The recent, extremely dynamic development of modern methods of biotechnological manipulation of genes, including human germline genes, presents new challenges to philosophers and especially bioethicists with unprecedented urgency. Until recently, many of these issues have been the subject of science fiction, and neither biologists nor bioethicists have expected them to be occurring now rather than in the distant future. It can be assumed that germline gene editing (together with progress in understanding of the human genome) will bring in the near future empirical knowledge, which will put the current philosophical concepts of human nature (based primarily on the speculative philosophical tradition) to the test.
Clifford D. Simak’s fixup novella City (1952) should be re-read as one of the first pieces of post-humanist science-fiction writing. This article argues that naming the book after the first story, and not after the fourth one, “Desertion”, was misleading because the book is not one of the “urban science-fiction stories”. City rather explores what would happen if people had the opportunity of instantly entering paradise (Nick Bostrom’s “post-human mode of being”), even at the cost of deserting the human body. A further hypothesis suggested here is that John W. Campbell, the founding father of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, initially refused to publish “Desertion” and never published City’s final story, “The Simple Way”, in his iconic Astounding Science Fiction magazine, because the post-humanist character of these stories contradicted his “classical” view of science fiction.
Before we start to think about the universal and global bioethical norms, we have to ask, whether we really need them. In this paper, we bring three examples to demonstrate the need for a global regulation in the biomedicine. The first example shows how the Internet facilitates the human organs and embryos market to boom. The second example focuses on global aspects of a biopiracy and the third one on a female genital mutilation (FGM), which points to the conflict between the universalistic approach and the principles of the multiculturalism. In conclusion we shortly discuss the conceptual problems of the ongoing process of a global bioethics forming itself as an extension of the UN universal human rights.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.