Whereto speculative bioethics? Technological visions and future simulations in a science fictional culture.

This article critically examines the development and current state of speculative bioethics (bioethics discourse concerned with future technologies) as reflecting an intensifying science fictionality, a cognitive/perceptual mode in which the imagined future begins to exert increasing degrees of influence on the present, culminating in a collapse of distance between the two. Future technologies thereby come to be viewed as generating practical ethical issues that need to be addressed well in advance of their arrival. Although this appears to be a prudent effort, it actually bypasses the present as a site of moral agency and locates ethics within a simulation of the imagined future. A constructive form of speculative bioethics must be able to critically assess visions of technological futures if it is to function as an ethics that is of and for the present. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/.