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Genetic Engineering and Environmental Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Andrew Dobson
Andrew Dobson
Affiliation:
Chair of the Politics Department at Keele University, Staffordshire, England.
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Extract

When God gave humankind dominion over the earth he may not have known exactly what we would be able to do with it. The technical capacities to which the production and reproduction of our everyday life have given rise have grown at an astonishing and, it seems, ever-increasing rate. The instruments that we use to do work on the world have become sharper and more refined, and the implications of human interventions in the nonhuman environment are much more far-reaching than could have been imagined even forty years ago. It has become something of a cliche to say that our technical abilities have outstripped the wisdom to know when, where, and how we should appropriately use them, but techniques such as genetic engineering invite the dusting-off of the cliche and the asking of the question implicit in it: We know we can splice genes, but should we splice them? We might of course come to the conclusion that we should only splice some of them some of the time, but even arriving at that conclusion presupposes that the ethical question has been asked and answered.

Type
Special Section: Alpha and Omega: Ethics at the Edges of Life
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 205 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

Notes

1. There is no need to distinguish between ethical and environmental-ethical for the moment.

2. To the extent that some scientific research is carried out ‘for its own sake’ this is an inaccurate formulation–but it will do for present purposes. In any case, discoveries made after research ‘for its own sake’ will often have practical implications, and so the ethical questions will arise at some point or other.

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30. As I pointed out at the beginning of this article.

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47. See note 37. Rolston, 1992:80.Google Scholar

48. See note 37. Rolston, 1992:76.Google Scholar

49. See note 32. Holland, 1990:170.Google Scholar

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52. See note 37. Rolston, 1992:85.Google Scholar

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66. I have already pointed out that Fox himself develops a more nuanced view than that suggested by this quotation.

67. Although of course these risks need also to be taken into account, and have been the subject of intense debate for as long as genetic engineering has been practised.

68. Holland, A, Chadwick, R. Better by design (unpublished). Advice to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Holland and Chadwick's remarks are here confined to species, but from an environmental ethical perspective they can be expanded to include ecosystems with little difficulty.Google Scholar

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