This issue of Diogenes is devoted to questions of bioethics. This subject was chosen not because bioethics is fashionable but rather because the purpose of this journal is to explore the timely and timeless questions of our era in order to understand what is at stake and to share this knowledge with our readers.

I have chosen to call my piece “Bioethics: Between the Plausible and the Thinkable” to highlight at least three themes that are taken up either directly or indirectly in the articles that follow.

Who would have thought twenty-five years ago that the term “bioethics,” a neologism coined by an American biologist, would have met with such success, becoming one of the cornerstones of philosophical and juridical reflection at the end of the twentieth century? For it was in 1970 that the biologist and oncologist Van Rensalear Potter published his book, Bioethics, Science of Survival.

Guilt and fear today have developed an unexpected quality: they contribute powerfully to the survival of humanity. The feeling of guilt proceeds from an elementary awareness: although the unequaled progress of science and technology in the twentieth century has undoubtedly ameliorated the conditions of human life, it also has given rise to an infernal logic of genocide and crimes against humanity, in which almost all nations, directly or indirectly, have participated and participate still. This awareness is joined to another, which is itself accompanied by a primordial fear: for the first time in history, science and technology have endowed humanity with the power to destroy itself and the planet, without furnishing humans with the means of escaping their destined role as sorcerer's apprentice, for no science can tell us what to do with science. It is this double feeling of guilt and fear that pushes contemporary man to search feverishly for ethical foundations capable of furnishing discreet regulatory principles to underpin decisions and actions. From the point of view of contemporary humanity, ethics must be able to confer meaning and perspective on an existence which apparently has neither: “Now,” writes Hans Jonas, “we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.”

The somewhat disturbing success of bioethics as a discipline is probably due to the unique nature of its subject matter. Indeed what is it that happens when scientific interest, with its particular resources and language, turns toward the study of the human body? Can this body be instrumentalized like any other object, or do the sciences have to give way here before a taboo subject? Have the sciences not, without their knowing it, taken on an unprecedented signification? The truly prodigious growth of new fields of biological knowledge has thrust biology into the public arena. Extending more than ever beyond the status of narrowly scientific knowledge, these new fields have taken on a mythological and normative character in the social imagination.

In the convent of San Domenico in Florence, Fra Angelico painted a miracle of topical interest. In it, we see a monk's cell and the holy surgeons Como and Damien who are attaching a healthy leg onto the body of an amputee. The progress of science has made it possible to realize bold dreams that have been expressed in the myths of seemingly antithetical cultures. Insofar as transplants can now be carried out on all the vital organs of the body, except the brain, modern medicine holds what would seem to be almost a promise of immortality, thus flattering human desire. How then can we explain the fact that, after a period of enthusiasm created by surgical feats, the anticipated spread of the operation has been frustrated by a marked reticence concerning organ donation? This phenomenon, widespread in the Western countries in which most transplants take place, indicates a “malaise of civilization.”

It is a cliché to say that the poor countries are becoming poorer and poorer while the rich ones become richer and richer. Previous experience shows that it is an illusion to count on mankind's sense of solidarity to resolve this dilemma. And yet we are dealing with a problem that is real, vast, and urgent. The developed world uses its knowledge and technological opportunities to sustain and increase its wealth, and in the race for scientific and technical advances the “Third World” faces the serious risk of never being able to catch up. Seen in this light, it is understandable that some people have allowed themselves to be seduced by the notion that in order to achieve a better equilibrium in the world all that is required is to return to a “more natural” life in which science and technology no longer play a dominant role. It seems to us, however, that this vision is unrealistic because it does not take account of the fact that human nature pushes us toward competition and that the kind of solidarity that would compensate for, and mitigate, this competitiveness works successfully only on a small scale (e.g., within the family or clan) or in very special circumstances (e.g., wars, natural catastrophes).

One of the defining features of the modern age is the apotheosis of natural history. Natural History is, of course, the title of Buffon's monumental work, written in the second half of the 18th century. Also, until the rise of the Industrial Revolution, natural history provided an integrated technology, stretching from the voyages of discovery to the establishment of colonies devoted to the cultivation of the resources discovered there, whether one considers sugar cane in its migration west, or vanilla plants on Reunion Island. Beginning in the 16th century, and in such works as Jean de Léry's The Singularities of the French Antarctic, voyagers described, in written accounts of what they saw in far-off lands, exotic substances with singular properties. Jean Nicot returned with tobacco. Parmentier took it upon himself to introduce the cultivation of the potato to France. From both Madame de Sévigné and a secular cantata of Bach we know of the immediate vogue that coffee enjoyed from its introduction in Europe. Later, in the 18th century, after his disastrous expedition to measure the meridian at the equator, La Condamine returned from the Amazon with two substances that would prove crucial to the technical development of the West: rubber and curare.

Contemporary bio-ethics shares with the ancient tradition of natural theology the characteristic of assuming, in the face of the advances of a fundamentally materialist science, an opportunistic function, which is that of the adaptive rescue of spiritual values. Bioethical humanism exists only in the process of this perpetual movement of repossession, and its effort, established to this effect, leads back incoherently to the interminable dualistic confrontation between science and conscience, having failed to take upon itself the task of constructing a rationally-informed thinking on the relationships between the order of development of positive knowledge and the order of development of moral feelings, both in human evolution and in the history of societies. These matters hardly concern today's fashionable philosophers, whose dominant preoccupation seems to be to find a still-unfilled job - something between an esoteric magus and a preacher in vogue - on the great stage of the inessential upon which inconsequential thought is exhibited.