Chemethics: Towards an Ethics of Chemical Intervention

Abstract

The ethics of chemistry occupies an uncomfortable position in the landscape of applied ethics. Even though a significant proportion of the moral challenges generated by contemporary molecular intervention are, at their root, chemical — produced by chemistry's characteristic capacity to decompose, recombine, and produce matter in novel configurations — the living space of ethics of chemistry has been systematically colonised by bioethics, ethics of technology, and public policy discourse. This paper argues that this colonisation reflects a structural misalignment: bioethics is constituted at the level of application rather than at the level of the founding conditions of molecular intervention. To address this gap, the paper proposes the concept of chemethics — an ethics of a type of intervention rather than a disciplinary or professional ethics, applicable wherever chemistry's constitutive agenda operates. Drawing on the genealogy of molecularism, the alchemical dream of total transformation, and the philosophy of chemistry, the paper develops three principles of chemethics — the underdetermination principle, the levels principle, and the limit principle — understood as second-order constraints on any adequate ethics of molecular intervention. The paper concludes that chemethics and bioethics are complementary frameworks: the former addressing the founding conditions of molecular intervention, the latter the application-level questions that arise from them.