Can Philosophical Analysis Really Help?
It may strain credulity to believe that the analysis of concepts such as ‘health’, ‘disease’ or ‘normality’ can shed any light on the ethical and policy issues associated with the vast amounts of new knowledge being generated by the human genome project and related inquries in biomedicine However, credulity must be strained. The focus of attention qua philosophy tends to be on who owns the genome or whether an insurance company can boot you off the rolls if you are at risk of succombing to a costly disease. But this is not really where the ethical and philosophical action is with respect to the ongoing revolution in genetics. Politics, economics, psychology, social work, education and philosophy all presuppose certain facts about human nature. In one sense the old nature/nurture battle is written on every page of the classic texts of Western thought. But the genome project, the attempt to map and sequence, to crack the code of our heredity, promises to make nature/nurture an issue in a
