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Section Information for Spring 2019
You live at a unique point in history, when our scientific prowess—our ability to interfere with and manipulate the forces of nature—has far outstripped our moral dialogue concerning what we should or should not do or how we ought to go about doing it. In fact, our ability to change and even design the conditions of our own and others’ lives have progressed so rapidly that it’s not clear how (or perhaps even if) our traditional moral theories—developed under very different circumstances—straightforwardly apply.
Morally speaking, the human conversation is playing catch-up to the technological one. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Humans have initiated the sixth (and most dramatic) great extinction, even as we foster medical miracles and toy with de-extinction. We’ve wreaked ecological destruction on a scale that threatens the entire biosphere, at the same time that we’re changing conditions to allow life to flourish in new ways and locations, and even as we realistically contemplate the biological colonization of other planets. Among ourselves, we’ve long since left behind the pressures of natural selection and now we wrestle over new ways of reproducing, enhancing, and killing ourselves in an era of not only designer babies but of designer selves.
This course is about wrestling with the deeply moral issues related to health and medical practice, including issues of creation, death, and personal agency in an era of hyper-technological change.
PHIL 309 DL3 is a distance education section.
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Credits: 3
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