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08/09/2005: "Blogger's angst"
One of my Interaction panels concerned the future of Blogging Science. Given that my blog (like my brain) contains only the most tangential & ill-informed of allusions to science - 'proper science' as opposed to the intellectually wimpy social science & bioethics stuff I do - my inclusion on this panel was something of a surprise to me, but mismatches of expertise & topic were far from unusual at the Worldcon. Anyway, I'm sure I taught my audience precisely bugger all, but the discussion got me thinking about the purpose & utility of this site. Does the online universe really need another half-informed pissed-off 30-something ranting at the media, the politicians, religion & the gullible dupes who gulp down all three?
Almost certainly not, especially as the people who read this are almost exactly the same people who can get the condensed (& more profanity-laden) version of the same rants in the pub every other weekend.
So what can I do with this that isn't just a copy of what everyone else with a gripe & a broadband connection is doing?
(The next bit is a bit academic-y, so feel free to cross the street & pass on by if you're not turned on by bioethics & political theory.)
One thing that occurred to me was to follow the old writers' adage & stick to what I know. As it happens, I'm paid to know a fair bit about medical law & bioethics, but I very much doubt posterity would thank me for yet another website where pro-life christians can enter into their own little e-jihad with supporters of bodily autonomy. That market, I suspect, is already substantially over-saturated.
In contrast, a much neglected area relates to economic/political discussions of bioethics. I have read articles - & supervised dissertations - looking at questions like when a financial offer (to act as a surrogate mother, or donate a kidney, or participate in medical research) becomes coercive, autonomy-undermining rather than -enhancing. And there are academic works out there considering the effects of a 'free market' approach to genetic enhancement on distributive justice (From Chance to Choice: Genetics & Justice, by Buchananan, Brock, Daniels & Wickler, is particularly good.)
Equally, there are non-academic (ooh, hark at him! of course, I mean not peer-reviewed) opinion pieces adopting various leftist or libertarian approaches to these sorts of issues, not least in the pages of Spiked! & it's predecessor LM. (John Gillott & Brendan O'Neill aren't quite your stereotypical Marxists, but the ancestors of the RCP have been among the most high-profile & provocative libertarian voices in the UK media in recent years).
What I haven't seen, or been able to find after 1/2 an hour on Google, is a site that collects these various left/libertarian perspectives, & that maybe acts as a forum for discussion & debate about them. So I thought I might use a part of this site to attempt just that. Ably assisted as ever by the technical expertise of Mr Lusiphur, I'm planning to use a page of this blog to catalogue the various online publications I've been able to find on this. And obviously, I'd be more than happy to add any that I've missed, or that haven't been published before.
The only criteria (aside from a minimum quality threshold, upheld entirely arbitrarily by me!) must be that the subject matter is bioethics/medlaw, & in particular, the sort of questions identified above. This isn't an attempt to censor other opinions. Religious voices, for example, have a contribution to make in any debate the outcome of which will impact on religious people. And questions of 'personhood' are, undeniably, important in the context of bioethical discourse, whether the subject be abortion, euthanasia or GM animals. It's just not what I'm trying to do here.
By restricting this particular discussion to issues of justice & exploitation, choice & coercion, & power dynamics, I hope to facilitate a slightly deeper level of analysis than would be allowed by a(nother) wide-ranging biethics site. That said, I'm planning to adopt pretty loose definitions of all of the above.
For anyone who reads this blog but who isn't interested in that stuff, keep on doing what you're doing! I've no intention of stopping the ill-informed rantage, which is at very least therapeutic to me! But the other side of the Blog will be there, for anyone interested, for at least as long as I'm interested.
