Ethics governance, modernity and human beings' capacity to reflect and decide---a genealogy of medical research ethics in the UK and Singapore.

Reubi, David (2009) Ethics governance, modernity and human beings' capacity to reflect and decide---a genealogy of medical research ethics in the UK and Singapore. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This PhD thesis explores how bioethics has reconfigured the way we think about, discuss and govern the scientific and medical use of the human body in the UK and Singapore. The thesis starts by analysing the language, knowledge, institutions and mechanisms that allowed people to render intelligible and organise the medical use of the human body before the emergence of bioethics. Then, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose, the thesis examines and compares the conceptual, material and political conditions that made it possible, in both the UK and Singapore, to identify the medical use of human tissue as a 'problem of ethics' needing to be assessed and regulated. The thesis furthermore discusses a key component of bioethics - the procedure of informed consent - and analyzes how its use is reconfiguring subjectivities and contemporary notions of citizenship in both countries. On the basis of a systematic content analysis of key bioethics' journals from 1960 to the present and over twenty in-depth interviews with key experts in the field, the thesis makes two important findings. First, it explains how, in the UK, bioethical governance was developed to protect human beings from the dangers of modern science, while in Singapore it was introduced as part of the country's drive to be a modern and developed nation. Second, it argues that bioethical governance has brought into being, through its language, categories, procedures and experts, a new figure of the subject and citizen: the human being capable of reflecting and deciding on his or her own existence. These findings make an original contribution to (1) the sociological study of bioethics and the bioethical governance of the life sciences and (2) the literature on govern-mentality.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Health Sciences, Medical Ethics, Philosophy of Science
Sets:	Collections > ProQuest Etheses Departments > Sociology
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/2189

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