Abstract

In this chapter, Ashley Biser discusses the politics of birth and reproduction in a world where reproductive technologies increasingly reveal and amplify the cultural-technological character of generating new life. Biser does so by responding to the concerns of thinkers like Leonard Kass, Francis Fukuyama, and Jürgen Habermas, who worry that without a distinction between "the grown and the made," we cannot make ethical judgments about biotechnology. Biser does not respond to this worry by attempting, as these thinkers do, to secure a concept of nature from which we might ethically judge new reproductive technologies, nor by arguing that a concern with nature is misplaced. Instead, drawing on Hannah Arendt's exhortation to think phenomena "without a banister," Biser argues that we should direct our critical attention to the phenomena and "stabilizing activities" that we have sought to describe with the nature/artifice distinction, and ask whether or how new reproductive technologies may challenge or transform these activities.

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