Review - Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics

From the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep, to the FDA's approval of BiDil as the first race-specific medication to ongoing discussions concerning the use of gene editing technologies such as "CRISPR," medical innovations during the past couple of decades have raised a number of significant ethical, social and political questions. Should cloning as human reproduction be limited? Is the pursuit of race-based medicine morally acceptable? Would it be a moral failure to abstain from using gene-editing technologies if they are proven safe to use? For Osagie K. Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky, the editors of Beyond Biopolitics: Toward a New Bioethics, these questions are further complicated by the specific sociopolitical context in which they arise. How do we understand, for instance, the FDA's approval of BiDil alongside the history of race and eugenics in the United States? Addressing these questions requires, on their account, a conceptual framework and approach not found in contemporary bioethics.  

To elaborate, for Obasogie and Darnovsky, bioethics currently operates on the basis of principlism. Principlism "provides a common framework by embracing four principles as...