Word: precept
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...each year and choose the 2,000 students most likely to make a mark on the world. Some of these students may also possess well-developed social skills, but that's really beside the point. Most of your classmates will be determined to succeed at any cost--a noble precept in itself, but not one that makes for a warm and friendly social atmosphere...
...prize, whenever someone picks up a book "based on the movie" or a cd of music "inspired by the film," he or she is continuing a tradition started by none other than Lucas himself. It's a distinctly American tradition. (Of course, it's based on commerce!) Its basic precept is that what sells in one area will sell in others. More importantly, what is popular in one form can be even more popular in another. Movies into toys into books into CDs--there's no limit to the number of ways the same thing can be sold...
...bites credible, yet his proclamations laid out a soul-shivering truth. Medicine has a strong impetus (if not temptation) to use this technology--for basic research, for new therapies, to provide solutions to infertility or to "replace" a dying loved one. But medicine is also bound by the traditional precept to do no harm, and so it takes on added challenges--such as whether clones will die young because of their older DNA or whether they will suffer the environmental mutations picked up during the life of their adult parent...
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...
...Lewis agrees with Freud that this precept runs counter to the original nature of man," Nicholi said...