[In search of a new morality. Ethical considerations on the Amstad Report]

Against the background of rapid progress in the field of reproduction medicine and gene technology, the governments of various countries have set up commissions to discuss the moral, legal and social problems involved and make proposals for regulation. Thus, in 1986 the Swiss Federal Council convened an expert commission which, after two years of discussion, has recently published a voluminous document (the "Amstad Report"). The present paper attempts to analyze, from the philosophical viewpoint, some of the problems associated with such processes for the further development of morality for specific ends. A leading question in this regard is the role of philosophical thought in these processes, i.e. the potentialities and limits of ethics for the creation of a moral consensus on the problems surrounding technical intervention in human reproduction. There are four schools of thought: 1. The activities of expert commissions are evidence of the fact that man is at present endeavouring consciously to "construct" his morality. He may always have been the subject of his mortality, but this was without his own knowledge and awareness. Today, under the pressure of new means of action, man is becoming the conscious subject of his mortality and the formation of a morality is a process aimed at a specific result. 2. The fundamental difficulty of such a scheme arises from the absence of a theoretical and socially tested system for the "construction" of a new morality. This is also true of philosophy: on questions of morality it possesses analytic competence but no specific methods of generating new norms and values.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)