Biopolitics in the Risk Society: the Possibility of a Global Ethic of Societal Responsibility

Abstract

In this chapter I explore two related themes: the significance of new forms of technology, in particular biotechnology, as a political-ethical challenge in what Beck (1992) has termed the ‘risk society’; and the ability of contemporary ‘biopolitics’, to use a phrase of Feher and Heller (1994), to generate an appropriate ethical response. The argument I shall be proposing is that an adequate ethical and political response to new forms of technology in the ‘risk society’ must abandon essentialism as well as questioning a simple model of rights as a normative reference point. The crucial question, which will be addressed in the third section, is how such an adequate response must draw upon an ethic of societal responsibility (see Strydom, this volume). This is approached by means of a debate with the theories of Jonas, Apel and Habermas. These theories allow us to see how societal responsibility provides a new normative framework in which debates and struggles on biotechnology take place. But the new discourse of biopolitics has wider implications for society: it challenges our ideas of democracy and the ethical neutrality of science. As a key factor in motivating contemporary perceptions of risk, biotechnology opens a crucial discursive space in which critical communities are and can be mobilised to specify problems and to propose solutions. My argument, then, is that as a result of new developments in biotechnology, a new kind of politics is advanced: biopolitics, which involves a reconstruction of the politics of science. In this process, science’s monopoly over the definition of what should count as scientific rationality is broken and many voices emerge around the theme of societal responsibility. Accommodating these differences would appear to require a more inclusive and participatory democracy, one that is centrally concerned with the relationship between society and nature, thus supplanting liberal-welfare democracy, which is about the relationship between society and the state through delegated represesentative models.