nalist, Jean-Yves Nau, praises the French system of blood transfusions because it was
able to move quickly to a state of alert with regard to an infectious agent called “TTV”:
“The rapidity with which French health authorities reacted this time afterLancetcame
out is markedly different from the procrastinations of 1985” (the year of the HIV/AIDS
contamination of the blood supply). And he adds: “Today, scientific uncertainties no
longer lead to inertia on the part of the responsible authorities. The new virus thus
bears witness, thirteen years later, to the ground that has been covered in the service of
public health” (p. 6). On the crucial importance of the precautionary principle, see
Dratwa 2003.
- Such is the moral and civic limit of a major study by Boltanski and Thévenot
1991—which, scandalously, is not yet available in English. The hypothesis of common
humanity creates an impasse for the most important of moral requirements: it leaves
open the question of what constitutes or does not constitute humanity. - If the intolerable role of the committed intellectual speaking in the name of Sci-
ence and authorized by Science to short-circuit politics is fortunately disappearing,
moralists rediscover a function that needs neither Science nor the prophetic tone nor
illusions of unveiling to be accomplished; see Walzer 1988. - On this obligation, see Despret 2002. The ethics of discussion (once it has been
extended to nonhumans and humans alike), the obligation to consult those about
whom one is speaking, depend not only on morality but also on administration, the
guardian of procedure, as we shall see in Chapter 5. - We can understand the signal weakness of Ferry’s attack on ecology (Ferry
1995): if he had succeeded in revising the ancient distinction between moral subjects
and inert objects, he would only have arrived at immorality! - In Chapter 5 we shall find another professional role, that of administrator, but
its usefulness cannot appear before we have defined the power to follow up that is
charged with describing the learning curve of the collective. - I have simply taken up the same positions that they occupied in Figure 3.1.
I am using in a contradictory sense the expressions “upper house”—normally used
for senates—and “lower house”—normally used for houses of representatives—spe-
cifically in order to recall the incongruous and provisional character of such labels. By
playing on the legal and scientific terms, I could have called the former the “house of
claims” and the latter the “house of causes.” - We are also far from the maintenance of the pluralism that accepts diversity of
opinions only against a background of an indisputable common world made up of a
rather badly composed mix of nature and human rights. The upper house will take the
exploration of multiplicity much further than any “respect for the pluralism of opin-
ions,” because it will run the risk precisely of not taking them to be mere opinions
(Stengers 1997b); conversely, the lower house will seek unity much more assiduously
than people try to do in regimes that claim to be pluralist. - On this sort of “extended peer review,” see Ravetz 1983.
- This is the key feature of the so badly misunderstood notion of constructivism;
see Latour 2003. - On this remarkable example, see Western 1997 and Thompson 2002.
- From this viewpoint, the human sciences have everything to learn from the ex-
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