During a recent colloquium I attended, Alisa Carse warned that biomedical technologies increasingly offer opportunities to ignore human vulnerability. After I told Vladimir de Thézier about her talk, he asked me to try to identify her as either a left-wing bioconservative or a technoprogressive. Since readers may be unfamiliar with these terms, I will offer an explanation. In the end, I had no good answer to offer to Vladimir’s question.

My own understanding of this distinction comes from Dale Carrico. His distinction between bioconservatism and technoprogressivism relies, as I understand, on his idea of “technoethical pluralism”. Very simply, bioconservatism happens when private moral belief ascription is employed to do the work of political belief ascription. Presumably, technoprogressivism is good because it keeps politics with politics and relegates morals and aesthetics to an arm’s length distance, to be enjoyed in situations that do not demand purely political protocols. Bioconservatism and variants of uncritical technophilia, like transhumanism, allegedly fail to do that.

The question about Carse then becomes: When Carse makes assertions about how we should live together with peers who hold competing aspirations — in other words, when Carse speaks in a distinctly political mode — then to what extent is she, in such moments, employing the criteria or protocols of moral belief? If the answer is, “a lot”, then we may call her “bioconservative”. If the answer is, “not so much”, then we may call her “technoprogressive”. (There are many other important criteria for these categories, of course.) For the moment, I believe this concept facilitates a useful way of thinking about technodevelopmental politics. Incidentally, however, Dale more recently rejected “technoprogressive” as a useful term because it has been stolen.

In any case, when I listen to or read a person like Carse for the first time, I am generally disinterested in this kind of analytic, get-to-the-top-of-it, fit-it-into-the-pattern kind of thinking. I do care very much about Carse’s place in Carrico’s schematic, but at such an early stage of trying to empathize with a person whose work I know so little of, I am not quite ready to assign her to a category. I hope to become much more familiar with her work later on.