Environmental and Medical Bioethics in Late Modernity: Anthony Giddens, Genetic Engineering and the Post-Modern State

Abstract

A controversial question among contemporary scholars is whether advanced industrial societies are still in modernity, or whether they are on the threshold of, or even have entered, a new postmodern order (see, for example, Bell, 1973; Lyotard, 1986, p. 14; Lash and Urry, 1987). In The Consequences of Modernity Anthony Giddens writes: ‘Beyond modernity, we can perceive a new and different order, which is “post-modern”, but this is quite distinct from what is at the moment called by many “post-modernity”’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 3). However, he does recognize that there is something perceptibly different about the present, which he characterizes as ‘late modernity’ (or ‘high modernity'), an era in which the consequences of modernity are more radicalized and globalized than before (Giddens, 1990, pp. 3, 51).