Concerns about the sacred—common in everyday moral thinking—have crept into bioethics in various forms. Further, given a certain view of the metaphysics of morals that is now widely endorsed in Western philosophy, there is in principle no reason that judgments about the sacred cannot be part of careful and reasoned moral deliberation.

We find our way in the world partly by means of the discriminatory power of our emotions. The gut sense that something is repugnant or unsavory—the sort of feeling that many now have about various forms of biotechnology—sometimes turns out to be rooted in articulable and legitimate objections, which with time can be spelled out, weighed, and either endorsed or dismissed. But we ought not dismiss the emotional response at the outset as “mere feeling.”.