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Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket

9 bytes added, 14:51, 12 November 2006
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Do we today have an available bioethics? Yes, we do, a bad one: what the Germans call <i>Bindestrich-Ethik</i>, or 'hyphen-ethics', where what gets lost in the hyphenation is ethics as such. The problem is not that a universal ethics is being dissolved into a multitude of specialised ones (bioethics, business ethics, medical ethics and so on) but that particular scientific breakthroughs are immediately set against humanist 'values', leading to complaints that biogenetics, for example, threatens our sense of dignity and autonomy.</p><p>The main consequence of the current breakthroughs in biogenetics is that natural organisms have become objects open to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is 'desubstantialised', deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called 'earth'. If biogenetics is able to reduce the human psyche to an object of manipulation, it is evidence of what Heidegger perceived as the 'danger' inherent in modern technology. By reducing a human being to a natural object whose properties can be altered, what we lose is not (only) humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right in <i>Our Posthuman Future</i>: the notion of humanity relies on the belief that we possess an inherited 'human nature', that we are born with an unfathomable dimension of ourselves.*
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