ABSTRACT
A critical ethics of care must address the role of the rhetoric of care in the subjectivation of neoliberal citizens. This chapter focuses on security and care in relation to affective structures underpinning the regulation of biotechnologies, in particular synthetic biology. It argues that both self-betterment and insurance are framed as rational risk-prevention strategies properly undertaken by homo prudens and both incorporate fantasies and affective yearnings central to a critical ethics of care. P. Rabinow defines equipment as 'a set of truth claims, affects and ethical orientations, designed and combined in a practice'. The chapter describes a critical ethics of care should make a valuable contribution to this new equipment. It focuses on the plethora of ethical questions it illuminates over the biopolitics of which forms of life should be prioritized, how issues of access to resources are to be managed and the use of the rhetoric of care and security to do so.
