Constructing critical bioethics by deconstructing culture/nature dualism.
This paper seeks to respond to some of the recent criticisms directed toward bioethics by offering a contribution to a "critical bioethics". Here this concept is principally defined in terms of the three features of interdisciplinarity, self-reflexivity and the avoidance of uncritical complicity. In a partial reclamation of the ideas of V.R. Potter, it is argued that a critical bioethics requires a meaningful challenge to culture/nature dualism, expressed in bioethics as the distinction between medical ethics and ecological ethics. Such a contesting of the "bio" in bioethics arrests its ethical bracketing of environmental and animal ethics. Taken together, the triadic definition of a critical bioethics offered here provides a potential framework with which to fend off critiques of commercial capture or of being "too close to science" commonly directed toward bioethics.
Twine
Richard
R
Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy IEPPP & ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics CESA Gen, Lancaster University, UK. r.twine@lancaster.ac.uk
D000818:Animals; D001675:Bioethics; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D006801:Humans