Abstract

MORENO, Juan Carlos  and  OSORIO GARCIA, Sergio Néstor. The starting point of the bioethical analysis of science and technology: criticisms of determinism. rev.latinoam.bioet. [online]. 2017, vol.17, n.2, pp.76-91. ISSN 1657-4702.  https://doi.org/10.18359/rlbi.2142.

What should be the starting point of the bioethical analysis of science and technology? In almost half a century of history, different perspectives of bioethical analysis of science and technology have been formulated. This article recognizes the broad theoretical context on the subject and will not inquire about it, but on a more fundamental issue: the need to specify a common starting point for the different analyses, to avoid some frequently flawed budgets. The article proposes as a point of departure for the bioethical analysis indicated an internalist perspective, oriented fundamentally to face the task of dismantling deterministic presuppositions, and not an externalist, traditional and moralizing view. The text specifies the different meanings of the deterministic viewpoints on science and technology commonly assumed, and their relations with moral judgments. It also analyzes, in a comparative form, the way in which several authors and perspectives take or question this type of approach. The fundamental contribution of the article is to propose as a basic ethical perspective the task of opening the black box of moral judgments and dissolving the precarious deterministic understandings of the nature of science and technology, in which many of the bioethical analyses on the subject remain imprisoned.

Keywords : technological determinism; bioethics; internalism; externalism; philosophy of technology.

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