On the sanctity of nature

Hasting Center Report

Volumn 30, Issue 5, 2000, Pages 16-23

  Kaebnick, Gregory E ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BIOETHICS; HUMAN; NATURAL SCIENCE; PHILOSOPHY;

BIOETHICS; HUMANS; NATURE; PHILOSOPHY;

EID: 0034277857     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527882     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Splicing Life: A Report on the Social and Ethical Issues of Genetic Engineering with Human Beings (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 54-56.
2. A. M. Capron, "The Impact of the Report, Splicing Life," Human Gene Therapy 1 (1990): 69-71, at 70.
3. Oddly enough, given the natural skepticism we are likely to have for anything labeled "algeny," the term was actually coined by someone who approves of it - the biologist Joshua Lederberg. Mary Midgley has brought this to my attention. In this same vein, Lee Silvers most recent book is titled Remaking Eden, which he evidently thinks is a good idea.
4. J. Rifkin, The Biotech Century (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), p. 33.
5. A. Gewirth, "Why Rights Are Indispensable," Mind 95 (1986): 329-44, at 338.
6. If abortion saves the woman's life, then of course it avoids a harm to the biological creative force as well. What tips the scales in favor of intervening and saving the woman's life instead of the fetus's is that it also avoids a harm to the human contribution. Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
7. D. Nelkin and L. Andrews, "Homo Economicus: The Commercialization of Body Tissue in the Age of Biotechnology," Hastings Center Report 28, no. 5 (1998): 30-39.
8. C. Elliott, A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 25-48.
9. G.J. Annas, "Why We Should Ban Human Cloning," NEJM 339 (1998): 122-25;
10. H. Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 162-63.
11. A. Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 28, 51-57.
12. A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966; New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 138-39.
13. Thus the claim that the sacred is "independent of human decisions and preferences" is a dicey matter. The independence of the sacred lies in the fact that if something is sacred, then it possesses value that does not refer to human states of affairs (as do respect for persons and the utilitarian principle) and does not reflect either individual choice or a collective vote (as might, say, the judgment that ice cream is yummy). Something's being sacred is not experienced solely as resulting from human decisions and preferences.
14. S. Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983), p. 31.
15. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), § 217.
16. For a discussion and defense of this view of moral claims, see J. McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity, ed. T. Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985): 110-29;
17. and D. Wiggins, "A Sensible Subjectivism?" in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
18. S. Toulmin, "Casuistry and Clinical Ethics," in A Matter of Principles: Ferment in U.S. Bioethics, ed. E. DuBose et al. (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 310-18, at 315.
19. E. Erde, "Studies in the Explanation of Issues in Biomedical Ethics: (II) On 'On Play[ing] God', Etc.," The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 14, no. 6 (1989): 593-615, at 594.