Advances in medicine and biology have made possible great advances for future medical procedures and for entirely new procedures such as genetic splicing to create new forms of life. These new procedures bring with them great responsibility and require that experimentation and development in biology be conducted following ethical precepts. The issues thus raised are not simple and are not easily answered, making it all the more vital that critical thinking be developed and applied to issues of bioethics. In short, bioethics has developed as a wide-ranging field because there is a need for an ethical framework for experimentation on drugs and medical procedures using human beings or because science can now do things which were once left only to human biology, including everything from genetic manipulation to cloning. Every step forward raises concerns that the next step might go in the wrong direction, and bioethics is a method for deciding which step to take and which step to avoid.
We must apply critical thinking even to the determination of what underlying ethical structure to apply to these issues. Some believe there is a natural law that must be followed in making these decisions and that we must be true to nature in making our ethical decisions. Others see a different imperative at work:
There is nothing in terms of natural laws or patterns that we should emulate. Our morality is not concerned with obeying laws of nature. Instead it is concerned with facing facts as they relate to a larger plan or vision. Our limited biological morality which may be partially encoded in genes concerns rules and behavior relative to our immediate fellow humans (Heinrich 42).
What we need, says Heinrich, is a larger morality, one that is global rather than local:
Our natural morality once sufficed to keep us moral. Now, however, when we drink a cup of coffee we are affecting rain forests in Colombia... Such linkage is a ...