Love, Yiddish and the Problem of Bioethics
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To think about ethics necessarily involves thinking about where lines should be drawn — which actions are right and which are wrong. For bioethical inquiry, which considers the moral questions raised by biomedical science and biotechnology, it might seem that a natural place to start would be to draw a line around action itself, dividing science into a theoretical and contemplative component on the one hand, and an experimental and applied component on the other. Such a distinction would aim to respect the liberal democratic value of free inquiry, while reserving the right to intervene at the point at which inquiry seeks to employ unethical practice.
Of course, separating scientific theorizing from experimentation is hardly simple. Theoretical advance tends to be intertwined with experimentation, rather than strictly prior to it. Furthermore, one of the distinguishing features of modern science is its tendency to depreciate traditional distinctions between theory and practice, knowledge and power, speech and deed. Knowledge, according to modern science, becomes know-how, in the precise sense that one does not have knowledge of whatsomething is unless one knows how to make it. An ethics that takes its bearings from the putative distinction between theory and practice is therefore bound to prove unsatisfactory in addressing ethical problems unique to the modern scientific age.
Bioethics at its best is not, in any event, concerned primarily with actions themselves, but rather with the meaning of actions — that is, with the kind of thinking about the world that actions both reflect and reinforce. For instance, in the case of embryonic stem cell research, bioethics seeks to address not only the potential injustice done to embryos destroyed, but also the damage done to the soul of the destroyers: what might be the effects on how we regard human life (at any stage), not only from such destruction, but from our convincing ourselves that it is a morally weightless act?