The Machine in the Garden of Desire

摘要

At the end of their article, Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu (2014) argue that commenters need to take seriously the moral status of the project, and suggest that it would be more productive to focus on the ends for. which biotechnologies may be used, rather than the means or the complexities of contemporary culture. We argue that serious moral investigation of the potential therapeutic interventions is not possible if we omit the role of culture in producing the very moral dilemmas raised by scientific and technological "innovations" or start with simplistic assumptions about users and ends. In our brief commentary, we focus on two of the false analogies and assumptions the authors make with respect to the imagined technology and its potential users.