ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim, in one of his Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (Mannheim, 1952), wrote about two cultural ways of approaching a problem. He observed that when one mentioned the word ‘problem’ to a European, he treated it as a riddle, an exercise in metaphysics, a question that you unravel again and again, whereas when one suggested the same word to an American, he reached for his toolbox. For him, a problem was something that needed a technological solution. These two perspectives get repeated in the literature. In the debate on life-enhancing technologies, one senses a tension between an America at one end, bristling with technological promise, and a UK/Europe seeded with philosophical doubt. Any third group, with, say, a South Asian or African perspective, needs to add a different view to the debate.
