by Valerie Syverson

Created on: February 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Paracelsus's homunculi and Asimov's robots: the laboratory ethics of personhood and artificial life in medieval and modern thought.

What is the most important thing about living beings? This question, abstract and philosophical as it sounds, has direct applicability to questions of bioethics and roboethics in the modern world. Genetic engineering, in a sometimes spectacular fashion, breaches the boundary between real and artificial creatures. The FDA, despite pleas from consumers, has proven completely unable to come up with a definition for "natural". (12) Even the question Do clones have souls?, meaningless as it may sound to those outside the traditional metaphysical idiom, troubles many when they consider questions of stem-cell research or cloning. Those who think further to the future ponder the logic of digital intelligence, the question of whether hypothetical advanced computer intelligences can and should be considered the same as human ones. Depending on the perspective, the potential products of science's advance can embody either humanist progress and the possibility of eliminating poverty and disease or an inevitable march toward any particular sort of posthuman dystopia. In either case, the ethical quagmire of identity and souls and fundamental rights cannot be avoided when considering the issues raised by the near-inevitable relentless creation and refinement of scientific methods which continue to transcend, as they have in every era, the comfortable categories of human experience as we know it.

The ethical and philosophical questions raised by the spectre of artificial life and artificial intelligence are more-or-less as follows:
1) By what criteria may we differentiate a living creature from a nonliving creature?
2) By what criteria may we define and recognise intelligence?
3) What inherent rights are to be afforded to a living being?
4) What inherent rights do we ascribe to an intelligent being?
5) How, if at all, are natural and artificial creatures qualitatively different?
These same questions have been equally pressing since people began seriously considering and debating the possibility of creating life through laboratory or engineering processes.
The question of whether it was either possible or ethically justifiable for human efforts to generate life from nonlife was just as immediate and vital a question to the philosophers of antiquity and the alchemists of the Middle Ages as it is to today's genetic engineers and neural-computation programmers.

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