ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the current state of the law regarding the life sciences advances, but rather with the conceptual and evaluative problems that bioscience presents to lawmakers. Throughout most of history, law was alleged to be God-given or divinely inspired and among many peoples expressed a communal consensus sanctified by tradition. Law and policy regarding acceptable risk have been thrown into confusion by the inability of society to reach a consensus on criteria to reconcile the benefits of advances in the life sciences with the enlargement of individual or collective human rights. Law extends to a large number of matters in human affairs beyond the scope of science. Efforts to deduce principles of law and ethics from observed nature are as old as political philosophy, but such inferences do not provide an adequate theoretical foundation for the concept of biocracy.
