Word: morale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Probably not. Instead, we'll reach again for a time-tested moral notion, one sometimes called the Golden Rule and which Immanuel Kant, the millennium's most meticulous moralist, gussied up into a categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; treat each person as an individual rather than as a means to some...
Under this moral precept we should recoil at human cloning, because it inevitably entails using humans as means to other humans' ends--valuing them as copies of others we loved or as collections of body parts, not as individuals in their own right. We should also draw a line, however fuzzy, that would permit using genetic engineering to cure diseases and disabilities (cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy) but not to change the personal attributes that make someone an individual (IQ, physical appearance, gender and sexuality...
...announcement in February 1997 of the birth of a sheep named Dolly, an exact genetic replica of its mother, sparked a worldwide debate over the moral and medical implications of cloning. Several U.S. states and European countries have banned the cloning of human beings, yet South Korean scientists claimed last month that they had already taken the first step. In the following essay for TIME, embryologist Wilmut, who led the team that brought Dolly to life at Scotland's Roslin Institute, explains why he believes the debate over cloning people has largely missed the point...
...laws requiring the sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to suffer from hereditary defects. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal of Virginia's decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize Carrie Buck, an institutionalized 17-year-old whom the state had decreed a "moral imbecile," the daughter of a "feebleminded" mother and the mother herself of a daughter who was found to be, at age seven months, subnormal in intelligence. The court, by an 8-to-1 vote, rejected Buck's appeal. In his majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The principle that sustains...
...just a matter of consumers' smelling something very fishy in the idea of tomatoes given an antifreeze-producing gene from the winter flounder. More broadly, society--at least European society--is beginning to view genetic science as a market-impelled juggernaut out of control and wearing moral blinders...