ABSTRACT
The new and envisioned technical and scientific opportunities to transgress the boundary between technology and life allow for innovation in many areas and have huge transformative potential. In particular, it is the breathtaking novelties provided by research fields such as human genome editing, enhancement, robotics, and synthetic biology that create open questions and normative uncertainty because living entities are affected. Therefore, ethical reflection, complemented by philosophical inquiry, is needed to support opinion forming in societies and political decision-making for funding and support, but also adequate regulation. Ethical reflection can be seen as a methodological approach which applies methods, procedures, instruments, and tools to discursively analyze and resolve conflicts arising from different moral assumptions in situations of normative uncertainty. Social coherence, including its morals and normative frameworks, is incomplete and unstable, a fragile mesh which is continually being challenged and threatened by social developments or by innovations and the conflicts resulting from them.
