Technological mediation of empathetic human-animal relations through gene editing technologies

Abstract

With the rise of genome editing, several possibilities to efficiently alter so-called farm animals arose which also gave room to ethical concerns. This paper aims to contribute to broadening the ethical debate revolving around such technologies by combining care ethics and postphenomenology. Care ethics highlights the importance of empathy in moral decisions and investigates mechanisms of bypassing and overriding empathy. Meanwhile, postphenomenology can explain how technologies can shape humans’ perception of the world including nonhuman animals and thereby their capacity to empathise. In this paper we investigate to what extent gene editing technologies mediate breeders’ and geneticists’ perception of nonhuman animals.