Engineering flesh: towards an ethics of lived integrity.
The objective of tissue engineering is to create living body parts that will fully integrate with the recipient's body. With respect to the ethics of tissue engineering, one can roughly distinguish two perspectives. On the one hand, this technology is considered morally good because tissue engineering is 'copying nature'. On the other hand, tissue engineering is considered morally dangerous because it defies nature: bodies constructed in the laboratory are seen as unnatural. In this article, we develop a phenomenological-ethical perspective on bodies and technologies, in which the notion 'lived body' and concrete experiences of health and illness play an important role. From that perspective, we analyse the practice of tissue engineering by focussing on one specific example: the engineering of heart valves. On the basis of this analysis, we propose that the ethics of tissue engineering should be framed not in terms of 'natural' or 'unnatural' but in terms of 'good embodied life' and 'lived integrity'.
Derksen
Mechteld-Hanna Gertrud
MH
Department of Technology Management Section History, Philosophy and Technology Studies, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, P. O. Box 513, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, The Netherlands. m.h.g.derksen@tm.tue.NL
Horstman
Klasien
K
D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000941:ethics; D020811:Biomedical Technology / Q000941:ethics*; D017281:Cost of Illness; D019918:Heart Valve Prosthesis Implantation; D006351:Heart Valves; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D023822:Tissue Engineering / Q000941:ethics*