Thesis ID: CBB001562034

Democratic DNA: Technology, Pragmatism, and the Politics of the Human Genome (2003)

unapi

Johnson, Jeffrey Allan (Author)


University of Wisconsin at Madison
Riley, Patrick


Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Riley, Patrick
Physical Details: 162 pp.
Language: English

Human Genomics, the science of understanding the content of human genes, poses a variety of political challenges ranging from equality of access to the transformation of human identity. Democratic theory offers two resources for addressing these challenges in the form of two imperatives for democratic governance: a liberal imperative holds that technology as an object of public choice and a force structuring society ought to be subject to the consent of the governed, and a pragmatic imperative holds that for both political and epistemological reasons better public choices about technology are made through democratic procedures than through undemocratic ones. But there is a great obstacle to democratizing genomic technologies. The standard ethical concept used to understand technology is the neutrality thesis: technologies are value-neutral tools for the achievement of valued ends; thus ethical questions apply only to the uses of technologies and not to the technologies themselves. This thesis is embedded in genomic technologies, and limits them to the realm of technocratic rather than democratic governance. The neutrality thesis is enforced, I show, by the separation of nature and society inherent in the modern understanding of technology. As such, the modern understanding of technology is an obstacle to resolving the challenges of human genomics. The philosophical pragmatism of Charles Peirce proves to be the key to overcoming the tyranny of technological neutrality. Technology, rather than being an artifact, is an action. To understand it requires understanding not its physical nature but the subjective meaning of the action. Peirce's semiotics shows that reality is itself constructed by human understanding from the repertoire of possibilities inherent in the material reality, bridging the gap between modern conceptions of scientific knowledge and democratic social action. Dewey's politics of a community of deliberative democratic inquiry provides a link from this to at least two effective institutional models for this. Large-scale technological issues such as the provision of genetic therapy demand a state-centric model built around international regimes; less extensive issues such as research ethics allow a user-centered model where less formal epistemic communities develop their own paradigms for governance.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 4191. UMI order no. 3113707.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562034/

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Authors & Contributors
Jasanoff, Sheila
Bijker, W. E.
Lascoumes, Pierre
Barthe, Yannick
Weldon, Stephen P.
Sorj, Bernardo
Concepts
Democracy
Technology and politics
Biotechnology
Human genetics
Science and politics
Authorities; experts
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
Germany
Europe
Mexico
England
Puerto Rico
Institutions
United States. Patent Office
Human Genome Project
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