By Dan O’Connor

Osagie K. Obasogie & Marcy Darnovsky (eds) Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (University of California Press, 2018) 

Pity the poor bioethicist, the universal whipping dog of modern academia. For if she is not being told to “get out of the way” of research by Steven Pinker, then she is being called a “thief of virtue” by Tom Koch.[1] She is either a hinderance to progress or a schill for the neoliberal research enterprise, a regulation-spouting roadblock on the way to curing disease, or a craven fig leaf for the depredations of rapacious healthcare corporations.

Into this unseemly fray, enter Osagie Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky: editors of this new  collection. They have a different beef with bioethics: it is no longer fit for purpose. To them, bioethics’ traditional focus on individual choice leaves it incapable of addressing the social and political challenges of contemporary biomedicine, in particular ‘advances’ in genetics and reproductive medicine. Informed consent, they argue, is no way to think about the morality of DNA forensics, for example, or the rights and wrongs of human enhancement. Instead, Obasogie and Darnovsky have assembled an array of (mostly) previously published pieces which they contend constitutes “the new biopolitics”. These (this?) “new biopolitics” profeses to attend to the political perspectives of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, privacy and democracy, that (or so they argue) are elided or ignored by bioethics’ exhausting focus on individual choice, and are necessary to meet the challenges of modern biomedicine.

…continue reading ‘Beyond Bioethics: Review’

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