Psychiatry is distinguished from other fields of medical expertise and bears a particular kind of responsibility, namely the treatment of persons incapable of informed consent per se. The History of psychiatry shows that much too often inhuman abuse was happening in psychiatric facilities. An ethics of psychiatry therefore requires a reliable and stable foundation for values that allow justifying normative claims embracing both characteristics. Such a basic foundation already exists in form of the pluralistic and international recognition of human dignity. We argue that human dignity does and has to go beyond "respect for autonomy" and by that it can function as highest authority on questions concerning value judgments on critical cases in psychiatric bioethics.

In fields where science and technology overlap, so do different function-ascriptions. The entities of Synthetic Biology research are a case in point, where organisms with biological functionality are altered to perform technical functions. A function theory for SynBiofacts has to address artifactual as well as biological functions of one and the same entity. Further demands on a function theory for Synthetic Biology emerge from methods of SynBiofact creation called kludging and the use-scenarios of SynBiofacts in proof-of-concept research and BioArt. After discussing intentional accounts of technical functions, etiological function theory, contextual causation and contextual selection, a pluralist and weakly normative account of function will be outlined, that, or so it will be argued, can indeed cover all function ascriptions in Synthetic Biology. Lastly, some of the advantages and disadvantages of taking this stance will be outlined.

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