To the Question of Obscenity of Biotechnologies

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

 A number of contemporary thinkers, trying to clarify ethical
implications of the newest biotechnologies, point out a completely
definite feeling that plays a leading role in our moral judgments
concerning last achievements in this field of human activity. The
feeling is one of obscenity or loathing in relation to certain biomedical practices (for instance, therapeutic or even industrial using of
embryonic tissue). Thus, introduction of new technologies turns to
be connected with overcoming the loathing and getting accustomed
to obscenity. The article provides the existential-phenomenological
analysis of this situation and shows that every human practice,
including the highest technologies, is based on (i. e. is response
to) the fundamental experience of the embodied human existence
which is the ambivalent experience of affectedness by and estrangement in relation to nature.