¶ … Verhey, Allen. "Playing God and Invoking a Perspective." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 20 (1995): 347-364.
Any physician of a moral and ethical frame of mind would be reflexively offended if a patient, or the loved one of a patient, accused that physician of 'playing God.' But what does this phrase mean? According to Allen Verhey's essay on medicine, modern bioethics, and "Playing God and Invoking a Perspective," the phrase "humans should not play God" has been used quite often by individuals of a particular, naturalistic ideological frame of mind to argue against using of supposedly unnatural forms of medicine, technology, and the use of related forms of biotechnology to sustain human life, or to ameliorate the sufferings of human life. The idea that physicians, scientists and medical practitioners should not play God has even been used to argue against such processes as cloning and genetically modified food because these methodologies are considered unnatural.
Who and what, Verhey asks, is this human-generated notion of 'God' that has become so venerated, in popular discourse, whose methods we should not attempt to play at? The core notion behind the phrase 'humans should not play God,' used in the vein delineated above, is that humans must respect natural processes and thus interferences by physicians are inappropriate and contrary to the natural will of the divine law. Whatever will be, must be, whatever is natural -- that is, whatever is untouched -- is inherently better than what can be accomplished by human interference. Taken to its logical extreme such an argument could be used against vaccinations and antibiotics, as well as the extremes of modern medicine.
The notions of God, and of not interfering or "playing" at the works of God, are often drawn in a fuzzy fashion, with even fuzzier logic. This naturalistic notion of what is God's realm and what is science and humanity's realm seems to be drawn along the lines of what makes the human advocate of 'not playing God' as uncomfortable...
This does not mean that any individual has the right to do whatever they would like to any other individual, but rather that humanity as a whole can make its own decisions without impunity, which robs humanity of their dignity (Ramsey, qtd. In Verhey, 292). Thisties directly back to Verhey's thesis that "the fundamental perspective from which we interpret our responsibilities is critically important to seeing what those responsibilities
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