In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society.

在对新技术的伦理反思中，经常会出现一种特定类型的论点，批评科学家们用这些新技术的可能性“扮演上帝”。本文的第一部分是检验这些论点在文献中是如何被解释的。随后，本文旨在将这些论点重新解释为符号论点：它们与其说是基于一组本体论或经验论主张，不如说是基于符号分类方案，这些方案首先为我们的价值判断奠定了基础。因此，引用符号论证是指某些新技术如何冒着破坏我们基本的符号区别的风险，我们通过这些区别组织和评估我们与世界和社会的互动。此外，这种象征性的区别往往对逻辑论证具有弹性，主要是因为它们本身构成了我们首先在文化和伦理领域进行论证的基础。因此，评估和反驳这些论点的有效策略需要另一种方法，表明这些技术要么不会挑战这些分类，要么如果它们挑战了，