Ricerc@Sapienza

The research project FoLAB, A Form of Life Approach to Bioethics, aims at shifting the bioethical debate and the debate on issues related to life from a theoretical, principled based to an ethnographical, form of life approach.
Traditionally issues in bioethics are dealt with through a value conferring model. The discussion is on the moral notions and principles which are taken to be relevant in order to be applied to a given circumstance. Circumstances are described in factual terms asking the details to the sciences and are considered to be devoid of any conceptual articulation, of any form which instructs moral thought. Diverse lines such Utilitarian and Kantian theories are examples of such an approach. Against this family of views it can be argued that life has a form found in the ways in which beings persist in living organized in bundles of relations of dependancy, coexistence and meaning. Questions about value and normativity can be dealt with within the conceptual articulation offered by the shape taken by life in specific circumstances.
Traditional issues such as the new ways of being brought to life and ending one's life and new issues related to how human life is transformed in its intimacy and autonomy by new technologies and how the concept of life itself tends to migrate to robots should be treated from within the forms of life which such new circumstances contribute to create. A shift is required from the approach which applies a theory to a circumstance of life to the one which works from within the normativity offered by life itself. FoLAB indicates the project of exploring the details of how life persists and hosts spaces of creativity and critical reflection. An ethnography of ordinary life, explored especially within popular culture, is required in order to ground normative and critical reflection within the details of life.