The Politics of Valuation

Value Disjunctures in Bioethics and Fetal Research During the 20th Century

Abstract

This article has two aims: First, the article proposes to sensitize our analytical minds to what we dub “value disjunctures”—clashes, in practice, between different valuations. The article proposes a strategy for analyzing value disjunctures—paying attention to how different value worlds de-cohere. We ask: What happens if we highlight the periods and situations when versions of the world are pulled apart? Second, the article aims to highlight how today’s bioethics can neither be read as a tale of democratization of ethics, nor as a tale solely driven by ethical disasters. What we offer is a story of how the bioethical yardsticks of today were established as dominant in fetal research. The sensitizing concepts we propose shine a light on how bioethicalization is a historical process that intertwines what is good, with what objects are seen as important, as well as how these objects are understood. Bioethicalization is a struggle about valuations, which yardsticks for the good that become salient, but also a struggle about which objects should be valued, as well as the nature of these valued objects. This article highlights how all matters of value—the ethical, the epistemic, and the economic—are intertwined with changing ontologies, thus highlighting how ontologies and values are enacted together.