Abstract

The growing ability to modify the biological structure of living organisms afforded today by progress in biology produces understandable unease. This unease is expressed, among other things, in argumentation based on “responsibility for future generations”. This argumentation obliges us to be concerned with the fate of our species. Such concern has negative as well as positive dimensions. The former consists of preventing the birth of handicapped persons or limiting the population; the latter consists of creating new structures. Gen-ethics, a new subdiscipline of bioethics that addresses the above argumentation explicitly, considers responsibility for the number and identity of future human beings; this responsibility is seen to rest upon the present generation. Since future generations do not yet exist, this responsibility seems to have as its object not concrete persons, but the environmental and social context that we will leave for future generations