Abstract

This is an interdisciplinary thesis which explores religious ethics in relation to the sciences and technology using prenatal diagnosis as a case study. ;Chapter One outlines the methods and goals of prenatal diagnosis, representing not only "technical background" but also theory underlying the development and application of this technology. ;Chapter Two expands the theoretical aspect of prenatal diagnosis through a study of the meaning of "burden", a critical concept in assessing antenatal diagnostic technology. ;Chapter Three is given to problem identification, suggesting the extent to which prenatal diagnosis challenges us to move beyond empiricist thought models especially in terms of the need to contain biotechnology within limits. ;Chapter Four studies the burden response in Christian bioethics, pointing to the difficulty within this framework of defining limits to the mastery and control of nature. ;Chapter Five sketches a Buddhist bioethics. It is an exploration, relying primarily on textual sources. The suggestion is that Buddhist-Christian dialogue may be fruitful for developing a bioethical response to technology. ;Chapter Six concludes the thesis. An adequate ethical response to the complex problems raised by biotechnology must develop out of a concern to "see things whole", that is, out of an ethical framework containing both humanist and scientific perspectives. A self-critical ethics cannot reduce values to either economics or technique. Exploration of an analogy between these ideas and Buddhist aetiology of disease suggests what might be an insight regarding "limits of burden" in prenatal diagnosis