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The overcoming of all human weakness is often viewed as a personal right as well as a common good. But fully overcoming human weakness would undermine the basis for mutual support and recognition. The achievement of complete technical independence from natural forces would end the embeddedness of humanity within natural history. This book defends the necessity of ethical assessment against the automatism of relying on technical developments or market processes. To identify both the values and ethical limits of technology development, criteria for the goodness of human life, and for nature in general, are required. This includes a meta-ethical discussion of moral objectivity, philosophical anthropology, and moral history. On the basis of that discussion, conclusions are drawn about ethical debates in the domains of medicine, biotechnology, and information technology.
Within the broad framework of processual hermeneutics, this monograph studies rationality by investigating what are the fundamental cognitive mechanisms required for the cultural development of rational constructions. It analyses the basic cognitive competences through which the human being connects categories and operations in a manner that allows it to orient itself in the world. If both understanding and explaining are forms of human-specific orientation, what does asking the question “how” imply cognitively? This monograph focuses therefore on the human-specific array of cognitive mechanisms, here referred to as enarrativity.
Die damit einhergehende Inkohärenz und Unübersichtlichkeit ist aber kein semantisches Unglück. In den verschiedenen begrifflichen Konstellationen zeichnen sich vielmehr der Ort der humanen Lebensform in der Natur und die epistemischen, ethischen und ästhetischen Einstellungen zur Natur ab. Die Beiträge thematisieren arbeitsteilig semantische, systematische und normative Aspekte menschlicher Naturverhältnisse wie Ursprung und Veränderung, die menschliche Natur, Verbindungen von Naturwissenschaft, Ethik, Technik und Ästhetik sowie bioethische, tierethische, umweltethische und klimaethische Herausforderungen.