Abstract

The Human Genome Project and genetic enhancement technologies raise some crucial philosophical and ethical questions, including questions concerning the nature of human being and the purpose of medicine. These questions, in my opinion, should not be ignored. Standard bioethics is incapable of dealing with these kinds of questions because it participates, to one degree or another, in what has come to be known as the Baconian project. ;It is my argument that, those who are associated with the development of biotechnologies ought to resist the Baconian project that is embedded in standard bioethics for three primary reasons. First, the Baconian project is largely responsible for the marginalization of the crucial ethical questions raised by new biotechnologies, such as the human nature question and the purpose of medicine question. ;Second, the Baconian project is based on a mechanistic view of the human being, a view that is inadequate because it fails to take fully into account the issues concerning personal identity, free agency, and the moral significance and vulnerability of the human body. Third, the Baconian project and its quest to relieve the human condition gives an extraordinary amount of power to medicine, resulting in the "medicalization" of many conditions which, at least from an Aristotelian standpoint, are beyond the proper end of medicine. ;Those who are associated with the development of new biotechnologies ought to embrace what I refer to as an Aristotelian-inspired ethic of vulnerability. An ethic of vulnerability has four primary features: It holds that ethical reflection begins with the agent and not with an "ethical dilemma," thus making the fundamental ethical and philosophical questions raised by new biotechnologies central rather than peripheral; It is based on a substance view of the human being, which adequately accounts for personal identity and free agency; It sees the body not as an obstacle, but as an integral part of a morally worthy life; It views biotechnology as an enterprise made to serve human beings and their moral projects