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.)
Related Papers
- → Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today(2018)8 cited
- Mantras: Words of Power(1980)
- → Is this a mantra? mantra of(2009)
- The Cult of Gāyatrī: A Study(2021)
- → New Technologies(2009)