Ethics in the open: Applied ethics for lively worlds

Environmental ethics and bioethics have generated important interventions in applied ethics by promoting moral theories and practices that incorporate previously neglected entities, such as ecosystems and nonhuman animals. Nonetheless, traditional applied ethics methods rely upon two problematic assumptions not yet adequately addressed in environmental ethics and bioethics literatures: first, that morally considerable beings are discretely bounded and have a fixed moral status and, second, that moral theories can be calculatively applied to conflicts between these beings to produce normative obligations. However, as the importance of thick ecological relationships becomes ever more evident and experimental technologies that blur biological boundaries become ever more potent, it is increasingly untenable to assume that morally relevant differences and boundaries are stable and determinate. This work proposes that morally relevant differences and boundaries are only resolved from within historically contingent, material and discursive apparatuses and cannot be prefigured prior to ethical inquiries. This leaves the latter methodological assumption equally untenable---it is not possible to calculate moral obligations if the conditions of ethical relatings are specific to an epistemological and ontological apparatus. Thus, making use of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist science and technology studies literatures, this work advances a methodology that attends to the ethical stakes of epistemic and ontological entanglements of ecological and biotechnological worlds. This methodology is preferable because it allows for specific, material interventions into the open and on-going apparatuses that produce unstable and indeterminate differences and boundaries. Three case studies are presented as examples of this methodology: an account of human-grizzly bear encounters that considers the agency of grizzlies in the creation of boundaries between humans and bears; a critique of bioethics policies regulating human ova donation for stem cell research that establish an opposition between women's altruism and economic status; and an inquiry into the co-constitution of scientific practice and moral values in the creation of humanized mice for biomedical research. Each case study makes use of the theoretical tools described in the first chapter by proposing specific interventions into the epistemic, ontological, and ethical entanglements under consideration.