The transformation of history begins with the history of transformations.

Modern technology has introduced action of such moral scale, objects and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them.

Introduction

In February 1997, Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute introduced Dolly, the recently cloned ewe, to the world. President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II responded with caution to the success of this project and took initiatives to prevent any future attempts to clone human beings. The President and the Pope were, of course, responding from within two quite different moral universes. Clinton, the classical sophist, tailored his response to the dictates of his pollsters and spin-doctors, and fashioned his rhetoric to appeal to the dominant mood and fears of the American people. The Pope responded from within the long tradition of natural law theory in which human beings are morally subject to the natural order of things ordained by God. Both were responding on the basis of what can be argued to be a scientifically outmoded cosmology.

All moral orientations and theories arise from one or another conception of the structure and operation of the universe. We call the theoretical account of the nature of the universe “cosmology.” The morality of society changes when the cosmology of a society changes. According to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, shards of older moral traditions persist, sometimes for many centuries, emerging to challenge the validity of any new morality, even though these traditions have outlived the context within which they originally made sense.