Enlightenment and enchantment: Technology and moral limits

This essay places C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures in a particular intellectual context that points to important recent developments in the interdisciplinary discourse of applied ethics, particularly bioethics and its critical response to biotechnology. It also recasts the problem of the two cultures into a more fundamental question about the ethical governance of science—can we, should we, and will we in time finally bring about the end of the Faustian imperative of technocracy, and bridle unlimited consumption and economic growth based on depletion of finite fossil carbon and the ecologically destructive effects of its use?