Changing the Facts of Life

THE CUSTODY TRIAL FOR BABY M raises the question of how emerges through specific cases. This trial involves advances in reproductive technologies and the ethical issues that have arisen with them. Although the problems associated with discovery and have been spread across the disciplines, it seems important to ask whether there is a common denominator within this diversity. Not just at the theoretical level, but also as it is implemented in examples, so that we may pass from cognitive to ethical thought. Two hypotheses serve as a point of departure for what follows: 1) Resistance to and the acceptance of what is new involves definitions of what is pertinent, or important, to the thinking of a given era. By the transposition of ideas from one discipline to another, by returning to older forms and discourses, the emergence of newness depends upon a complex relationship between a tradition of thinking and the sudden appearance of what I will call facts. To ascertain what one means by a in such cases is not easy. Although at a certain level facts, like events, are cultural constructs, subject always to the process of interpretation, there is a limit to this definition in the context of action, pain and human distress. 2) Ethical thought may be defined here as a questioning of the status of the particular event, and its insertion into a system of thinking: making relevant what is most contingent, relative, even temporary. The legal system in the United States, for example, is based on case-by-case precedent, and this makes what is contingent into a future given. Within the framework of a specific case, I want to ask not only: what legitimizes ethical judgment? but also, how does one judge?1 The passage from thought as invention to fact as experiment is currently being debated in biology, where the advances of reproductive technologies now give these questions urgency. What makes this passage so acutely important now, as J. Testart has pointed out in his book L'Oeuf transparent, is that ethics must form the bridge between this generation and the next, because there is nothing that has been discovered in science and technology that may not be tried out. So that if one cannot limit invention, one

Action (physics) · Context (archaeology) · Diversity (politics) · Epistemology · Event (particle physics) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Law · Psychology · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Social Psychology