This article reviews suggestions for how ethical tools are to be evaluated and argues that the concept of ethical soundness as presented by Kaiser etal. (2007) is unhelpful. Instead, it suggests that the quality of an ethical tool is determined by how well it achieves its assigned purpose(s). Those are different for different tools, and the article suggests a categorization of such tools into three groups. For all ethical tools, it identifies comprehensiveness and user-friendliness as crucial. For tools that have reaching a decision in a democratic context as a main purpose, it identifies transparency, guiding users toward a decision and justification of the decision-supporting mechanism. For tools that aim to engage the public, it identifies procedural fairness as essential. It also notes that the scope of use for ethical tools is limited to the same moral community, and that this feature is frequently overlooked.

In this paper, I investigate the moral status of agricultural biotechnology and, more specifically, genetically modified (GM) crops by employing the hubris argument. The old notion of hubris, given to us by the ancient Greeks, provides a narrative from which we can understand ourselves and technology. Ronald Sandler offers us an understanding of hubris he claims gives us a prima facie reason and a presumption against the use of GM crops. I argue that Sandler's hubris argument fails for several reasons: (1) Sander and many others fail to have a proper understanding of agriculture as an inherently technological practice which is radically different from 'nature'; (2) the notions of control and manipulation which are central to the concept of hubris are difficult to understand and use in the context of agriculture; (3) trying to establish a prima facie reason against GM crops runs into serious difficulty since many GM crops are profoundly different from each other; and (4) even if we accept Sandler's argument of hubris, it actually plays no role in the reasoning and evaluation of the moral status of different GM crops.