Rhetoric of Bioethics: Field Statement (Attempt 1)

            In contemporary legal, medical, philosophical, and public forums, bioethics occupies a central position with social groups debating issues concerning life and health as well as the technological and medical interventions into both: abortion, genetic screening, cosmetic surgery, research procedures, xenotransplantation, regulation of human organ markets, and “human enhancement” (see John Harris) to name a few. However, in the digital age, it is the transformation of the very notion of life that has sparked the most hopes, anxieties, and ethical challenges for Western democracies. Broadly construed, this list seeks to trace the shifting definitions of life, human, animal, and machine in these debates and how these debates are structured in contemporary political, legal, economic, and medical forums. These debates are of both an ethical and ontological order. In Bioethics in the Age of New Media, Joanna Zylinska defines bioethics as an "ethics of life" where "life names both the physical, material existence of singular organisms (what the Greeks called zoe) and their political organization into populations (bios)" (xiii). Traditional bioethics has been focused on zoe, with an explicit exclusion of bios; however, whenever we face singular decisions regarding individual beings, their lives and health, we are already situated in and drawing on a broader political context (xiii). Thus, bioethical decisions have moral and political influences and consequences. Within contemporary debates, though, not only do we see a shifting line about what counts as an ethically significant being shifting (e.g. the Spanish Parliament's extension of human rights to great apes), but also a disintegration of the boundary between what counts as a living being and a nonliving being (e.g. theories of the posthuman).

            The renewed focus on the both the material and ontological existence of beings as well as their (bio)political existence – an existence often rhetorically constructed through laws and policies – aligns with recent trends in material rhetoric. In the introduction to Rhetorical Bodies, Jack Selzer notes that academy’s embrace of the “rhetorical turn” this perspective has all too often reduced material things to mere functions of language, constructed by verbal and written language practices (4, 8). Selzer argues that we need to invert this perspective, allowing “material practices and realities … [to] come under rhetorical scrutiny” (8). While the essays collected in Rhetorical Bodies focus largely on matter itself, Body Talk’s focus on the discourses surrounding reproductive technology reveal the other side of material rhetoric’s coin. Language is not as immaterial as previously thought. The invention of new reproductive technologies and the rhetoric used to talk about them reveals countless material consequences in the lived lives of women – such as “ownership and control of knowledge, access to techniques of science and technology, place and power of expertise and professionals, societal definitions of pathology, definitions of the self, the rights granted to embodied citizens, and views about the relationship between technology and religion” (Lay et. al. 3). Since the essays in this collection focus mostly on texts, material rhetoric’s current trend is less an issue of artifact of study than of how the artifact is examined. Material rhetoric examines both the materiality of language and language of the material. Bioethics – as a discipline focused on the defining our ethical obligation to beings that are materially and discursively constructed – seems rich for rhetorical study.

            Key texts in my list will focus on two themes: shifting definitions and the structure of debates. Philosophically, bioethics often focuses on what counts as life as well as what lives are worthy of rights and ethical treatment. Historically, “human life” – often defined by shifting traits, capacities, and capabilities in different historical contexts – has held a privileged position in bioethical relations. However, criticisms of this position of human exceptionalism by individuals in animal studies, disability studies, posthuman studies have not gone unheard in bioethical debates. Many of the texts on this list interrogate the couplings between the living and nonliving, the human and nonhuman, as attempts to challenge traditional understandings of bioethics. Because what counts as life – as well as lives worthy of rights and ethical treatment – are decided through debates within public and private forums, key texts in my list will highlight the relationships between institutions and organizations and the discourses that circulate. For example, in “Not-so-Public Relations: How the Drug Industry is Branding Itself with Bioethics,” Carl Elliott describes how bioethics has drawn the attention of biotechnological industries, who increasingly invest in persuading bioethics experts and medical practitioners of the social justice of using specific drugs and enhancements, and as Zoltan P. Majdik and Carrie Anne Platt note in the most recent issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (42.2), campaigns to promote the ethical choice of using biotechnological products has recently shifted target audience to the individuals who would need the drug, producing subject positions with a moral obligation to use certain products. These trends influence the seemingly public debates around bioethical debates, leading at times to the regurgitation of positions without recognition of the stakes within them. While these bioethical marketing trends are predominantly American trends, neoliberalism, globalization, and the financial investments of biotech companies run the risk of strengthening the Americanization of bioethics around the globe by increasing the circulation of such public health campaigns. Thus, this list seeks not only to explore what is at stake in the representations of life, human, animal, and machine are debated in contemporary bioethics, but also how and why certain bioethical stances are dominant.