Our Endangered Garden
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and term of moral worth, of value. This means, second, that we can also speak of value as a means to some other end. My car has instrumental value to me insofar as it gets me to where I want to go. But what of human genes and instrumental value versus final value, meaning by this those things that we
body parts and euthanasia to get us what we want, say relief from pain? And what of ecosystems?because we Now we can can, we defineshould the issue before us. The technological imperative – – risks reducing everything to instrumental value,
to price, in the pursuit of technological goods as a final value. Actions and policies, forms of life and ecosystems, are then enfolded within the reach of human power conceived as a good-in-itself, a final value. This is the project of overhumanization. In the current situation it is extremely difficult to artic-
ulate and to defend a conception of worth that is not easily reduced to price or instrumental value. There is the increased willingness to assign a price to body parts, wetlands, air and water, and genetic advances to alter species. We are not, thankfully, quite to the point of the complete banishment of moral
argument about final or intrinsic value from the public arena – although we are on that path. That is one reason to insist that social and political policy remain open to moral criticism.We ought not to resist all forms of technology. That would be humanly
impossible and actually immoral. Still, people must morally assess the power at their disposal and how that power is to be used. With that insight we can now turn more directly to the debate about basic and natural goods in our global situation.
We have been sorting through a range of issues in trying to challenges involved in thinking about how to assess and rightly value the Mapping the Moral Landscape define the moral
garden, that is, the goods of natural life which human power can intervene to cultivate, change, and destroy. Let us now map some widespread argu-ments. The aim is to clarify the moral debate and to sort out what might be a properly theological humanist position.
One common ethical stance in the West holds that the moral task is to promote those aspects of life deemed most important and to counter or change what impedes life, (say) disease, physical and mental suffering. Ethics for the Enhancement of Life