Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine

Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering, and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatic stance for studying the making of values in society, which means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals, and publics regularly do to define what counts as proper conduct, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing. Exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine, this volume features in-depth studies ranging from how zoos make animal value to how health-care administrators attempt to engineer fair and efficient health-care markets. The concluding chapter proposes the word valuography to indicate an empirically oriented research programme into the simultaneous making and intertwining of many different values. This research programme is based on the idea of taking values as something to be understood and examined as enacted, ordered, and displaced in various practices rather than as transcendental entities that impinge themselves upon action. Three areas of concern are specifically highlighted as warranting such a research programme within the realm of the life sciences and medicine: how stakes are made; the intertwining of values and the epistemic; and the relationships between economic and other values.

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Dussauge, Isabelle, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, eds. 2015. Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199689583.001.0001