in dealing with humans, don't start with intellect. 1st ask "who benefits, and how?"

you will invariably discover, when something is illogical, that you haven't grasped the motivation. someone is making a dollar from what seems to you to be illogical, or at least someone hopes to.

genetic and/or cyber enhancement of humans appeals to many people, particularly rich people for whom human frailty is the only blot on the horizon. they will reward someone who makes respectable what they want.

incidentally, since when does one need a licence to pontificate. amateur pontifexes abound on this site, i am responding to one.

None of the above. Savulescu makes good copy because he panders to the moral outrage that sells. The catch-cry of 'why not?' applies as equally to gleeful four year olds as to bioethicists.

It should be called the Germaine Greer syndrome - the world needs an intelligent someone to put their potentially absurd opinions out there so we can examine our vanilla ethics against them. The resulting incremental shift in opinion might make the world a better place.

Having someone logically analyse the ethics of a situation and provide reasoned opinions need not be accepted verbatim, but cannot be dismissed.

It is infinitely better than the Vatican's centuries old response of "thy shalt not" because we said so.

God help us from the "vanilla" mediocrity of those who bristle at anyone who challenges their prejudices.

Hooray! At last someone has seen that the emperor has no clothes. The end result of an ethics that relies only on rationalism is a nightmare. We have become mad with a kind of reason that does not recognize the human imperatives that our long history has taught us. The kind of ethics described in this article is thin gruel and deceptively easy because it is isolated from what we know about the human condition. Before the "why not?" question is asked we should ask the "why?" question situated in the context of all of the richness of human cultural consciousness.

Peter Sellick

Debates on bioethics are welcome and crucial, but this whole piece is just a personal attack on Professor Savulescu.

I can't find any pictures of Michael Cook online, but it's telling that he rails at "the sporty, good-looking, energetic Professor Savulescu", and his "sexy little prefix “bio”".

One suspects that Mr Cook might be motivated more by his own perceived lack of personal appeal and authority than by ethical concerns.

"Why shouldn’t we do transgressive action X? he demands. X hurts no one. X is an expression of autonomy. X is my right. Do you object that X is against human nature? No such thing, buddy. Therefore, X is ethical. Let us, then, be courageously transgressive."

Perhaps I have missed something, but this seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. Why should Michael Cook's manufactured outrage prevent us from making logical decisions favouring our own happiness? If Cook thinks that a particular action is deleterious to human welfare then he is obliged to demonstrate how and why -- making ad hominem attacks against a particular individual is no argument at all.

Unfortunately many religious believers still seem to take the view that if something is sensible and beneficial then there must be something wrong with it: they would far rather adopt futile and painful practices like abstention from sex and self-flagellation just to demonstrate how 'unnatural' rational commonsense behaviours really are. Well, smallpox vaccinations and antibiotics are 'unnatural' too, but they save a lot of lives.

And meanwhile another batch of Afghani children is sacrificed to the glorious irrationality of religion...