Abstract
The debate between conservatism and progressivism of human enhancement ethics is essentially a debate between normative ethics and naturalistic ethics. Naturalistic ethics has a problem of "naturalistic fallacy", and normative ethics also has a problem of "normative paranoea". The former is a historical limitation of human cognitive ability which can be gradually solved with the development of science and technology, while the latter is a self-righteous positioning error of anthropocentrism. Therefore, normative ethics should give way to naturalistic ethics, and accordingly conservatism of human enhancement ethics should give way to progressivism. A naturalistic research approach is needed for human enhancement ethics. This naturalistic approach regards man as a living system that realizes its pursuit of balance through survival and development. Freedom is the pursuit of the balanced state of the living system, while survival and development are the process of the realizing of this pursuit. Equality is the fact that living systems are identical to other living systems and thus have equal influence in the higher systems of which they are composed. Democracy is a high-level system composed of living systems in which the dominant power is in the hands of most subsystems rather than a few. This as a whole constitutes a kind of naturalistic or systematic axiology.
Highlights
With the development of science and technology, some disciplines such as physics and chemistry enter a bottleneck and develop slowly, the life science enters a explosion period and develops rapidly
People welcome the latest achievements of the development of life science, but the application of these achievements is strongly restricted by traditional ethical concepts and theories, which causes a lot of controversies
All of these controversies mainly focus on the ethical details arising from the application of life science and technology, while lack the deep axiological and philosophical thinking behind them
Summary
With the development of science and technology, some disciplines such as physics and chemistry enter a bottleneck and develop slowly, the life science enters a explosion period and develops rapidly. People welcome the latest achievements of the development of life science, but the application of these achievements is strongly restricted by traditional ethical concepts and theories, which causes a lot of controversies. All of these controversies mainly focus on the ethical details arising from the application of life science and technology, while lack the deep axiological and philosophical thinking behind them. It points out that the nature of conservatism is normative ethics and the nature of progressivism is naturalistic ethics, and advocates a progressive-naturalistic path of human enhancement ethics. This paper points out that this kind of progressive-naturalistic ethics is not anthropocentrism nor ecocentrism but living-system-centrism in between
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