Abstract
The author analyzes the characteristics and some consequences of postmodern consumption ’s nature . Consequently, he explores some of the most direct sequels that postmodernism and its unbearable lightness bring to biolaw , as a discipline imbued in postmodernity or, perhaps also, as a chronologically postmodern discipline. To elaborate the diagnosis, three methodological tools will be used: (i) The analysis of Baumanian metaphor of liquefaction or fluidity and its consonances with the nature of postmodernity ; (ii) The review of the postmodern liquefaction process, by examining forms of consumption , forms of ethics and postmodern bioethical trends; and (iii) The analysis of the connection between postmodernity and biolaw . From this analysis , he will conclude that the liquid nature of postmodern philosophies has given rise to an increasing number of philosophical proposals, which succumb to the socio-cultural changes of postmodernity and its forms of consumption . Hence, if biolaw bases its rules on bioethical principles and postmodern ethics , its nature will most likely be liquid .
I Owe Erick Valdés for the subtitle of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept “liquid ” acquires a special meaning in Zygmunt Bauman’s thought, while the Polish sociologist builds his work on the liquid ’s metaphor . This means that the topics analyzed by Bauman—modernity , love, fear, education , culture, surveillance, consumption , life —and in general his examination of reality is understood and studied from the concept of liquid . However, for the purposes of this chapter, I analyze only the relationships that the liquid has with postmodern ethics and biolaw .
- 2.
I owe the expression “the unbearable lightness of the post-modern age” to professor Erick Valdés .
- 3.
This belief is not widespread in the academic community . There is even a great deal of criticism about identifying the present with postmodernity , since various theorists understand the actuality, not as a postmodernity , but as late tardiness of modernity . However, in this paper I tend to identify contemporary times as postmodern times.
- 4.
Ontological -based bioethics recognizes the existence of a human nature based on ontology, which, in turn, illuminates and delimits the actions of our freedom until it leads us to the good . Put another way, ontological bioethics deduces its ethics from metaphysics , since it has a finalist conception of the human being and his freedom .
- 5.
In contradistinction to this postmodern understanding of autonomy , there are proposals for an autonomy understood in all its anthropological integrity , which from a protagonism of the human, is committed and always projects towards the common, while being able to cope with the technosystem’s devastating consumerism and its deontologized proposals of ethics and bioethics .
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Noguera Pardo, C. (2019). Liquid Biolaw: The Unbearable Lightness of the Post-Modern Age. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_10
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