David Edmonds poses a question:

Imagine three cities.

1. A medieval city (something like Oxford).

2. A city heavily bombed in World War II and completely rebuilt, with original materials etc. (e.g. the centre of Warsaw).

3. A city constructed in 2012 to look just like the medieval city (e.g. Poundbury the ‘traditional’ village Prince Charles has created in Dorset).

Now imagine that these three cities look identical.  And let’s stipulate that the experience of living in them is pretty much the same (the houses are no more likely to suffer from dry rot in the first than the third).   Here’s the question: where would you rather live?

He reckons that most would prefer Oxford over Warsaw, and both – comfortably – over Poundbury.  I suspect that he’s right.  Why is this, and why does it matter for bioethics?

Edmonds’ hypothesis is that it’s because we care about origins and back-story.  We like to have some sense of where things came from – it’s a part of how we assess their worth.  The problem with a place like Poundbury is that its backstory is completely ersatz. (Whether an ersatz history is better than none at all is a further question, and we could extend the thought-experiment by adding a fourth option: what about living in an unashamedly modern town?  What if an architect was allowed to start from scratch, and didn’t look to the past at all?  Depressingly, my hunch is that many people would prefer to live in Poundbury than in Neopolis.  Without genuine history, they’d prefer fake history.  Prince Charles obviously would.  Mind you, if it wasn’t for a history, fake or imagined, he’d have nothing at all.  Except Cornwall.  And about a billion pounds.  But I digress…)

As for bricks and mortar, so for genetic origins. more…