In this article, I present what I believe to be the core of Jürgen Habermas’s views on the morality, ethics, and regulation of emerging genetic and reproductive technologies in his bookThe Future of Human Nature.

In this article, I present what I believe to be the core of Jürgen Habermas’s views on the morality, ethics, and regulation of emerging genetic and reproductive technologies in his bookThe Future of Human Nature.

In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...) determine a perspective. Second, bioethics and science fiction share the family resemblance of expressing moral beliefs. I then consider how understanding bioethics and science fiction as interrelated discourses can be the basis of a methodology for inquiry into relational autonomy in the context of biotechnologies and medicine. As an example of this methodology, I analyse Fay Weldon’s novel The Cloning of Joanna May. (shrink)