Environmental Values

Recently at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a microorganism has been created through synthetic biology. In the future, more complex living beings will very probably be produced. In our natural environment, we live amongst a whole variety of beings. Some of them have moral status – they have a moral importance and we cannot treat them in just any way we please –; some do not. When it becomes possible to create artificially living beings who naturally possess moral status, will this artificiality modify their status? Many people contend that it will, but I am not of the same mind and will develop three arguments against it.

In the context of synthetic biology, scientists and bioengineers talk of living beings as being ‘living machines'. This categorisation of the envisaged new life forms has given rise to the ethical concern that their moral status may be seen as different from that of natural or only partially artificial living beings (GMOs). The paper discusses the notion of a living being and the notion of a machine in order to arrive at a conclusion to the question of whether this categorisation is warranted or not. For this reason, it also looks back to the history of the comparison of living beings to machines and tries to show what motivated the analogy. In the end, though, it is argued that one should stop short of categorising living beings as machines, even if there are areas of analogy between living beings and machines. Finally, the idea that the envisaged artificial synthetic living beings could be regarded as some kind of machines is rejected.

Synthetic biology makes use of genetic and other materials derived from modern biological life forms to design and construct novel synthetic organisms. Artificial organisms are not constructed from parts of existing biological organisms, but from non-biological materials. Artificial and synthetic organisms are artefactual organisms. Here we are concerned with the non-instrumental value of such organisms. More specifically, we are concerned with the extent to which artefactual organisms have natural value, inherent worth and intrinsic value. Our conclusions are largely supportive of the value of artefactual organisms. However, they do not constitute a comprehensive ethical evaluation of them.

This essay examines how biocentric positions assess the aims and planned products of synthetic biology. In this emerging field, scientists and engineers aim at designing and producing new life forms by various procedures. In this paper I explore whether, for biocentrists, 1) synthetic organisms have moral standing and, 2) the process of synthesising living organisms has moral implications. Because naturalness plays a role in some biocentric theories, synthetic biology – at first sight – seems to challenge the idea that all living organisms have moral standing. However, according to the interpretations that I offer, the biocentric positions discussed here would also assign moral standing to synthetic organisms. That living organisms have moral standing does not necessarily imply that it is morally problematic to synthesise them. However, different lines of biocentric argumentation suggest that in designing and synthesising living organisms, the moral standing of the product needs to be taken into account. This means among other things, that according to biocentrists, such procedures may lead to special responsibilities or require certain attitudes from scientists towards their products.

Biocentrism maintains that all living creatures have moral standing, but need not claim that all have equal moral significance. This moral standing extends to organisms generated through human interventions, whether by conventional breeding, genetic engineering, or synthetic biology. Our responsibilities with regard to future generations seem relevant to non-human species as well as future human generations and their quality of life. Likewise the Precautionary Principle appears to raise objections to the generation of serious or irreversible changes to the quality of life of non-human species. Objections to the application of all this to new life-forms produced by synthetic biology are considered and addressed from a biocentric perspective. The bearing of biocentrism on religions is also considered, together with contrasting views about science, religion and the creation of life.