New Technologies

Abstract

Abstract Those of us who became involved in bioethics in the 1970s heard a certain message repeated ad nauseam. It seemed to assume qualities of a ritualistically invoked mantra. As one of the two major bioethics think tanks dating from those days already has a mantra named after it, I will call this mantra the “Hastings mantra.”1 The Hastings mantra has two parts: • The development of novel medical technologies confronts us with ethical challenges of a sort never before encountered. • It is vitally important that we address those emerging ethical challenges pro-actively, before the technology has come into wide- spread use. (The mantra seldom proceeds to answer the logical follow-up question, “Or else what?” since one cannot provide any very long list of technologies that were not put into use merely because pro-active bioethical analysis objected.)

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