Self-realization of Living Beings and GMO in Agriculture

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.21860/j.10.2.5 

In this paper, I will suggest an ethical framework for reflecting on the moral consideration towards human and non-human living beings, which is based on the notion of selfrealization. Such an ethical position, which sees morally right action as the one seeking to enable self-realization to each living being, tries to establish a biocentric consideration not far from the classical ethical categories. Besides, it is suitable for the judgment of contemporary concrete moral problems, a part of which certainly is the question of the justification of genetic modification of organisms in agriculture. Apart from the morally suspicious human intervention in the intimate structure of living beings, which unnecessarily jeopardizes their self-realization, from the aspect of human self realization, the whole scientific, technological, and economic framework to which such activities belong is questionable. Precisely by focusing on this framework, we are getting closer to what is here considered as a pre-task of morals, namely, the avoidance of conflict of grounds of obligation toward self realization of different living beings, by which the potentials of the utopian in (bio)ethical thinking are reviled. Thus instead of the classic pro et contra approach to the issue of GMOs in agriculture, we are addressing here the often unexamined conditions in which genetic modifications in this field take place.