Whereto speculative bioethics? Technological visions and future simulations in a science fictional culture

Abstract

This article critically examines the development and current state of speculative bioethics (bioethics discourse concerned with future technologies) as reflecting an intensifying science fictionality, a cognitive/perceptual mode in which the imagined future begins to exert increasing degrees of influence on the present, culminating in a collapse of distance between the two. Future technologies thereby come to be viewed as generating practical ethical issues that need to be addressed well in advance of their arrival. Although this appears to be a prudent effort, it actually bypasses the present as a site of moral agency and locates ethics within a simulation of the imagined future. A constructive form of speculative bioethics must be able to critically assess visions of technological futures if it is to function as an ethics that is of and for the present.

Bioethics and Biopolitics: Presents and Futures of Reproduction

“…It is in this sense that, as put by Schick (2016, 225) “the imagined future becomes an aspect of our present” and creates a “causal inversion”: it is the future that makes the present and not vice-versa. However, we must note how a form of “anticipatory bioethics” is not by any means “neutral” towards technologies, because addressing questions raised by future possible technologies as if they were already here (which, often, is not the case!)…”

The legal ambiguity of advanced assistive bionic prosthetics: Where to define the limits of ‘enhanced persons’ in medical treatment

“…To ignore this reality, while simultaneously brushing aside the potential for extreme D/SCIS or SLCIS capabilities, is to discredit the rationale behind the use of speculative ethical thought in industrial or scientific discourses and the harms it evidently prevents. 20 Unlike other advances in ABPs to-date, the allowance of SLCIS-nervous system interaction poses a great range of potential risks hereto only displayed in science-fiction novels and electronic media. While the author will concede that direct access to the central nervous system may not be entirely possible for CIDABPs as they exist today, [6][7][8] the potentiality of a direct neural interface with a (realistically) alien form of intelligence brings into question how concepts such as "self" can remain centred in traditionally understood-biologically bounded-notions of embodiment and how individual "authenticity" will effectively be swayed.…”

Citizenship as the exception to the rule: an addendum

“…Many of the questions presented herein may seem far-fetched to many, academic and non-academic alike. 29 When compared to the examples given to us through science-fiction media, however, and are coupled with the realisation that these examples are driving our social and technological advancement, they become stark representations of humanity’s potential future (Schick 2016 ). How society adapts depends strongly upon the science-fiction example being utilised for reference.…”