Resumen de The in-human capital. Bioethics versus "clinical labor"
Since the birth of bioethics, a new situation has been consolidated; it emerges sometimes confusedly in the lemma of “bioeconomy”, in which human bodies are registered both in techno-scientific research and in labor processes. In fact, in pharmacological trials with healthy subjects and in the field of reproductive technology, a new kind of workforce has arisen, now defined as “clinical labor”. An emblematic case is FIVET, its development has made it possible to separate the figure of the woman supplier of the gametes from that of the woman who become pregnant and gives birth, thereby giving rise to two different markets –one for oocytes and the other for surrogacy– marked by forms of social and racial discrimination. However, the contrast between solidarity (donation) and profit (exploitation) is not the only thing at stake. “Clinical labor”, in fact, derives in theoretical terms from the analyses of those economists who have enhanced the notion of human capital trying simultaneously to transform the most intimate bodily functions into “commercial goods and services”. Therefore, while from many parts the notion of human capital is looked on as the solution to problems, there is inadvertence as to how it institutes an ethics that completely rewrites the way of conceiving the relationship between health, illness and disability within the perspective of the entrepreneurial self. This paper, therefore, endeavors to investigate from a bioethical perspective the neoliberal literature on human capital, in order to avoid this from marking down the bioethical criteria of the biotechnical age to come
