Enabling Participation or Exclusion? New Technologies of Personhood and Responses from STS and Political Philosophy

• In Event: Creative Misfits - II: Creating Categories: Disability, Agency, and Identity

Abstract

The development of new technologies, especially in biomedical contexts, is often justified and promoted in terms of their hypothetical benefits for persons with illness or disability. Notably, these two target groups are not always well-distinguished. Research articles, press releases, and social media will highlight a technology as “assistive”, “restorative”, or as providing the user with unprecedented independence, productivity, or social participation. In general, these discourses overlap significantly with traditional philosophical standards for moral and political personhood (e.g. Dennett 1988). Simultaneously, scholars in (dis)ability studies have argued that common framings of technology are politically and culturally harmful; not all disabled people identify with a medical deficiency model, and the choice to label select technologies as assistive reveals implicit “ability expectations” of citizens (Wolbring and Diep 2016).

Mapping these conflicting sentiments, I use a co-productionist (Jasanoff 2004) framework to interpret new empirical findings in the context of emerging digital and biological technologies, including the results of a multidisciplinary deliberative workshop (“BCIs and Personhood”) held in 2018. Examining two case studies of brain-computer interfaces and multi-cellular engineered systems, I suggest that discourses and practices around emerging technology is an important site for the formation of the moral/political person and that STS has a important role in proactively excavating and evaluating these (dis)enfranchising processes. Such research does not undermine philosophy’s conceptual analysis of personhood, but rather complements it, identifying new or unacknowledged forms of injustice in society.

Author

• Matthew Sample, Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal