotechnologies for prevention and cure, when available to everybody, are potential equalizers of our inherent unequal biological individuality, while Biotechnologies for performance, which are mainly available to those who have the means, can be problematic because they play the game of biological unequality.
The New Atlantis in which Mr. Cohen writes and for which he is editorially responsible is very close to the Neocons. Neocon philosophy is an elitist and a darwinist one. The Neocons are against biotechnologies for therapeutic purposes but they defend the devaluation of the body and the lives of strangers and soldiers for warfare purposes. This in itself does not discredit Mr. Cohen's opinions in Bioethics, although he doesn't make this essential difference between cure and performance, but it contradicts his bioethicism. That was and still the great paradox of neoconservatism in the sphere of religion and morality, fierce amoral neoliberal warfare capitalism which is degrading to humans and conservative values which have the pretensions to restore core values for humanity. Hundred thousand of bodies and body parts were lost in Iraq. The human body and soul were subjected to barbaric scenes of torture in Iraq and Guantanamo.
But the Bioethics that rejects biotechnologies as a whole without distinction between prevention, care, and performance, may well be seen as contemptuous for suffering and sufferers.
We can't just throw the whole thing in the name of Ethics. Bioethics was born as an Ethics for advanced medical technologies which are the very raison d'ĂȘtre of this new discipline.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
'Biocapitalism' and Neoconservatism:Post Updated
Labels:
Bioethics,
Biotechnology,
Capitalism,
Neoconservatism,
Warfare

No comments:
Post a Comment