Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-lvtdw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T08:23:40.258Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Reproducing exclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2009

Monica Konrad
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

In Chapter 4 we considered two substantive concerns informing an anthropological ‘ethno-ethics’ for the anticipatory study of probable life futures related to developments in predictive testing technologies. These are characterised by the dual attempt to (1) delineate kinship relations as changing techniques of heredity and moral genealogy; and (2) show how certain forms of relatedness are fundamentally at odds with the bioethical conception of individual autonomy that underpins the medicocentrism of ‘rights’-based claims to knowledge. When the issues underscoring the ‘right to know/right not to know’ debates are transposed ethnographically to a microanalysis of real-time decision-making, we are able to see how the ‘facts’ of a genealogical ethics are built up over time as local moralities of information disclosure and non-disclosure. While family members must discriminate between genetic information that they think is good to know or make known, and knowledge that they think is ‘bad’ to tell and share with others, such attempts frequently entail unresolved processes of moral decision-making, both within and across the generations. As embodied experiences of moral reckoning, these genealogical knowledge dilemmas also implicate a myriad of interests and divergent claims beyond the life of any one person. Now these plural interests, and their activation by social agents in the experience of everyday genetics, require the conceptual modelling of a relational ethics in contradistinction to earlier evolution-based accounts of a so-called ‘naturalistic ethics’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
Ethics, Ethnography and Science
, pp. 109 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Reproducing exclusion
  • Monica Konrad, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511584183.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Reproducing exclusion
  • Monica Konrad, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511584183.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Reproducing exclusion
  • Monica Konrad, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511584183.006
Available formats
×