SBOs, as the name suggests, are living biological entities that have not been born, but engineered into being. artefacts, as distinct from features of the world that would be there anyway even if we weren’t, i.e. We’ll see that the uncertainty of the boundary has ontological and ethical implications which it’s interesting to consider given the current trajectory of scientific research and development, albeit that conscious organisms of this kind are only a theoretical possibility.Īs a rule of thumb, the way we tend to distinguish between things we deem natural and things we deem artificial or synthetic tracks the categorisation of things humans make, i.e. Whether conscious or not, SBOs challenge the nominal ontological distinction outlined. We’re going to think about the nature of the distinction in some detail here in relation to a hypothetical category of entities which straddle this ambiguous boundary – conscious Synthetic Biological Organisms (SBOs). But despite its apparent plausibility, this also fails to cast the distinction clearly. A similarly straightforward answer to the question of what is artificial might be ‘something that we humans make, rather than something that could be found if we weren’t here’. This answer, though, invites the further question of what it is for something to be ‘artificial’. So perhaps we could say it means anything non- artificial. But this answer is question-begging, as it presupposes we know what it means to be ‘naturally’ occurring, as opposed to occurring through some other, non-natural means.
When it comes to the ethical and ontological implications, this boundary is yet more uncertain, writes Alex McKeown.Īt first sight it seems to be an obvious question with an obvious answer: What is natural? Well, it’s anything that occurs naturally.
But the conditions for naturalness quickly become murky. So, too, do we readily accept value judgments that hold the natural superior to the artificial. The distinction between natural and unnatural seems, on the face of it, simple enough.
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