Department of Critical & Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia

Ravi Glasser-Vora is a PhD candidate in the Department of Critical & Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His research is concerned with the impact of an ethics of informed consent on health technologies and medical practice. He has previously presented papers on circumcision & the anti-communitarianism of a neonatal right to bodily integrity and Foucault’s archaeology of medical perception & the birth of informed consent.

After World War Two and through the second half of the 20th century, primarily in response to the grand projects and fantasies of biological eugenics, free informed consent has come to be regarded as a necessary condition for the ethical and legal practice of biological research on human subjects and the use of medical and enhancement technologies. Legal precedents and policies in many countries have established the default concept of consent as the basic right of the patient or research participant to be provided with all relevant information about the risks and likelihoods of benefits by the doctor or researcher. Informed consent acted as a provisional moratorium on biological eugenics because eugenics sought to refine and effect human biology in ways that were beyond individual consent.

This paper investigates the continuities and breaks between eugenics and contemporary techniques of human enhancement. In both public discourse and academic work such debates often centre on whether it is legitimate to write off eugenics as a pseudoscience, while contemporary genetic technologies and study can be preserved as legitimate based on their ability to empirically see and test human inheritance. By examining the historical role of individual rights in determining the interventions of the human biological sciences, this paper, instead, moves the debate to the social organisation of human enhancement technologies. It argues that precisely where individual informed consent becomes insufficient to authorise the effects of contemporary enhancement and treatment technologies, new kinds of sociality are developing around the proliferating categories of biomedical classification that both reiterate and challenge the old models of eugenic hygiene.