A Brave New World Understanding the Ethics of Human Enhancement
One problem with these sorts of criticisms is that it is often hard to pin down exactly what their scope is. Take the charge of ‘playing God’. It sounds like a very bad idea for humans to ‘play God’, but the charge is often thrown around carelessly, and is particularly likely to be heard when new technologies are introduced.
When In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) techniques were first pioneered in the 1970s many conservatives, especially religious conservatives, criticised its use on the grounds that this amounted to playing God. There have been over five million IVF births since then and the charge of playing God is rarely, if ever, heard in association with IVF these days. But if the use of IVF is no longer to be considered to be a form of playing God, then perhaps some forms of human enhancement shouldn’t count as instances of paying God either.
If a human enhancement can occur naturally, as a result of evolution, then it is not easy to see why it would be morally problematic to introduce the same enhancement deliberately.
In order to be able to know how and when to apply the charge of playing God we need a theory that explains why some activities, which we generally deem as acceptable, such as employing IVF, are not instances of
