Climate engineering is subject to the “playing God” critique, which charges that humans should not undertake to control nature in ways that seem to overstep the proper scope of human agency. This argument is easily discredited, and in fact the opposite—that we should “play God”—may be equally valid in some circumstances. To revive the playing God critique, I argue that it functions not on a logical but on a symbolic and emotional level to highlight nostalgia for functional dualisms in the (...) face of the bewildering problem of climate change. It also raises significant questions about the virtue of those who might engineer the climate. These two concerns point to questions about the proper role of human agency. I use the scholarship of Aldo Leopold and H. Richard Niebuhr to argue for a model of human agency based on contextual awareness and responsive, communal responsibility. I conclude with some implications of this view for decision-makers engaging the topic of climate engineering. (shrink)

As technology's frontiers advance, we acquire the capacity to alleviate the aspects of suffering and sorrow that are caused by our genetic programming, while also inviting unwelcome side consequences. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a bacterial defense system with genome editing capabilities, is now being implemented to startling results. It is being used to correct for harmful mutations by permanently altering genes, promising to eliminate defects in whole species. Advantages notwithstanding, and apart from insufficiently considered dangers precipitated by (...) the well‐intended technology, there are other moral issues to consider. What does existence look like in which humans become resistant to experiencing genetic defects? We can welcome medical innovation's reduction of undue hardship, but is there a threshold past which a permanently improved version of us makes us ineligible to participate in the human condition? This essay offers a theological and Aristotelian critique of using CRISPR for extensive human gene editing, arguing that it is our imperfections, including susceptibility to disease, decline due to aging, and the ephemerality of joy, which make us human. (shrink)