1 The Relation between Ethics and Aesthetics in Connection with Moral Judgements about Gene Technology Michael Hauskeller Ethics and aesthetics are commonly regarded as two different branches of philosophy. Ethics is concerned with the interrelated questions of what is good (for ourselves and others) and what is right. Ethicists, or moral philosophers, inquire into what we ought to do and why we ought to do it, and also, was is desirable and what kind of life is worth living. Aesthetics, on the other hand, seems to deal with entirely different questions: traditionally it is concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of art. But in more general terms aesthetics can be understood as, to use a definition first brought forward by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, “die Wissenschaft der sinnlichen Erkenntnis”, which means: the science of sensory, or perceptive, knowledge 1 . It may well be, though, that we can neither discover and understand what our moral obligations comprise, nor lead a good, rich and satisfying life, without a certain capacity for perceiving the things around us, that is: perceiving them with our senses. If sensory perception were of the essence of morality, the 1 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750/58, § 1.