Bioconservadorismo

The word names an objection, not a party. The shared point is distrust of techniques that would redesign the human body: genetic manipulation beyond therapy, enhancement, reproductive cloning, and the transhumanist promise to leave the human condition behind. Leon Kass chaired the United States President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 and argued for limits on enhancement. Michael Sandel, in The Case Against Perfection, treats the wish to design one's children as a failure of humility, not only as a risk. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future (2002), asked for regulation of biotechnology from a liberal argument about human nature. Jürgen Habermas tied the same caution to the equality of persons who were not designed by others. It is not one membership.

The political range is wide on purpose. Some bioconservatives are religious and read the body as given. Others are secular, environmental, or writing from disability criticism, and refuse the idea of a human being corrected by design. What joins them is a defense of the natural as a moral category, not a tax program. Bioluddism, a broad rejection of technique, is a different claim: bioconservatism usually accepts medicine and tools and concentrates the critique on redesigning the living. Transhumanists, among them Nick Bostrom, answer that the objection rests too much on intuition and that genetic modification can be health care. This page records both sides. It picks neither.

It is a different claim from generic conservatism, and a different word from environmental conservation. Conservatism, on this site's list, defends inherited institutions, order, and property. A person can be bioconservative and liberal on the economy, or environmentalist and culturally on the left. The label fixes no party, church, or tax rate. It is also not a recommendation. Defining the word is not an invitation to block a therapy.

Technology runs from Acceleration to Bioconservative. The Bioconservative pole on this test is a wide end: slow down, regulate, and keep human nature and the environment as they are. The statements that land there mix topics such as genetic engineering, automation, and the pace of technique. A score toward Bioconservative describes answers. It is not a finding that the person holds the philosophical doctrine, and a score toward Acceleration is not a transhumanist membership.

Culture runs from Progressive to Traditional, and Religion from Irreligious to Religious. Some people who use the label sit toward Traditional and Religious. Others do not. Habermas and Fukuyama write the argument without asking for a clerical state. The test can show those combinations. It cannot add the two axes and call the sum bioconservadorismo. Power, from Security to Freedom, is not fixed either: regulating a technique is not, by itself, a surveillance program.

The match uses only four axes, Economy, Power, Intervention, and Culture, and 38 positions published by the open-source 12axes project. Bioconservadorismo is not among them. The RightValues quiz hosted on this site uses the word as a band on its own technology axis. That is a different question bank. It is not a 12 Axes coordinate, and it is not copied here. The nearest published names, by meaning and not by a new calculation, are conservatism, liberalism, and technocracy. The charts below are their real positions.