Dissertation Abstract
Democratic DNA: Technology,
Pragmatism,
and the Politics of the Human
Genome
by
Jeffrey Alan Johnson
Degree: Ph.D.
Year: 2003
Pages: 00162
Institution: The
Advisor: Supervisor Patrick Riley
Source: DAI, 64, no. 11A (2003): p. 4191
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.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL
Accession
No: AAI3113707
Provider: OCLC
Database: Dissertations