Biotech and the Future

May 3, 2006

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is out in a revised paperback edition. In the new afterword to the book, Fukuyama identifies four specific challenges to the historical trend toward liberal democracy. Of particular interest for bioethics is the fourth identified challenge, technology:

our ability to manipulate ourselves biologically, whether through control over the genome or through psychotropic drugs, or through a future cognitive neuroscience, or through some form of life extension, will provide us with new approaches to social engineering that will raise the possibility of new forms of politics.

Developments in biotechnology create amazing opportunities as well as serious threats to human dignity, and to human life itself.