Biocitizenship

The emergence of biomedical technologies in societies with the wide variety of demand and supply of goods and services causes some consequences. The most important of them include assigning moral values to hitherto non-moral categories, the emergence of new identities based on these values and market conditions, and the emergence of new worldviews and forms of social activism. Authors discerning these dependencies, such as Nikolas Rose or James Hughes, have proposed the concepts of genetic citizenship and cyborg citizen, respectively, simultaneously claiming that nowadays we face also the rise of new kinds of societies, e.g. democratic transhumanism. The aim of this article is reflection upon the new forms of citizenship based on the supposed legitimacy of these concepts. The particular attention is paid to the notion of biocitizenship, reflecting the dynamics of current political changes in the context of biomedicine development.