Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the technological, is not surprising. And yet, with this hybrid we
have moved beyond both Marxist and engineering kinds of humanism.
For in creating cyborgs, we will not just make technology, we will
become it. Technology will no longer function as an extension of our
physical capabilities but will actually constitute them. Here, Winner
observes, the tendency in the social sciences to no longer recognize the
traditional distance between culture/artifice and nature/biology serves as
a powerful underpinning to the desirability of replacing humans with
manufactured hybrids.
While applauding the undoubtedly positive ethical and political
aspects of social constructionism in helping us detect the strategies of
domination and marginalization in many appeals to the “natural,”
Winner admonishes against a too hasty embrace of these entities. Citing
the work of Donna Haraway, he observes that proponents of hybridiza-
tion are more prone “to generate a collection of moral sentiments” than
arguments that lead to “explicit ethical commitments.” Moreover, their
attempts to denigrate the supposed integrity of natural things, while
clothed in progressive sensibilities and liberal convictions, fail in the end
to address the challenge of biotechnology and its possible violation of a
natural order that exists beyond human influence or control. And finally,
Winner worries over the conflation of a leftist social constructionism
with “the work of radical reconstruction and recapitalization at stake
in today's technical and corporate realms.” In effect, Winner reaffirms
Zaner's and Elshtain's essential presupposition: that most of the world
remains a place, not of human making, but of things—including
humans—that are simply given. But in doing so, he extends their argu-
ments by raising the question of whether genetic engineering is the
appropriate tool to address the injustice that always accompanies the
world in its imperfect givenness. Might, he asks, an engineering approach
to all our problems actually subvert the claims of justice by refusing to
simply let beings be?
Winner is thus anxious to expand the question of human nature and
genetic engineering to include its moral and political aspects. Progres-
sives have traditionally focused on institutional change and a critique of
political life. But this template is now being challenged by the seemingly
more rational prospect of biological transformation, especially at the
genetic level. Aside from the disturbing question of the justice of employ-
