ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relation between morality and ethics, and the relation between culture and ethics. It is a sort of intellectual history, combined with present-day ethical concerns. The chapter provides the cultural backgrounds of the biotechnology debate. Biotechnology's problematic status is partly the result of its discord with some of the most basic and widespread assumptions held in Western culture, concerning nature and natural beings. Man-induced genetic modifications, seen as changes in the fundamental 'structure' of nature, are, in this view, considered by many as violations of the 'natural integrity' of these living organisms. Ethics comes in when one go against the finality, the telos or the destiny of an organism. The basic idea of intrinsic value is that things and living organisms possess a value, a worthiness independent from whatever contingent desires we or other valuing organisms could have. The cosmological perspective with its biological implications is intimately and ultimately linked with its religious origins.
