Our Endangered Garden
107
A second view says that the moral task is to on this planet. This ethics is usually found among religious and non-religious people, often conservatives. Ethically speaking, this position is deontological: Ethics for the Reverence of Lifereverence life as it has developed
what is good and right is defined in terms of duties to moral laws and others, not consequences. The ethics of the reverence of life asserts that human existence, the world. Technology is a tool rather than a worldview. The ethics thereby humanum, is given by God and reflects God’s image in the
misses the depth of the challenge as well as the positive side of logicusform. Morality is not about making life better by overcoming pain, sorrow, and loss, but protecting it from destruction, even the destruction caused by. The outlook is hypertheistic, even if not explicitly cast in religious homo techno-
human action. This widespread ethical position, including secular people and religious leaders from popes to Buddhist monks like Hanh, denies the tech-nological imperative in favor of insisting on the intrinsic sanctity of life. For theistic traditions, the idea is that moral goodness is about discerning God’s
will for us and then living in conformity with God’s will. Insofar as human beings are created in the image of God, we ought not to seek to alter or change that image. Limits must be placed on experimentation when those limits are intrinsic to human nature. To deny those limits is, for this position,
immoral insofar as it leads to actions that deny the duty to respect the lives of others. There are some things we should never do, and these are rooted in the inviolability of life.For the ethics of the reverence of life, practical issues are of various kinds.
Will the procedures respect the sanctity of life as it is given, and are they con-sistent with a range of other life-issues? Are scientific procedures and results undertaken, attained, and distributed in a fair manner? Are the procedures part of the formation of a “culture of life” in which other goods – like sci-
entific research and economic goods – are put to the service of what fosters life and cares for the least advantaged? If space allowed, we could go through more specific questions surrounding ethical analysis of genetic technology.For our purposes, the most crucial thing to see is that this ethics requires
belief in the sanctity of human life. Some thinkers, like Pope John Paul II, Paul Ramsey, and others, ground this claim in their religious convictions and hope to show how those convictions can resonate in public debate. Other thinkers, philosophers, and theologians argue that ideas like the sanctity of life
are grounded in human freedom, consciousness, and relation to others. Human beings are cultural creatures, to be sure. But we are also the members of a species with attributes we value. (^24) And still others – and this includes some