Confrontations in "genethics": rationalities, challenges, and methodological responses.

It was only a matter of time before the portmanteau term ‘‘genethics’’ would be coined and a whole field within bioethics delineated. The term can be dated back at least to 1984 and the work of James Nagle, who claims credit for inventing the word, which he takes ‘‘to incorporate the various ethical implications and dilemmas generated by genetic engineering with the technologies and applications that directly or indirectly affect the human species.’’ In Nagle’s phrase, ‘‘Genethic issues are instances where medical genetics and biotechnology generate ethical problems that warrant societal deliberation.’’ The great promises and terrific threats of developments in scientific understanding of genetics, and the power to enhance, modify, or profit from the knowledge science breeds, naturally offer a huge range of issues to vex moral philosophers and social theorists. Issues as diverse as embryo selection and the quest for immortality continue to tax analysts, who offer reasons as varied as the matters that might be dubbed ‘‘genethical’’ for or against the morality of things that are actually possible, logically possible, and even just tenuously probable science fiction. This review article, of Matti Häyry’s Rationality and the Genetic Challenge, offers a critical response to Häyry’s ‘‘nonconfrontational notion of rationality,’’ which is advanced as a core component of a superior methodological approach in genethics. Prior to engaging with the methodology, I will give an overview of the monograph, which is wide-spanning, with many points at which a critical analysis might be engaged. For me, the most interesting and comment-worthy is the analytic approach. It is common to refer to milestones in intellectual development. Häyry’s book is well viewed not so much as a milestone but as a map and a welcome invitation to pull over and have a look at the state of the field, the lie of the land. To belabor the metaphor, in applied ethics there are many roads and many milestones. Häyry’s purpose is not to show us that only one of these roads is the right one but—simultaneously more modest and more radical—to articulate a means of working out which roads should be scratched off the map and which we should leave there, even if we see no reason to go where they would take us. Following a presentation of Häyry’s perspective of rationality and the genetic challenge, I express certain reservations concerning qualifications that I think must be logically entailed by an analysis that employs his critical approach. Although I believe there is much to recommend the methodological tools he develops and defends, I suggest they do not overcome all that might be hoped, or, that if they do, they do so in a much more controversial and confrontational way than may at first seem true.