Appendix F in Information and Biological Revolutions: Global Governance Challenges--Summary of a Study Group. Francis Fukuyama, and Caroline S. Wagner 2000
This project was conducted in RAND's Science and Technology Policy Institute. It is also available as a printed report.
Leon Kass is an Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, 1998–1999 William H. Brady, Jr., Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute March 18, 1999.
As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick first announced the structure of DNA. True, soon after that discovery, scientists began seriously to discuss the futuristic prospects of gene therapy for genetic disease and of genetic engineering more generally. But no one then imagined how rapidly genetic technology would emerge, as the direct consequence of new, utterly unforeseen techniques for DNA recombination. Within a few years, we will see the completion of the Human Genome Project, disclosing the DNA sequences of all the 100,000 human genes. Today, genetic technology companies are thriving, even on incomplete genomic knowledge; the research director for SmithKline Beecham reported at a recent meeting that his company already has enough genetic sequencing data to keep his researchers busy for the next 20 years, developing early detection screening techniques; rationally designed vaccines; genetically engineered changes in malignant tumors leading to enhanced immune response; and, ultimately, precise gene therapy for specific genetic diseases. The age of genetic technology has arrived—and with it, much public anxiety and a growing attention to the some of the attendant ethical issues.
Genetic technology comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian effort to cure disease, prolong life, and alleviate suffering. Attached to the intrinsically humane and morally purposive art of medicine, genetic technology arrives to begin with wrapped in the highly moral mantle of generous and philanthropic humanitarianism. Occupying the moral high ground of compassionate healing, biomedical technology usually receives a royal welcome in our society, even when it raises challenges to other traditional moral norms. To a large extent, the same will be true of much of what genetic technology has to offer in the future. Who would not welcome genetic surgery that corrected the genetic defects that
lead to sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, and breast cancer or that protected against the immune deficiency caused by the AIDS virus? But genetic technology strikes most people as different from other biomedical technologies. Many people are concerned, anxious, and afraid of “tampering with human genes.” Even knowledgeable people, duly impressed by the truly astonishing genetic achievements of the last decade and eager for the benefits, are nonetheless ambivalent. For they sense—I think rightly—that genetic technology, while in some respects continuous with the traditional medical project, is also in decisive respects radically new and, therefore, disquieting. Often hard-pressed to articulate the precise basis of their disquiet, they talk rather in general terms about the dangers of eugenics or the fear of “man playing God.”
Enthusiasts for genetic technology, made confident by their expertise and by their growing prestige and power, are often impatient with the public’s disquiet. Much of it they attribute to ignorance of science: “If the public only knew what we know, it would see things our way and give up its irrational fears.” For the rest, they blame outmoded moral and religious notions, ideas that scientists insist no longer hold water and only serve to obstruct scientific progress. But this sincere yet also self-serving attempt to cast the debate as a battle of beneficialand- knowledgeable cleverness versus ignorant-and-superstitious anxiety cannot succeed. For the public is right to be ambivalent about genetic technology, and no amount of learning molecular biology and genetics is going to allay its—our— legitimate human concerns. Rightly understood, these worries are, in fact, in touch with the deepest matters of our humanity and dignity, and we ignore them at our peril.
I want this evening to try to articulate some of these concerns, in the hope that we might be less heedless, less arrogant, and more sober as we hurl ourselves forward we know not where. Rather than speak about some ethical questions raised by the use of this or that technique, I want us to consider the moral meaning of the entire enterprise. To do so, we must bear in mind that genetic technology cannot be treated in isolation, but must be seen in connection with other advances in reproductive and developmental biology, in neurobiology, and in the genetics of behavior—indeed, with all the techniques now and soon being marshaled to intervene ever more directly and precisely into the bodies and minds of human beings. I shall proceed by raising a series of questions and comments, the first of which is an attempt to say how genetic technology is different.
What Is so Special About Genetic Technology?
Genetic engineering, when fully developed, will wield two powers not shared by ordinary medical practice. First, medicine treats only existing individuals, and it treats them only remedially, seeking to correct deviations from a more or less stable norm of health. Genetic engineering, in contrast, will deliberately make changes that not only are transmissible to succeeding generations but will even alter in advance specific future individuals (through direct germ-line or embryo interventions). Second, genetic engineering may be able (through so-called genetic enhancement) to create new human capacities and, hence, new norms of health and fitness. True, for the present, genetic technology is being hailed primarily for its ability to improve diagnosis and treatment of disease in existing individuals. To the extent that it would and could be confined to such practices, it would raise few questions beyond the usual ones of safety and efficacy. Even intrauterine gene therapy for existing fetuses with diagnosable genetic disease could be seen as an extension of the growing field of fetal medicine. But there is no reason to believe that the use of gene-altering powers can be so confined, either in logic or in practice. For one thing, germ-line gene therapy and manipulation, affecting the unconceived and the unborn, is surely in our future. The practice can be given numerous justifications, beginning with the desire to reverse the dysgenic effects of modern medical success.
Ordinary medicine is not without heritable genetic consequences, though these are not the deliberate or direct goals of therapy, but rather its unintended byproducts. Thanks to medicine, individuals who would have died from, say, diabetes now live long enough to transmit their disease-producing genes. Why, it has been argued, should we not reverse these changes by deliberate intervention? More generally, why should we not effect precise genetic alteration in disease-carrying sperm or eggs or early embryos, to prevent in advance the emergence of disease, which otherwise will later require expensive and burdensome treatment, genetic or other? And why should not parents eager to avoid both the birth of afflicted children and the trauma of genetic abortion be able to avail themselves of germ-line alteration? Even before we have had more than trivial experience with somatic gene therapy—none of it successful—sober people are calling for overturning the existing self-imposed taboo on germ-line modification.1 Never mind the severe ethical impropriety of experimenting upon the unborn (who cannot give their consent) or the countless mishaps that will have to be discarded. The line between somatic and germ-line modification cannot hold.
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1 See, for example, Walters (1991).
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Neither can we hold or defend the line between therapy and genetic enhancement, despite the naive hopes of many that this will prove possible. Would people reject additions to the human genome that enabled us to produce, internally, vitamins or amino acids we now must get in our diet? Would we oppose the insertion of engineered foreign genes that would be antibiotic to bacteria and parasites or would offer us increased resistance to cancer? Alterations in the immune system that would increase its efficacy or make it impervious to HIV? When genetic profiling becomes able to disclose the genetic contributions to height or memory or intelligence, will we deny prospective parents the right to enhance the potential of their children—by genetic means, among others? Finally, should we discover—as no doubt we will—the genetic switches that control our biological clock and that very likely influence also the maximum human life expectancy, will our life-prolonging culture opt to keep its hands off the process of aging and the upper limit on human life expectancy? Not a chance.
We thus face a paradox. On the one hand, genetic technology really is different, because it can and will go to work directly and deliberately on our basic, heritable, life-shaping capacities, at their biological roots, and it can take us beyond the existing norms of health and healing—perhaps even to alter fundamental features of human nature. On the other hand, we will find its promise familiar and irresistible, precisely because the goals it will serve, at least to begin with, will be continuous with those of modern high-interventionist medicine. This paradox itself contributes to public disquiet: We rightly perceive a powerful difference in genetic technology, but we also sense that we are powerless to use that recognized difference to establish clear limits to the use of genetic power. The genetic genie, first unbottled to treat disease, will, we rightly suspect, go his own way, whether we like it or not.
How Much Genetic Self-Knowledge Is Good for Us?
Quite apart from worries about genetic engineering, gaining genetic knowledge is itself a legitimate cause of anxiety, not least because one of its most touted benefits—genetic profiling of individuals—is guaranteed to increase everyone’s anxiety. The deepest problem connected with knowing your own genotype and thus learning your own genetic sins and unhealthy predispositions is neither the threat to confidentiality and privacy nor the risk of so-called genetic discrimination in employment or insurance, important though these practical problems may be. It is rather the various hazards, anxieties, and deformations in living your life that attach to knowing in advance your likely or possible medical future. To be sure, such foreknowledge of predisposition will be welcome in some cases, if it can lead to easy measures to prevent or treat the impending disorder and if we are talking about genes that predispose to disorders that do not powerfully affect self-image or self-command. But will and should we welcome knowledge that we carry a predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, or some other personality or behavior disorder? That we definitely carry genes that will surely produce a serious but untreatable disease that will strike us at an unknown future time? Still harder will it be for most people to live easily and wisely with less certain information about predilections and predispositions, say, where multigenic traits are involved or where the predictions are purely statistical, with no clear implication for any particular “predisposed” individual. The recent case of a father who insisted that ovariectomy and mastectomy be performed on his 10-year-old daughter because she carried the BRCA-1 [breast cancer] gene dramatically shows the toxic effect of genetic knowledge.
Less dramatic but more profound is the threat that excessive genetic foreknowledge poses to human freedom and spontaneity, a subject explored 25 years ago by the late philosopher, Hans Jonas, one of our wisest commentators on technology and the human prospect. In a discussion of human cloning, Jonas argued for a novel “right to ignorance,” necessary for human freedom and authentic action:
That there can be (and mostly is) too little knowledge has always been realized; that there can be too much of it stands suddenly before us in a blinding light. . . . . The ethical command here entering the enlarged stage of our powers is: never to violate the right to that ignorance which is a condition for the possibility of authentic action; or: to respect the right of each human life to find its own way and be a surprise to itself. (Jonas, 1974, p. 163. Italics in original.)
To scientists who see only how knowledge of predispositions can lead to rational preventive medicine, Jonas’ defense of ignorance will look like obscurantism. But, as Jonas observes, knowledge of the future, especially one’s own, has always been excepted [from the injunction to “Know thyself”] and the attempt to gain it by whatever means (astrology is one) disparaged—as futile superstition by the enlightened, but as sin by theologians; and in the latter case with reasons that are also philosophically sound. (Jonas, 1974, p. 161.)
Everyone remembers that Prometheus was the philanthropic god who gave to human beings fire and the arts, but we forget that he gave them also the greater gift of “blind hopes”—“to cease seeing doom before their eyes” (Aeschylus, lines 250ff)—precisely because he knew that ignorance of one’s own future doom was indispensable to any human being’s aspiration and achievement. I suspect that many people, taking their bearings from life lived open-endedly rather than from preventive medicine practiced rationally, will prefer ignorance of the future to the scientific astrology of knowing their genetic profile. In a free society, that will be their right. Or will it?
Freedom, Power, and Coercion
Even people who might welcome the growth of genetic knowledge and technology are worried about the power of geneticists, genetic engineers, and any governmental authority armed with genetic technology.2 Precisely because we have been taught by these very scientists that genes hold the secret of life and that our genotype is our essence if not quite our destiny, we are made nervous by those whose expert knowledge and technique touch our very being. If, as science has taught us, power over genotype is power over life, not only ours but that of future generations, we have reason to be anxious, even apart from any particular abuses and misuses of that power. C. S. Lewis, friend neither of ignorance nor timidity, put the matter sharply:
It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have hitherto used badly, and against their fellows, the powers that science has given them. But . . . I am not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am considering what the thing called “Man’s power over Nature” must always and essentially be. . . .
In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. . . . The real picture is that of one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. . . . Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. (Lewis, 1965, p. 69–71. Italics in original.)
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2 One of the remarkable silences in all discussions of genetic technology has
been the naive neglect of its potential usefulness in creating biological
weapons, such as, to begin with, antibioticresistant plague bacteria or, later,
aerosols containing cancer-inducing viral vectors.
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Most of our genetic technologists, quite properly, will not recognize themselves in this portrait. Though they concede that abuses or misuses of power may occur, especially in tyrannical regimes, they see themselves not as predestinators but as facilitators, merely providing increased knowledge and technique that people can freely choose to use in making their health or reproductive decisions. Genetic power, they tell us, serves to increase freedom, not to limit it. But as we can see from the existing practices of genetic screening and prenatal diagnosis, this claim is at best self-deceptive, at worst disingenuous. The choice to develop and practice genetic screening and the choices of which genes to target for testing have been made not by the public but by scientists and not on liberty-enhancing but on eugenic (albeit, so far, on negative eugenic) grounds. Moreover, in many cases, practitioners of prenatal diagnosis refuse to do fetal genetic screening in the absence of a prior commitment from the pregnant woman to abort any afflicted fetus. And while a small portion of the population may be sufficiently educated to participate knowingly and freely in genetic decisions, most people are now, and no doubt always will be, subject to the (often but not always) benevolent tyranny of expertise. Every expert knows how easy it is to get most people to choose one way over another, simply by the way one raises the questions, describes the prognosis, and presents the options. The genetic preferences of scientists and counselors will always overtly or subtly shape the choices of the counseled.
In addition, economic pressures to contain health-care costs will almost certainly constrain free choice. Discrimination in insurance may eventually work to compel genetic abortion or genetic intervention, through decisions to refuse coverage for this or that genetic disease. State-mandated screening already occurs for PKU. In France, the government has mandated that all citizens will need to carry all their personal information on a “smart card” by the year 2000. The growing tendencies to rationalize health care and to make it more costeffective may constrain choice precisely as they enhance prospects for prevention and treatment. Moreover, with full-blown genetic screening, there will likely be increasing pressure to limit reproductive freedom, all in the name of the wellbeing of children. Already, in 1971, geneticist Bentley Glass, in his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, enunciated “the right of every child to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype.” Looking ahead to the reproductive and genetic technologies that are today rapidly arriving, Glass proclaimed: “No parents will in that future time have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally incompetent child.” (Glass, 1971, p. 28.) It remains to be seen to what extent such prophecies will be realized, but they surely provide sufficient and reasonable grounds for being concerned about restrictions on human freedom, even in the absence of overt coercion, even in liberal polities.
Beyond Freedom and Coercion: Questions of Dignity and Dehumanization
Although the public worries about abuses of genetic power and about who will control the controllers, I believe its deepest concerns lie elsewhere. What does and should worry us most can, and probably will, arise even with the free, humane, and so-called enlightened use of these technologies. For, truth to tell, genetic technology, the practices it will engender, and (above all) the scientific teachings about human life on which it rests and which it seems to validate are not, as many would have it, simply morally and humanly neutral. They are pregnant with their own moral meaning, regardless of whether they are practiced humanely or taught humbly. They necessarily bring with themselves changes in our practices, institutions, norms, beliefs, and human self-conception. It is these challenges to our dignity and humanity that most urgently generate the concerns over genetic (and other biomedical and neuropsychological) science and technology. Let me touch on five aspects of this most serious matter.
“Playing God”
Curiously, the worry about dehumanization is sometimes expressed, paradoxically, in the fear of superhumanization, that is, that man, or rather some men, will be “playing God.” This complaint is too facilely dismissed by scientists and others who are nonbelievers. The concern has meaning, God or no God. By this phrase is meant one or more of the following: (1) Man, or, again, some men, are becoming creators of life, and indeed, of individual living human beings (in vitro fertilization, cloning); (2) they not only create life, but they stand in judgment of each being’s worthiness to live or die—not on moral grounds, as is said of God’s judgment, but on somatic and genetic ones (genetic screening and abortion); and (3) they also hold out the promise of salvation from our genetic sins and defects (gene therapy and genetic engineering). Man, not God, is a god to man.
Never mind the exaggeration in the conceit and the fact that man, even at his most powerful, is capable only of playing at being God. Consider only that, if scientists are seen in the godlike role of creator-judge-savior, the rest of us must stand in inferior relation to them as creatures-judged-tainted. These worries, despite the hyperbolic speech, are not far-fetched.
One example will suffice. Not long ago, in my own institution, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. “Were he to have been conceived today,” the physician casually informed his entourage, “he would have been aborted.” Determining who shall live and who shall die—on the basis of genetic merit—is a godlike power already wielded by genetic medicine. And this power will only grow.
Manufacture and Commodification
But, one will rightly respond, genetic technology holds out the promise of redemption, of the cure for these life-crippling and life-forfeiting disorders. Very well. But to truly practice their salvific power, the genetic technologists will have to greatly increase their manipulations and interventions, well beyond merely screening and weeding out. True, genetic testing and risk management aimed at prevention may in some cases actually cut down on the need for high-tech interventions aimed at cure. But there will be many, many other cases in which increasing scrutiny will necessarily be accompanied by increasing manipulation. And, to produce Bentley Glass’s healthy and well-endowed babies, let alone babies with the benefits of genetic enhancement, a new scientific obstetrics will be necessary, one that will come very close to turning human procreation into manufacture. This process has already crudely begun with in vitro fertilization; it will soon take giant steps forward with the ability to screen the in vitro embryos before implantation; with cloning; and, eventually, with precise genetic engineering. Just follow the logic and the aspirations of current practice: The road we are traveling leads all the way to Brave New World—not by dictatorial fiat, but by the march of benevolent humanitarianism, cheered on and enjoyed by the very citizens who, in their ambivalence, also dread becoming simply the latest of man’s manmade things.
Make no mistake. The price to be paid for producing optimum, or even only genetically sound, babies is the transfer of procreation from the home to the laboratory and its coincident transformation into manufacture. Increasing control over the product can only be purchased by the increasing depersonalization of the process. More and more, we will give existence to new life not by what we are but by what we intend and design. As with any product of our making, no matter how excellent, the artificer will stand above it, not as an equal but as a superior, transcending it by his will and creative powers. Such an arrangement will be profoundly dehumanizing, no matter how genetically good or healthy the children. And let us not forget the powerful economic interests that will surely operate in this area; with their advent, the commodification of nascent human life will be unstoppable.
Standards, Norms, and Goals
Equally troublesome is the matter of standards, norms, and goals. According to Genesis, God, in His creating, looked at His creatures and saw that they were good—intact, complete, well-working wholes, true to the spoken idea that guided their creation. But what standards will guide the genetic engineers? For the time being, one might answer, the guide would be the norm of health. But even before the genetic enhancers join the party, the standard of health is going to be deconstructed. Are you healthy if you are asymptomatic but carry genes that will definitely produce Huntington’s disease or that predispose to diabetes, breast cancer, or coronary artery disease? What if you carry, say, 40 percent of the genetic markers thought to be linked to the appearance of Alzheimers’s disease? And what will health and normality mean when we discover genetic propensities to alcoholism, drug abuse, pederasty, or violent behavior? Health will become at once both imperial and vague: Ironically, we will get increased medicalization—via genetic diagnosis—of what have hitherto been mental or moral matters at the same time that we will see the disappearance of any given standard of health, wholeness, or fitness.
Once genetic enhancement comes on the scene, all pretense of standards will go out the window, just when such standards would be most urgently needed. “Enhancement” is, of course, a soft euphemism for improvement, and the idea of improvement necessarily implies a good, a better, and perhaps even a best. But if previously unalterable human nature can no longer can function as a standard or norm for what is regarded as good or better, how will anyone truly know what constitutes an improvement? It will not do to say that we can extrapolate from what we like about ourselves and to proclaim that more is better. Because memory is good, can we say how much more memory would be better? If sexual desire is good, how much more would be better? Given that life is good, how much extension of the maximum life expectancy would be good for us? Only simplistic thinking believes it can easily answer such questions. In whose image will the creators of the new and enhanced human beings create them? This is the real problem with positive eugenics: less the threat of coercion, more the presumption of thinking we are wise enough to engineer “improvements” in the human species.
The more modest enhancers, like the more modest genetic therapists and technologists, have no such grandiose goals. They are valetudinarians, not eugenicists. They pursue, or think they pursue, not some far away positive good, but the positive elimination of evils: diseases, pain and suffering, the likelihood of death. But let us not deceive ourselves. There is in all this avoidance of evil an implicit positive goal: nothing less than a painless; suffering-free; and, finally, immortal existence. What is more, though unstated, this implicit goal is in fact held to be uncontroversial and paramount. Only the presence of such a goal can justify sweeping aside all opposition to the progress of medical science. Only such a goal gives to the principle “cure disease, relieve suffering” its trumping value in nearly all arguments about medical ethics: “Cloning human beings is unethical and dehumanizing, you say? So what: it will help us treat infertility, avoid genetic disease, and provide perfect materials for organ transplantation.”3 Never mind whether it means creating and growing human embryos for experimentation, changing the definition of death to facilitate organ transplantation, growing human body parts in the peritoneal cavities of animals, perfusing newly dead bodies as factories for useful biologicals, or reprogramming the human body and mind with genetic or neurobiological engineering: Who can sustain an objection if these practices help us live longer and with less overt suffering?
The Tragedy of Success
That the project is utopian and finally doomed to failure does not slow the enthusiasts. They do not see that we will not eliminate suffering but merely shift it around. They do not remember that contentment means parity between one’s desires and one’s powers, and they therefore do not appreciate the discontent that we are already seeing as a result of rising desires and expectations in the health-care field.4 Worst of all, they do not see the larger human cost of the successes of the humanitarian project. As Aldous Huxley made clear in his prophetic Brave New World, the conquest of disease, aggression, pain, anxiety, suffering, and grief unavoidably comes at the price of homogenization, mediocrity, pacification, drug-induced contentment, trivialized human attachments, debasement of taste, and souls without loves or longings—the
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3 Such was the tenor of Cloning Human Beings, the June 1997 report of the
National Bioethics Advisory Commission, notwithstanding its call for a temporary
ban on human cloning. The only agreed-upon (and temporary) moral objection to
human cloning: It “is not safe to use in humans at this time,” solely
because the technique has yet to be perfected (p. iii). Even this elite ethical
body apparently believes that there are no other moral arguments sufficient to
cause us to forgo possible health benefits.
4 A number of recent studies show that, although their actual state of health
has improved substantially in recent decades, people’s satisfaction with their
current health status has remained the same or even declined. People seem to be
doing better but feeling worse, very likely as a consequence of rising
expectations.
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inevitable result of making the essence of human nature the final object of the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Like Midas, bioengineered man will be cursed to acquire precisely what he wished for, only to discover— painfully and too late—that what he wished for is not exactly what he wanted. Or, worse than Midas, he may be so dehumanized he will not even recognize that, in aspiring to be perfect and divine, he is no longer even truly human. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, technological humanitarianism is like a warm bath that heats up so imperceptibly you do not know when to scream. I am sorry to paint such a gloomy prospect. I surely have no way of knowing whether my worst fears will be realized, but you surely have no way of knowing that they will not. True, Huxley’s portrait is science fiction, but what was debunked as mere science fiction not 20 years ago is today genuine biological possibility. But my main point is not the rightness or wrongness of this or that imagined scenario—all this is admittedly highly speculative. It is rather the plausibility, or even the wisdom, of thinking about genetic technology, like the entire technological venture, under the very ancient, profound, yet profoundly un-American idea of tragedy, that poignantly human adventure of living in grand self-contradiction. In tragedy, the failure is embedded in the hero’s success, the defeats in his victories, the miseries in his glory. The technological way of approaching both the world and human life, a way deeply rooted in the human soul and spurred on by the utopian promises of modern thought and its scientific crusaders, seems to be inevitable, heroic, and doomed.
Science, the Soul, and Shrunken Self-Understanding
To say that technology as a way of life is doomed, left to itself, does not yet mean that modern life—our life—must be tragic. Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule. And here, I regret to say, the news is not encouraging. For the relevant intellectual, spiritual, and moral resources of our society, the legacy of civilizing traditions painfully acquired and long preserved, are taking a beating, not least because they are being called into question by the findings of modern science itself and by biology’s most public and prophetic voices. The technologies present troublesome ethical dilemmas, but the underlying scientific notions call into question the very foundations of our ethics.
The challenge goes munch further than the notorious case of evolution versus biblical religion. Is there any elevated view of human life and goodness that is proof against the belief that man is just a collection of molecules, an accident on the stage of evolution, a freakish speck of mind in a mindless universe, fundamentally no different from other living—or even nonliving—things? What chance have our treasured ideas of freedom and dignity against the teachings of biological determinism in behavior, the reductive notion of “the selfish gene” (or, for that matter, of “genes for altruism”), the belief that DNA is the essence of life, and the credo that survival and reproductive success are the only natural concerns of living beings—or, rather, of their genes?
As sociologist Howard Kaye notes:
For over forty years, we have been living in the midst of a biological and cultural revolution of which innovations such as AID, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, genetic manipulation, and cloning are merely technological offshoots. In both aim and impact, the end of this revolution is a fundamental transformation in how we conceive of ourselves as human beings and how we understand the nature and purpose of human life rightly lived. . . . Encouraged by bio-prophets like Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, E.O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins, as well as by humanists and social scientists trumpeting the essential claims of race, gender, and ethnicity, we are in the process of redefining ourselves as biological, rather than cultural and moral beings. Bombarded with white-coated claims that “Genes-R-Us,” grateful for the absolution which such claims offer for our shortcomings and sins, and attracted to the promise of using efficient, technological means to fulfill our aspirations, rather than the notoriously unreliable moral or political ones, the idea that we are essentially self-replicating machines, built by the evolutionary process, designed for survival and reproduction, and run by our genes continues to gain. But still the public’s ambivalence persists, experienced in the form of anxiety at what such a transformation would mean. (Kaye, 1997b; see also Kaye, 1997a.)
These transformations are, in fact, welcomed by many of our leading scientists and intellectuals. Last year the luminaries of the International Academy of Humanism—including biologists Crick, Dawkins, and Wilson and humanists Isaiah Berlin, W. V. Quine, and Kurt Vonnegut—issued a statement in defense of cloning research in higher mammals and humans beings. Their reasons are revealing:
What moral issues would human cloning raise? Some world religions teach that human beings are fundamentally different from other mammals . . . . Human nature is held to be unique and sacred. Scientific advances which pose a perceived risk of altering this “nature” are angrily opposed. . . . [But] [a]s far as the scientific enterprise can determine . . . [h]uman capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals. Humanity’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover. . . . Views of human nature rooted in humanity’s tribal past ought not to be our primary criterion for making moral decisions about cloning. . . . The potential benefits of cloning may be so immense that it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning. (International Academy of Humanism, 1997.)
To justify ongoing research, these intellectuals are willing to shed not only traditional religious views, but all views of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included. They are seemingly unaware that the scientific view of man they celebrate does more than insult our vanity. It undermines our selfconception as free, thoughtful, and responsible beings, worthy of respect because we alone among the animals have minds, hearts, and aspirations that aim far higher than mere life and the perpetuation of our genes. It undermines the beliefs that hold up our mores, practices, and institutions, not excluding science itself. Why, on these intellectuals’ understanding of “the rich repertoire” of human thought, should anyone choose to accept as true the results of their “electrochemical brain processes” rather than adhere to those of his own? The problem may lie not so much with the scientific findings themselves but with the shallow philosophy that recognizes no other truths but these and with the arrogant pronouncements of the bioprophets. In a recent letter to the editor complaining about a review of his book, How the Mind Works, evolutionary psychologist and popularizer Stephen Pinker rails against any appeal to the human soul:
Unfortunately for that theory, brain science has shown that the mind is what the brain does. The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God. (Pinker, 1998.)
One hardly knows whether to be more impressed with the height of Pinker’s arrogance or with the depth of his shallowness. But he speaks with the authority of science, and who can dispute him on his own ground?5
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5 For an attempt to dispute such reductionist claims and to point the way to a
more adequate account of living nature (on philosophical, not religious
grounds), see Kass (1985) and Kass (2nd ed., 1999). See also Jonas (1982).
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There is, in fact, nothing novel about reductionism, materialism, and determinism; these are doctrines with which Socrates contended. What is new is that these philosophies now seem to be vindicated by scientific advance. Here, in consequence, is perhaps the most pernicious result of our technological progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique, present or future. We are witnessing the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as something noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view that sees man, no less than nature, simply as more raw material for manipulation and homogenization.
Hence, our peculiar moral crisis. We are in turbulent seas without a landmark precisely because we adhere more and more to a view of human life that both gives us enormous power and, at the same time, denies all possibility of nonarbitrary standards to guide its use. Although well-equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going. We triumph over nature’s unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and our fickle opinions. Engineering the engineer, as well as the engine, we race our train we know not where.
This, I submit, is the truest moral meaning of all of today’s wonderful biomedical technology and of the scientific view it reflects and fosters. It is only our infatuation with scientific progress and our naive faith in the sufficiency of our benevolently humanitarian impulses that prevent us from recognizing it. Does this mean, therefore, that I am in favor of ignorance, suffering, and death? Am I in favor of killing the goose of genetic technology even before she lays her golden eggs? Surely not. But I do insist on the importance of seeing the full human meaning of this new enterprise in biogenetic technology and engineering. Important though it is to set a moral boundary here or devise a regulation there, hoping to decrease the damage caused by this or that little rivulet in the belief that one is avoiding the torrent, it is even more important to be sober about the true nature and meaning of the flood itself. The new biologists and their technological minions do not know all they think they know, and they never will. For all their ingenuity, they do not even seek the wisdom that just might yield the kind of knowledge that keeps human life human. If, unlikely though it seems, they could be persuaded to face squarely the full import of the project they are launching, they might proceed with less heedless exuberance and greater humility. And if the rest of us become clearly aware of the dangers—not just to privacy or insurability but to our very humanity—we might be better equipped to defend the increasingly beleaguered pockets and principles of human dignity, even as we continue to reap the considerable benefits genetic technology will inevitably provide.
References
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 250ff.
Glass, Bentley, “Science: Endless Horizons or Golden Age?” Science, Vol. 171, 1971, pp. 23–29.
International Academy of Humanism, “Statement in Defense of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research,” May 16, 1997.
Jonas, Hans, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974.
_____, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Kass, Leon R., Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, New York: The Free Press, 1985.
_____, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, 2nd. ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Kaye, Howard, The Social Meaning of Modern Biology, 2nd ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997a.
_____, “Anxiety and Genetic Manipulation: A Sociological View,” paper presented at the Hastings Center, December 1997b.
Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man, New York: Macmillan, 1965. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Cloning Human Beings, June 1997
Pinker, Steven, “A Matter of Soul,” The Weekly Standard, Correspondence Section, February 2, 1998, p. 6.
Walters, LeRoy, “Human Gene Therapy: Ethics and Public Policy,” Human Gene Therapy, Vol. 2, 1991, pp. 115–122.
Preface to Information and Biological Revolutions: Global Governance Challenges
This report summarizes the issues that arose and the discussions held during the meetings of a 1998–1999 study group focusing on global governance of information technology and biotechnology. The goal was to bring a policy perspective to bear on a discussion of new technological developments through a series of free-flowing and exploratory presentations and discussions. An important part of this effort involved bringing together experts from many different fields—journalists, policymakers, scientists, academics, business people—to discuss developments that will affect all of society. By bringing together such a variety of people, the organizers hoped to see whether people from different professions react differently to emerging technological developments. Each study group meeting featured a presentation by a different invited discussion leader, which either explored some aspect of information technology or biotechnology development or examined the capability of human nature or political structure to deal with new technology, followed by a discussion.
This report presents the findings that emerged from these meetings. It addresses a number of issues, with an emphasis on possible U.S. responses on a political or social level to critical technology governance issues. The body of the report summarizes the issues that emerged from the discussion. The appendixes distill the content of the various presentations and discussions.
Francis Fukuyama of George Mason University and Caroline Wagner of RAND’s Science and Technology Policy Institute organized this study group and conducted subsequent analysis, with the assistance of Richard Schum and Danilo Pellitiere, graduate students at the George Mason University Institute for Public Policy. Shaun Jones, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Defense, and Gerald Epstein, National Security and International Affairs Division, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Executive Office of the President, requested this study and provided guidance for this project. However, the conclusions in this report are solely those of the authors and should not be attributed to DARPA or OSTP.
The Science and Technology Policy Institute
Originally created by Congress in 1991 as the Critical Technologies Institute and renamed in 1998, the Science and Technology Policy Institute is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by RAND. The institute’s mission is to help improve public policy by conducting objective, independent research and analysis on policy issues that involve science and technology. To this end, the institute
Bruce Don, Director, Science and Technology Policy Institute
Science and Technology Policy Institute RAND Phone: (202) 296-5000 1333 H Street NW Web: http://www.rand.org/centers/stpi Washington, DC 20005 Email: stip@rand.org
source: http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1139/MR1139.appf.pdf 13nov02
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