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Introduction: Biotechnology and Ethics
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13146 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
236 Words |
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The Modern Thought section this month deals with sociobiology and biotechnology and the ethical implications of both. Various views of the role of biotechnology, the value of bioethics, and the uses of institutional psychiatry are presented, with no attempt to pass judgment on the moral and social questions being addressed. Rather, we have tried to underscore the wide range of views on these questions and the need for informed discussion. Some argue that these differences are derived from the conflict between a materialistic, mechanistic conception of human nature and other outlooks opposed to this still-prevalent view among Western intellectuals. Significantly, however, even among scientific materialists, differences have arisen--between the egalitarian materialists of the Left and the psychobiological materialists of the Right. While the majority of materialists remain environmental determinists and envisage the end of the sexual and social distinction in a "scientifically" planned future, other self-described materialist are more skeptical of such planning. The latter consider human nature genetically fixed and treat biology as destiny. For all the advances in biological research and biotechnology, the responses to scientific breakthroughs are still reducible to basic interpretations of human nature. These interpretations go back into the distant past and can already be discerned in the debates between Platonists and Epicureans. The present arguments about the uses and implications of scientific research continue to combine the new and the very old.
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