How biotechnology regulation sets a risk/ethics boundary

In public debate over agricultural biotechnology, at issue has been its self-proclaimed aim of further industrializing agriculture. Using languages of 'risk', critics and proponents have engaged in an implicit ethics debate on the direction of technoscientific development. Critics have challenged the biotechnological R&D agenda for attributing socio-agronomic problems to genetic deficiencies, while perpetuating the hazards of intensive monoculture. They diagnosed ominous links between technological dependency and tangible harm from biotechnology products. In response to scientific and public concerns, the European Community enacted precautionary legislation for the intentional release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In its implementation, choices for managing and investigating biotechnological risk involve an implicit environmental ethics. Yet the official policy language downplays the inherent value judgments, by portraying risk regulation as a matter of 'objective' science. In parallel with safety regulation, the state has devised an official bioethics that judges where to 'draw the line' in applying biotechnological knowledge, as if the science itself were value-free. Bioethics may also judge how to 'balance' risks and benefits, as if their definition were not an issue. This form of ethics serves to compensate for the unacknowledged value-choices and institutional commitments already embedded in R&D priorities. Thus the state separates 'risk' and 'ethics', while assigning both realms to specialists. The risk/ethics boundary encourages public deference to the expert assessments of both safety regulators and professional ethicists. Biotechnology embodies a contentious model of control over nature and society, yet this issue becomes displaced and fragmented into various administrative controls. At stake are the prospects for democratizing the problem-definitions that guide R&D priorities. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.