ABSTRACT
I agree, but argue that we should do so slowly, for both obvious practical reasons and less obvious philosophical reasons. The most obvious reason for caution is that we do not yet know enough to be able to, say, clone human beings safely, without severe risk of producing deformities, for instance. The less obvious reason for caution is that in unsettling traditional conceptions of what human life is we are, potentially, upsetting the whole applecart of ethics and respect for human life. Roughly speaking, it is up to us how we define human life and human rights. These are not scientific or wholly objective questions. But if we change our definitions too quickly or too often then they are unlikely to be accepted or to become entrenched in our behaviour. In Wittgensteinian terms, if we change the human life form too drastically, we risk undermining our form of life and the whole underpinnings of our ethics. (What would become of humanism, for instance, if our conception of humanity changed radically?) There is a danger of creating a moral vacuum, or at least a moral state worse than the one we have now. In reality this danger is not too great, but this is thanks in large part to a natural conservatism. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, Michael Thompson, and certain communitarian theorists (Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Patrick Devlin), I will argue that the fear of playing God is a useful brake on what might otherwise be a headlong rush into a new age for both ethics and technology.
