Il “pathos” della decisione: una lettura filosofica attraverso la generazione

Bioethical debates on the plan of removing the “casualty of origin” through genetic technology have raised the crucial issue of the place to be left to man’s autonomy in our techno-scientific era. However, in such philosophical debates, rarely grounded and often merely fantascientific, one fact clearly emerges: in the field of human reproduction there’s something that today, unlike in the past, may be at least partially determined by technology. So, today we are facing with a broadening of the decision “space”. Now, to what extend does the link between responsibility-knowledge-decision function when it comes to human reproduction? The radical novelty of each newborn underlines the falseness of every expectation to plan a child, at the same time highlighting a fundamental feature of the human action. So, drawing from a bioethical analysis, this essay focuses on the relation between knowledge and decision in order to determine whether and to what extend are our decisions supported by an adequate knowledge as well as to test the assumption proposed by Derrida, according to which we truly decide only when we don’t know in advance what we should do or what is convenient for us to do. Is it true that knowledge as such could revoke our possibility to decide? What does the unpredictable nature of each newborn teach us about our own decisions? These are some of the questions we would like to answer in the present essay.