'Get a life.': An anthropological assessment of public bioethical debate

Public bioethical debates are dominated by formalized medico-scientific discourses based on normative judgments about health and disease. A chief consequence of this circumstance is that the polar opposition between health and disease, lying at the heart of conventional modern biomedical discursive practices, has also become central to the field of public bioethical debates. However, this thesis argues that the concepts of health and disease have determined the corporeal norm and ideal through which reproductive and genetic technologies are justified. That is to say that the goal of eradicating 'disease,' which is the stated goal of medical practice and public health policy, only further reinscribes an idealistic notion of the 'healthy body' in the normative sphere. An anthropological analysis of the normative implications of the dominance of biomedical models of health and disease contributes a counter-discourse that highlights the normative and idealistic judgments and the goals of reproductive and genetic technologies. Thus, this thesis argues that the public bioethical field needs to consider becoming more interdisciplinary in its structure when assessing the implications of the use of reproductive and genetic technologies in contemporary society. This might facilitate corrections of the normative myopia that characterizes the public bioethical field today.