Scientific Responsibility and Ethical Failure in Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) is usually discussed as an environmental parable or a warning about genetic engineering. This study takes a slightly different route and argues that the novel's real subject is the slow disappearance of moral accountability inside institutions that have convinced themselves accountability is unnecessary. Reading the text through Donna Haraway's (1991) cyborg theory, and in particular her insistence that technological hybridity carries an unavoidable demand for relational responsibility, the discussion shows that Atwood is less interested in technology as a threat than in what happens when the people responsible for technology stop asking whether they should use it. Crake, Jimmy, and Oryx each carry a piece of this argument: Crake as the scientist who mistakes design for morality, Jimmy as the witness who never quite manages to look away, and Oryx as the reminder that exploitation, once normalised, becomes almost impossible to name. Working closely with the text, the study traces this pattern of ethical failure through the corporate compounds, the biosecurity culture built on fear, the marketing of the BlyssPluss pill, and finally Crake's decision to end the human species in the name of improving it. What emerges is a novel less about apocalypse than about the ordinary, cumulative decisions that make apocalypse thinkable.

Keywords: Biotechnology, Cyber-Dystopia, Ethical Failure, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, Scientific Responsibility