The first point is a fundamental objection to the preceding discussion. I appeal to the self and capabilities, as a criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate genetic engineering and as a gift we are entitled to use and improve. But isn't it obvious that utility is a superior criterion and grounds for the value of gene technology? Isn't utilitarianism a more adequate foundation for biotechnology? Isn't it more convincing because it is less metaphysical? When we talk of our capabilities as a gift we are to live up to and therefore entitled to use, perhaps even obliged to perfect, we imply metaphysical ideas. By contrast, the utility criterion legitimates all and only biotech that maximizes happiness. If this implies metaphysics as well, at least it seems to be a generally accepted one.

We are here again confronted with the competition of the utilitarian and the Cartesian approaches. But now it seems clear that we do and ought to use technology for making our life as comfortable as possible. Isn't this the best proof we may imagine for showing that we use our capabilities in order to be happy rather than for the sake of perfecting them and our activities? So here the utilitarian approach proves its soberness and its unpretentious metaphysics, if we have to call its belief in the finality of happiness metaphysics at all. The Cartesian approach, by contrast, seems caught in the implausibility of its presuppositions and consequences.