Aesthetic-Emotional Judgment: Ministers, Faith-Based Work, and Religious Services in the Church of Sweden

The previous chapter addressed how embryologists working inlaboratories in assisted fertilization clinics used perceptual-epistemological judgment to assess what embryos to select for the embryo transfer to the womb. The capacity of the embryologists was both a personal and entrenched and trained skill and a collective competence, developed and maintained through international agreements and local routines for jointly calibrating the assessment work across clinics. Perceptual-epistemological judgment is therefore recursively constituted both as an individual and a collective competence. In this chapter, the focus changes from visual inspection and scientific professional ideologies to less immediate and robust forms of judgment, namely what was addressed as aesthetic- emotional judgment in the first part of the book. While the work of embryologists is firmly anchored in a realist epistemology wherein the most qualitative embryos can in fact be selected, and the scientific challenge is therefore to decode the information displayed in the features of the embryos, aesthetic-emotional judgment belongs to an entirely different register of thinking wherein truths and beliefs are basically socially constructed and therefore open to negotiations and politics. Biological systems, embryologists and other scientists think, may reveal their inner workings through the use of carefully designed research methods.