Abstract
Joanna Zylinska, Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, has written a critique of what she calls ‘traditional bioethics’ and proposes an alternative bioethics that is non-normative and motivated by a content-free obligation to the alterity of all forms of life. Her book is divided into two parts: ‘Theorizing Bioethics’ and ‘Bioethics in Action’. The first critiques traditional bioethics and develops the theoretical basis for her proposal. The second part explores how her new bioethics would examine a number of bioethical issues with a significant media component: blogging, extreme makeover reality TV shows, the ‘secret of life’ DNA trope, and bioart.
The theoretical section begins with Zylinska characterizing traditional bioethics as built around three main concepts: normativity that is infused by a view of the good; humanistic assumptions about decisions lying within the rational human; and, the universal applicability of moral judgments. Zylinska questions all three of these perspectives and their place in bioethics. Her overview of bioethics presents it as an academic discipline involving arguments between utilitarians, deontologists and the occasional virtue ethicist. While Zylinska acknowledges that her treatment risks ‘a certain oversimplication’ (p. 20), this does occur and influences her analysis throughout the book. She points out important limitations with analytical approaches to bioethics, where presumptions are made without being examined. She makes important points about how bioethics has slipped under the control of biomedical corporations or political ideology. Yet many of these criticisms have been made within bioethics by some who see themselves as traditional bioethicists, but without falling into the utilitarian or deontological camps that Zylinska assumes dominate bioethics. To be fair, undertaking a detailed overview of bioethical theory would take many volumes, and Zylinska does highlight the importance of examining foundational issues in bioethics, which have been overlooked.
What most concerns Zylinska is the inherent humanism of bioethics. She seeks a theoretical model that goes ‘beyond the belief in the intrinsic dignity and superior value of the human’ (p. 36). Her concern is for a bioethics that appropriately engages humans, animals and machines. This leads her to examine what bioethics might be like if something other than the human was at its foundation – something like the cyborg. She reviews the recent origins of bioethics, and explores how bioethics might be different if the views of Van Rensselear Potter had predominated. These examined cybernetic and environmental issues, rather than having the clinical medical focus that has dominated bioethics. This leads Zylinska to look to other philosophers for a nonhumanist basis for her ‘posthumanist bioethics’ (p. 45).
Zylinska takes the concept of alterity (or otherness) from Emmanuel Levinas, although she distances herself from his anthropological tendencies. Rather than the humanist focus on difference and distinctiveness, she embraces openness to difference and an ethics of hospitality. From Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben she examines biopolitics and its network of interactions involving state governments and individuals. This leads into consideration of ‘the ethics of the self’ and whether blogging reflects a narcissistic culture. In keeping with Jacques Derrida, she finds that there are both good and bad narcissisms. However, for Zylinska these are not moral categories, but conditions of our psychic health.
Zylinska commences the second part of her book by examining reality TV shows (like The Swan) where participants receive complete makeovers, including cosmetic surgery and personality counselling. She makes insightful comments about these shows and the beliefs and motivations underlying them. She comments on how participants’ bodies are viewed as machines and points to eugenic ideas, but her comparison with concentration camps never seems adequately justified. The use of the swan metaphor leads to a consideration of animal metaphors and an ethics for animals. She sees much of value in Donna Haraway’s view of animals, but finds her unconvincing. Zylinska’s criticism is that Haraway offers little other than an appeal to the value of liking animals.
This is where Zylinska is most clear about her proposed alternative bioethics. Other lives, human or nonhuman, place an obligation on us to respond to them in ways that minimize violence and promote hospitality to alterity. At the same time, all life forms are not viewed as equally valuable or inherently good. Zylinska denies that this places any prescriptions on how to treat human and nonhuman life, but that humans should put their abilities ‘to good use and respond responsibly’ (p. 122). But what does this mean? Is this any more than the traditional call to ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’? Her insistence on a content-free, non-normative bioethics leaves many questions unanswered.
Zylinska begins her book with a list of ‘rather big’ questions (p. 5). Should we be able to buy and sell organs for transplantation? Is animal experimentation moral? Is gene therapy ethical? Is life worth living? Her book raises important philosophical questions, provides insightful cultural analysis, and critiques traditional bioethical approaches. But her alternative bioethics provides little guidance for anyone asking such questions. Her bioethics ‘will not tell us in a prescriptive and formalized way how to respond to challenges brought up by genetic testing, xenotransplantation, or cloning, as that would reduce ethical thinking to a reflection on totality and would thus prove ultimately unethical. Instead, ethics is seen as a primary demand or obligation imposed by the infinitely other, whose otherness transcends the Leibnizian monadism or genetic complementarity and goes beyond difference within a genus’ (p. 145).
Certainly, legalistic and formalistic approaches to bioethics are problematic, as many traditional bioethicists would agree. Yet Zylinska acknowledges that we have moral obligations and are responsible for the lives and deaths of others. We need to make decisions ‘about what to do’ (p. 177). Bioethics articulates various theories, principles and values to provide guidance for such decisions and to help answer the ‘rather big’ questions. But even as Zylinska rejects generalizable approaches to bioethics, her non-normative, content-free bioethics includes general principles, like openness to difference and minimal violence. At the same time, her ideological commitments lead her to refuse to provide clear guidance on whether people should or should not engage in specific actions (p. 123). She acknowledges that this is frustrating, and she is correct.
Bioethics provides a range of specific proposals, which then need to be critically examined and debated. Cultural analysis and media studies have important things to say to bioethics, and to that extent Zylinska’s book makes an important contribution. Her chapters on the trope of DNA as the secret of life, and bioart, are good examples of how such analyses are very relevant to bioethics.
But there is more to bioethics. People are trying to determine whether they should pursue cosmetic surgery on reality TV. Patients and their doctors have difficult decisions to make. Researchers must decide whether their proposed experiments are ethical or not. Legislators must determine specific regulations. Zylinska’s alternative bioethics will not help people facing such decisions because it won’t help in deciding between values or drawing lines (p. 123). This is not just frustrating, but a relinquishing of an important goal in ethics: to help people make ethical decisions.