[Can Happiness be "Produced"?] / Ist Glück "machbar"?

Psychiatry und psychotherapy aim at relieving their patients from mental diseases and disturbances and at enabling them to feel happier than they would do otherwise. Thus, part of their raison d'être depends on the chance to achieve happiness by a systematic effort. A "pursuit of happiness" along this line has repeatedly met with skepticism. The contribution discusses for arguments against the possibility to produce happiness - in oneself or others - by making it an explicit objective: the "happiness paradox", the irreducible subjectivity of happiness, the variability of happiness, and the theory that the ability to feel happy is completely genetically determined.

Embryonic stem cell research and the argument of complicity.

While the argument of complicity is only rarely discussed in bioethics, it is of obvious relevance to the issue of imported embryonic stem cells in countries in which the derivation of stem cells from early human embryos is legally prohibited and/or morally rejected. Complicity means that making use of the results or products of an illegal or morally problematic activity is itself morally problematic, although generally to a lesser degree than the original activity. The question arises as to which conditions make the argument of complicity plausible, thus supporting attacks against legislation that aims to promote research based on 'fruits of a forbidden tree'. This paper distinguishes a number of different variants of complicity, proposes that they deserve different kinds of moral valuation and applies the results to the ongoing debate about the German stem cell research law.

Human cloning and human dignity.

Judging from the official documents dealing with the moral and legal aspects of human reproductive cloning there seems to be a nearly worldwide consensus that reproductive cloning is incompatible with human dignity. The certainty of this judgement is, however, not matched by corresponding arguments. Is the incompatibility of reproductive with human dignity an ultimate moral intuition closed to further argument? The paper considers several ways by which the intuition might be connected with more familiar applications of the concept of human dignity, and argues that there is no such connection. It concludes that the central objections to human reproductive cloning are not objections relating to dignity but objections relating to risk, especially the risks imposed on children born in the course of testing the method's safety.