Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
returns are shared in different ways, including as personal satisfaction for
defending the common good. But in order for firms to ever reach that happy
condition, they must be able to see a market that rewards their responsible
behavior.
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In the developed world, this requires a reordering of tastes and prior-
ities, and most especially a drastic qualification of our cherished politi-
cal absolute of personal freedom, now extended to entrepreneurial
corporations. To get there, we need a more sustained and democratic
social and political dialogue about the role of economics and con-
sumerism in our national culture, the distribution of biomedical
resources, and the promises and perils of genetic manipulation. But this
conversion must and no doubt will be pushed along by pressures from
outsiders whose economic and social interests are entwined with ours,
but who up to now we have been free to ignore, except as cheap labor
or potential markets to enhance the opportunities of U.S. business (if not
necessarily of U.S. workers). Some “realists” might interpret this scenario
as just the latest phase in the ceaseless and more or less violent struggle
for resources and power that has always characterized the relations of
human societies, both internally and externally. But hopeful theorists
of the common good, religious and otherwise, will be sobered by a dose
of realism before undertaking the serious job of subjecting genetic engi-
neering to critical analysis and gradual, limited, and full participatory
implementation.
To the degree that a process of political participation results in the dis-
proportionate influence of elites or even “majority rule,” the problem of
collective egotism about which Niebuhr worried does not disappear.
Some safeguards against it are suggested by the struggle over patented
drugs in South Africa. Among them are the inclusiveness of mechanisms
and institutions of participation; the replacement of centralized control
over the process by a pluralism of avenues and strategies of participa-
tion and influence, among which there will be some friction; and—the
ultimate test—the incorporation of the interests of the most vulnerable
into the social outcome. While inclusiveness, pluralism, and some fric-
tion signal that self-interest does not control the political process
absolutely, improvement in the status of the most vulnerable signals that
the process has been effective in achieving greater equality and justice in
social life.
