Editorial The ethical concerns about transgenic crops Agnès E. Ricroch 1,2 , Michèle Guillaume-Hofnung 1 and Marcel Kuntz 3 1 Collège d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires, Université Paris-Sud, 54 Boulevard Desgranges, F-92330 Sceaux, France; 2 AgroParisTech, Génétique évolutive et amélioration des plantes, 16 rue Claude-Bernard, F-75231 Paris cedex 05, France; 3 Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS (UMR 5168), INRA (UMR 1417), Laboratoire de Physiologie Cellulaire & Végétale, 17 rue des Martyrs, F-38054 Grenoble cedex 9, France Correspondence: Marcel Kuntz (marcel.kuntz@cea.fr) It is generally accepted that transgenesis can improve our knowledge of natural pro- cesses, but also leads to agricultural, industrial or socio-economical changes which could affect human society at large and which may, consequently, require regulation. It is often stated that developing countries are most likely to benefit from plant biotechnology and are at the same time most likely to be affected by the deployment of such new tech- nologies. Therefore, ethical questions related to such biotechnology probably also need to be addressed. We first illustrate how consequentialist and nonconsequentialist theories of ethics can be applied to the genetically modified organism debate, namely consequen- tialism, autonomy/consent ethics (i.e. self-determination of people regarding matters that may have an effect on these people) and virtue ethics (i.e. whether an action is in adequacy with ideal traits). We show that these approaches lead to highly conflicting views. We have then refocused on moral ‘imperatives’, such as freedom, justice and truth. Doing so does not resolve all conflicting views, but allows a gain in clarity in the sense that the ethical concerns are shifted from a technology (and its use) to the morality or amorality of various stakeholders of this debate. Introduction Do the technical and scientific characteristics of genetically modified (GM) crops justify that their surrounding ethical considerations be given a particular specificity? And if so, to what extent? The ‘Devil is in the detail’ is a common idiom, but in ethics he may well be in the thresholds. Many ethical issues are formulated in terms of threshold: from which threshold? Up to which? These questions lead us to the dilemma that is the essence of ethics. From which threshold will the GM technology be considered as beneficial? From which threshold will they no longer be considered as beneficial? Lack of scientific certainty demands ethical questioning. However, when the scientific or technical certainties are unable to give certain answers, nothing justifies that ethical questions are formulated with a misleading technical or scientific sophistication. We then find ourselves in front of ethics in its fundamental unity. In contrast, persisting in a sectored thought would nourish alleged ethical specificities, and in the end, would derogate from common ethics, which must be built. Ethical sophistication encourages vio- lation of basic ethics, hidden by clouds of smoke. Basic ethics means the common core which is used as a basis for our behavior. Basic also means a simplicity of its formulation. In other words, ethics should be formulated almost in the same terms for a primary school pupil and for a researcher. Below, we will first discuss the confrontation between ethics viewpoints regarding transgenic plants. This discussion will then gain in clarity by refocusing on issues such as freedom, justice and truth. Regarding truth, we could refer to Descartes who considered error as a sin when the error results from a refusal to seek the truth. Version of Record published: 28 February 2018 Received: 20 November 2017 Revised: 19 January 2018 Accepted: 24 January 2018 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Portland Press Limited on behalf of the Biochemical Society 803 Biochemical Journal (2018) 475 803–811 https://doi.org/10.1042/BCJ20170794 Downloaded from https://portlandpress.com/biochemj/article-pdf/475/4/803/692491/bcj-2017-0794c.pdf by guest on 27 May 2020