Universal Values, Contextualization and Bioethics: Knowledge Production in the Age of Genetics

Th e impact of biotechnology on all living things is an interdisciplinary inquiry into some of humanity’s most fundamental questions: Who are we? How do we live together? How do we relate to the biosphere, to the rest of the living world? Are the answers given to these questions shaped by various contexts: social, cultural, economic, so on? Are there universal answers to these questions? Choosing this interdisciplinary fi eld of knowledge production as object of inquiry off ers an opportunity to investigate how traditional theories and disciplines are challenged to evolve in new directions as a response to techno-scientifi c developments of our times. It also allows us to study patterns of knowledge production, to examine hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, as well as the possibilities of interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practices in a multicultural context. I will argue that a framework that incorporates universal principles shall constitute one dimension of an adequate ethical theory in the context of new genetics providing that its principles are formulated in non-exclusionary terms that refl ect the relational context of individual lives. As Judith Butler has formulated »the problem is not with the universality, as such, but with an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to social and cultural conditions it includes within the scope of its applicability. When a universal precept cannot, for social reasons be appropriated or when ...it must be refused, the universal precept itself becomes a site of contest, a theme and an object of democratic debate« (Butler, 2006, p. 6). What both femiJAHR  Vol. 1  No. 1  2010 * Correspodence address: Enikő Demény, Ph.D., Central European University’s (CEU), Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine, Nador u. 9., H-1051 Budapest, Hungary, Phone: +3614723403; Fax: +3613283410; e-mail: [email protected] (Homepage: http://www.celab.hu/). UDK: 179:61 Review Article/ Pregledni članak Received/Primljeno 22/03/2010 »Th ere can be no culturally and psychologically perceptive ethics without taking into account the diversity of moral lives, but there can be no ethics at all without universals ... Th e hard part is to devise a theory that can readily join universality and the moral complexity of everyday life« (Callahan 2000, p. 38, 41).