Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 3, 2018

Bioethics

Bernard Reber
Pages 99-104

Towards Participative Bioethical Assessment

If some of European Parliamentary Offices of technological and scientific assessment have been inspired by the former Congressional Office of technological assessment of the US (OTA), they have made new revolutionary experiments with the introduction of the participation of ordinary citizens (lay people). TA has, thus, become Participatory Technological Assessment (PTA). In most cases these citizen have a large initiative according to 50 different devices. The wealth of these TA and PTA are uncommon innovations in the field of institutional design. The list of problems selected here tries to explicit some theoretical deadlocks linked with PTA on the way to Participatory Bioethical Assessment. If they are not been thought and envisaged by the organizers these problems embedded in the making of PTA process are key questions and conditions for the quality of the results. Bioethics is understood here in its complete and original sense, as Potter (1998) coined the term: “The time has come to recognize that we can no longer examine medical options without considering ecological science and the larger problems of society on a global scale” (p.2). This bioethical turn constitutes a major change in PTA as well. In a way it is a return of the good life, but thought largely and not only on an individual basis. The problem goes beyond the questions of pluralism of expertise and interdisciplinarity. We have to combine ‘horizontal’ interdisciplinarity with ‘vertical’ normativity. Some of the technical and scientific problems discussed, may sometimes be stabilized. In such cases we are in a prevention context, where we have only to deal with the moral controversies. We have there to open a new space of research, exposing the methods of bioethics, while considering the assessment of ordinary citizens and their beliefs. Very often we are in a context of precaution, and we find the controversies on both sides, on scientific and ethical grounds. In this respect, we have to consider a co-dependence between ethical and scientific inquiries. We will consider in this paper some theoretical problems on the way towards Participative Bioethical Assessment: the choice of normative political theory to constrain the debate; the definition of an argument (composition and type) in deliberative democracy facing moral pluralism; articulation between ethical and political deliberation; articulation between descriptive sciences and normative ones.