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The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some fundamental issues in bioethics and how they may be related to the topic of limits. Of course, one might ask if there is any ethical item that cannot be related to the topic of limits. Ethics could even be defined as the art of setting and justifying limits in order to instil a sense of reasonable, acceptable regulations. Without limits everything and everyone would lack coherence and identity. On the other hand there seems to have been an important cultural change in attitude towards many forms of limitations which are no longer automatically accepted as the lines at which we have to stop, or at least must ask permission to go any further. They are seen more or less as borders that can be crossed in order to discover areas of completely new possibilities, broadening the range of human activities and conferring the power to transform the original structure of nature. As far as I can see the ethical evaluation of limits depends more on assumptions linked to general worldviews and less on the construction of an ethical argument in specific situations. It makes a difference whether the ethicist is fundamentally seen as the border guard between the areas of the permissible and the forbidden, or whether ethics first of all has the task of surveying a partly unknown territory where we are not sure of the precise demarcations. In the modern understanding of nature, normative standards must be justified and can no longer be deduced from the description of a natural framework implying pre-existing moral rules.

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some fundamental issues in bioethics and how they may be related to the topic of limits. Of course, one might ask if there is any ethical item that cannot be related to the topic of limits. Ethics could even be defined as the art of setting and justifying limits in order to instil a sense of reasonable, acceptable regulations. Without limits everything and everyone would lack coherence and identity. On the other hand there seems to have been an important cultural change in attitude towards many forms of limitations which are no longer automatically accepted as the lines at which we have to stop, or at least must ask permission to go any further. They are seen more or less as borders that can be crossed in order to discover areas of completely new possibilities, broadening the range of human activities and conferring the power to transform the original structure of nature. As far as I can see the ethical evaluation of limits depends more on assumptions linked to general worldviews and less on the construction of an ethical argument in specific situations. It makes a difference whether the ethicist is fundamentally seen as the border guard between the areas of the permissible and the forbidden, or whether ethics first of all has the task of surveying a partly unknown territory where we are not sure of the precise demarcations. In the modern understanding of nature, normative standards must be justified and can no longer be deduced from the description of a natural framework implying pre-existing moral rules.