Radical Planetary Propositions and their Ethical Limits

Abstract

This paper examines a radical proposition for planetary futures: a collaboration between a group of synthetic biologists and a design collective interested in exploring the role of DNA as a digital storage and climate technology. Central to this collaboration is the use of speculation, both as an explicit design method and as an implicit technique used by synthetic biologists to imagine indeterminate future states. The paper highlights how biologists imagine such future states through contemporary limits and gaps in their understanding, and how such a practice inflects ethics as a particular kind of concern. Such an inflection, the paper suggests, cannot be considered an absence of ethics, but rather an ethics of absence: a means of doing ethical practice that puts doubt into abeyance and diminishes the role of ethics as a speculative force.  This, the paper argues, is a considerable problem for the role of speculation in imagining more radical planetary futures. Radical planetary propositions, need, the article suggests, far more radical ways of imagining future ethics.