One

Is Human Nature Obsolete? collects
papers given in 2001 at a conference at the University of Scranton with an
introduction and one paper written specifically for the anthology. Organizers
and editors Harold Baillie and Timothy Casey asked the conference participants
to address two questions:

(1)   Does the genetic
engineering of humans require a new understanding of what it means to be human?

(2)   Does what we know
already suggest there should be (and can be) effective limits to what can be
done?

Baillie and Casey introduce the collection, summarizing each
essay and conveying the tone of engaging and engaged conversation at the
aforementioned conference.

As in many discussions of these
topics, the focus shifts from genetic engineering in particular to take in germ
line modification, cloning, various artificial insemination techniques, and
abortion. I shall refer to this collection of topics by the term technological
intervention in reproduction. The contributors also discuss the use of
genetic and molecular techniques in other areas of medicine, and in
agriculture, manufacturing, and body modification.  When I refer to both
medical and non-medical uses, I shall use the term genetic and molecular
technological intervention, or GMTI.   This conference included
papers on the history and philosophy of technology in addition to papers on
ethical issues. Several authors discuss whether technological intervention
in reproduction is morally different from intervention by selective
breeding and husbandry, which have a long history and whether the combination
of technological intervention with corporate dominance of our culture makes for
specific moral problems.

Two: Common Concerns 

The first question Baillie and
Casey ask the contributors to address suggests concerns and themes expressing
unease about GMTI. The question assumes the possibility that GMTI
could lead to a new understanding of human nature, or alternatively, assumes
that some think a new understanding of human nature could result from GMTI.
So, one broad concern is whether technological intervention at the genetic
level alters human nature. If it does alter human nature, then that alteration
would have implications for natural law ethics grounded in a specific
philosophical anthropology that is common ground to several philosophers and
theologians in this collection. Given natural law ethics’ grounding in a
philosophical anthropology, the editors’ first question leads the contributors
to consider what natural law ethics have to say about a technology that
threatens to change the nature of that on which the ethics is grounded. Concern
with GMTI threatens widely accepted moral norms and threatens
traditional conceptions of the human and human nature pervades the essays.
Expectably, concern for a threat leads some authors to think that what
threatens is already attacking but in all cases these authors focus on what
often gets dismissed, ignored, or derided by thinkers one would consider
optimists about GMTI. In some contributions the attitude is stronger. Bethke
Elshtain denounces technological intervention in reproduction as a
"messianic project" and Rabinow expresses support for intense
disillusionment with the claim that acquiring scientific knowledge is per se
beneficial. I shall comment on three issues that arise from viewing GMTI
with unease: (1) a concern to define and defend a concept of human nature not
only based in Aristotelian metaphysics but also having wider appeal; (2)
exploring the historical, cultural, and literary expressions of unease about GMTI
and traditional conceptions of human nature; (3) the contrast between the
controlled body and the emerging self. While discussing all three issues, the
authors consider ethical evaluation of individual decisions and social institutions
pertaining to GMTI.

Three: Defining and Defending a Concept of Human Nature

The essays by Harold W. Baillie,
Bernard Rollin, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Thomas Shannon share the concern to
define and defend a concept of human nature rooted in the natural law tradition
but also having broader appeal. In contrast to the contributors who explore
nature and natural law in Aristotle and Duns Scotus, Marc Sagoff explores
Mill’s disambiguation of the meanings of ‘natural,’ between that in which
‘natural’ is opposed to the supernatural and that in which it is opposed to the
artifactual. Sagoff then uses Mill’s disambiguated meanings of ‘natural’ to
help us recognize suppressed premises in natural law theorists’ arguments
against artificial insemination and feminist theorists’ arguments of the
commodification of reproduction. An encouraging sign is the sophistication of
the Aristotelian accounts that make it clear that moral objection to
technological intervention in reproduction and genetics is not based on obscurantist
metaphysics or dogmatic conservatism but on an evolving tradition of thinking
about natural law ethics.

Harold Baillie explores an
Aristotelian-inspired hylomorphic psychology as an alternative to what he calls
the "fallacy" of GMTI, which I prefer to call a mistaken
assumption about GMTI; the mistaken assumption being that altering the
body is the same as altering the self. The genetic code that determines the
form of the body cannot replace the self or soul. He argues persuasively that
what makes us selves is what we do, our choices of action, and our
self-representation in action that is not reducible to the material that
constitutes the body. A self is not merely a body but is the entelechy of the
body — so this implies that becoming a self implies openness to the self I
shall become by my actions. When another limits my range of actions based on
their intentions for me or for the sake of some larger social design, then my
selfhood is diminished. What is morally objectionable about technological
intervention in reproduction is that it masks our nature from ourselves: we are
not made as artifacts are made, but living things, who discover our ends and
our selves by choosing our actions. Baillie provides a position from which to
think about limits on technological intervention in reproduction that
neither appeals to autonomy and self-ownership nor to controversial intuitions
about what is morally permissible.

Bernard E. Rollin’s argument in
"Telos, Value, and Genetic Engineering" is similarly sophisticated in
reformulating Aristotelian insights in terms that take account of evolutionary
and molecular biology. He reformulates the concept of telos from a
metaphysical essence to the concept of a genetically based, environmentally
expressed nature. He argues that the moral injunction to respect the telos
of a thing does not itself prohibit genetic modification of plants and animals.
The injunction to respect the telos should be considered in conjunction
with the moral injunction to conserve well-being. When human activity changes
plants’ and animals’ environments, Rollin judges it morally permissible to
genetically modify plants and animals in ways that alter their nature or telos
so long as that alteration of telos conserves their well-being in the
altered environment.  This argument would justify genetically modifying animals
raised in confined environments, such as chicken farms, so that confinement
longer causes them misery, and thus reduces their well-being.

Rollin’s argument does not transfer
directly to moral claims about genetic modification of human nature. He
distinguishes in humans an admittedly controversial and fuzzy distinction
between an ‘is-telos‘ and an ‘ought-telos,’ the first mainly the
domain of modern biology, the second mainly the domain of our self-concept and
our conceptions of what our ideal selves would be like. The ‘ought-telos‘
includes the ability to exercise freedom and reason, so that while it could be
morally permissible to genetically modify chickens or pigs so they do not experience
misery in confinement the ‘ought-telos‘ gives strong reasons why it is
morally permissible to do the same to humans. He asserts it would be morally
wrong to modify some humans so they could have a 1,000 year lifespan because it
would alienate them from love and friendship with other humans; more generally,
it would be morally wrong to engineer traits in humans that would radically
separate them from human companionship.

I lack the space to discuss the
essays by Shannon and Sowle Cahill in similar detail but they also reformulate
Aristotelian and Scotian insights for application to problems of technological
intervention in reproduction. 

Four: Historical, Cultural, and Literary Expression of
Unease

Some of the historical essays
engage in "grand sweep" history, tracing trends, changes, and
formulations of ideas over some fairly long expanse of history. The essays by
Casey, Rabinow, and Langdon Winner are in this group.  Of these, I found
especially interesting Rabinow’s reflections on the well-known phenomenon of
wounded pride among humans as we have been displaced from the center, topmost
point in our mythic cosmos, a process begun by Copernicus, Freud, and Darwin,
and continuing in the discovery of genetic similarities between ourselves and
the rest of nature. Sagoff also discusses wounded pride in his essay.

Diane B. Paul, Marc Sagoff, Robert
Proctor, and LeRoy Walters find insights in less grandly sweeping history. Each
of the four focuses on issues that arise at the intersection of policy, science,
and morality. Sagoff analyzes changed attitudes in medical ethicists’
discussions of genetic intervention in reproduction between the 1970’s,
which were notably marked by prediction and fear of epochal changes, and early
2000’s, which have a matter of fact tone. He points out that in intervening
years scientists have been persuaded that genes effects are partial, indirect,
and subject to moderating effects of other biological and environmental factors
and that the "genetic exceptionalism" that spurred early fears has
proven false. Walters analyzes three stages in the history of public oversight
of gene transfer experimentation by the National Institutes of Health
Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

            Robert Proctor studies a half-century of changes
in the most accepted theories in anthropology’s sub-disciplines that study
human origins and the role of the UNESCO statement on race in response to Nazi
policies of genocide. The essay covers much ground, including anthropological
theory of what makes a species human, the highly difficult process of inferring
from ancient stone "axes" to their makers, uses, and the character of
the culture(s) that produced them. His study concludes that conventional
liberal attitudes that "race as usually conceived does not exist" and
differences between peoples are due to nurture rather than nature enunciated in
successive UNESCO statements on race is an example of moral and political good
will stifling science.

            Diane Paul’s essay on "Genetic Engineering
and Eugenics: The Uses of History" takes up a mistaken inference in some
arguments that use the history of eugenics movement to conclude that no state
legal regulation of reproduction is morally permissible. The argument she has
in mind argues from the claim that state-sponsored coercive eugenics is morally
wrong to the claim that state interference with individual reproductive choice
is wrong, to the conclusion that any state interference with individual
reproductive choices is morally impermissible. She correctly points out that
the argument commits a fallacy of hasty generalization, moving from the
wrongness of state-sponsored coercive eugenics to the wrongness of any
interference in reproductive choice. The history of state-sponsored coercive
eugenics does not provide us with examples, facts, and patterns that can inform
our judgments about contemporary consumerist, market-driven eugenics. She
concludes that laissez faire policies regarding reproduction are not ipso
facto harmless. Her essay is a valuable caution against inapt
generalization of conclusions from one historical era to another.

            Jean Bethke Elshtain and Lisa Sowle Cahill take
up questions that GMTI raise for Christian social ethics, often phrasing
those questions in terms of dominant institutions of our culture. Bethke Elshtain
asserts that preparations and attempts to map the human genome, intervene in
disease at the germ line level, and clone human beings express an attitude of
pervasive dissatisfaction with our embodied nature, and that same
dissatisfaction results in the expectation that parents "rid
themselves" of wrongful life in order to avoid wrongful birth by aborting
fetuses who show signs of being disabled. She diagnoses this same
dissatisfaction in trends toward decreased care for all children and the view
that families with disabled children impose special burden on social
institutions rather than have special needs for support of social institutions.
I am not in a position to evaluate her claims that a "narcissistic fantasy
of radical sameness" motivates thoughts about human cloning and that
rationalist elites sneeringly dismiss the worries of Christian ethicists. I do
know that her worry about the capacity of a rational morality to do justice to
the claims of people with physical and cognitive disabilities is shared by
David Gauthier, who is as devoted to rationality in morality as Bethke Elshtain
is to denunciation (See Morals By Agreement [New York: Oxford University
Press], p. 18).  My guess is that the rationalist elites have more concerns
with her than she credits them with having.

            Lisa Sowle Cahill forgoes denunciation for wary
dialogue. It seems Sowle Cahill has absorbed the historical lessons advanced by
Sagoff, Walters, and Proctor, so that her criticisms are more focused than Bethke
Elshtain’s. Sowle Cahill thinks that many pressing issues raised by GMTI can
be addressed by adapting commonsense moral norms also found in traditional
natural law ethics. She, like Baillie and Rollin, thinks the natural law
conception of human nature as inherently social is an important premise from
which to consider arguments about GMTI. As an expert in social ethics,
her special contribution is the identification of moral problems in the unequal
distribution to the benefits of GMTI. She argues that unequal distribution
is exacerbated by the combination of technological expertise and unregulated
commercialization of products developed by the GMTI research complex of
for-profit companies, university research labs, and sophisticated marketing
firms. Sowle Cahill also demonstrates there is a  danger that sophisticated
commercial marketing of products and methods for technological intervention
in reproduction will transform family relations from a basis in love and
affection to a commodity that is exploitable for profit and expendable when it
does not profit. 

            In "Visions and Revisions: Life and the
Accident of Birth" Richard Zaner combines a phenomenological
interpretation of Simon Mawer’s novel Mendel’s Dwarf with concerns for
the future of what have been common human experiences of birth and nurture if
technological intervention in reproduction develops in the direction of making
birth more technological and less ‘natural.’ Zaner uses his meditation on the
novel to consider issues raised by the difference between the limited powers of
restorative medicine in the past and expanded powers of molecular medicine in
the future. In the past, those whom restorative medicine has been unable to
help were often considered freakish, alien, and disgraceful. At the same time,
the element of chance involved in birth provided background conditions so that
some features of one’s self and traits were to be accepted rather than
protested. The change to molecular medicine brings with it the power to do
something about what was previously beyond our power to do something about. Zaner
considers this change unparalleled and "appalling" because it
threatens to erase the distinction between nature and culture.

Zaner’s applies his
phenomenological method to the problem of technological conception and birth.
He argues first that as long as we are born of a woman we have a pre-reflective
awareness of intersubjectivity and that our primary way of relating to the
world is through others. Second, birth by non-technological processes implies
something unchosen about one’s genetic makeup.  Birth by completely
technological means, as in imagined futures of test tubes and artificial wombs,
would first eliminate or severely disrupt our pre-reflective awareness of
intersubjectivity and second, introduce the fact that my genetic makeup is
chosen for me. The first alters our phenomenal sense of self. The second is
grounds for altering our belief that the conditions of our birth are conditions
for which protest and claims to redress are not justified, since the genes of
one’s birth have not been an entitlement for our history. He proceeds to
conclude that fetal development is human development and that birth from a
uterine environment is a necessary condition for human life. One need not agree
with his conclusion to appreciate that his discussion identifies a potential
loss about which we should be uneasy.

Five: The Controlled Body and the Emerging Person:
Manipulation, Freedom, and Regulation

             The essays in this volume address different
concepts of control and freedom.  The most basic pairing of these concepts is
the insistence by many authors that the promise of GMTI to give us
control of human bodies does not give us control of persons. When contributors
like Shannon, Sowle Cahill, Baillie, Zaner, and Rollin address the metaphysics
of personhood in natural law ethics, phenomenology, and biology, they are
responding to the first question posed by the conference organizers. A second
pairing of these concepts comes in the cultural critique of efforts to control
the body as a means to freely manipulate the body and the thought that
controlling the body in order to manipulate it is a worthwhile goal of human
life. This leads to the second question Baillie and Casey posed to the
contributors. When contributors like Bethke Elshtain, Casey, Winner, and
Rabinow criticize this goal and suggest alternative goals from our culture’s
history, they are responding to the second question as well as providing an
alternative to the myopia of the present that Bertrand Russell called
"parochialism in time." 

A third pairing of these concepts
comes in the concern for individual choice. Sowle Cahill, Paul, and Winner
argue that the desire for children, family life, and patrimony are manipulated
by commercial forces into projects of controlling the bodies of their children
by the false claim that control of the body results in control of the person
associated with that body. This manipulative project of marketing the products
of technological intervention in reproduction is harder to detect when
controlling the body is lauded as a cultural ideal. Here, the worry is that the
combined power of the cultural ideal of control and constant presentation of
images of happiness by means of control might skew individual’s choices. The
concern for individual choice is also a matter for explicit moral reflection in
the essays by Baillie, Rollin, and Shannon. 

Six: Who Might Benefit from Reading this Book

            I found this book full of insights, challenges,
and careful demonstration that natural law ethics is relevant to a very recent
problem. In addition, the authors discuss issues of concern in philosophy of
science, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of technology, and cultural
criticism. The wide range of the book is also its limitation. If you are
looking for a wide-ranging assessment of human enhancement technologies that is
critical, historical, and encompasses policy, history, and ethics, this is a
good book for you. If you are a teacher seeking an introduction to the issues
of human enhancement, this book is too advanced for an introductory class. For
classroom use, this book would be valuable in an upper level course on the
ethics of human enhancement, the application of natural law ethics to
contemporary topics, or as a secondary text in a philosophy of technology
class.

 

© 2006 Robert L. Muhlnickel

 

Robert L. Muhlnickel, MSW, has been a clinician and teacher
in the University of Rcohester Department of Psychiatry and is completing his Ph.D.
dissertation in Philosophy at the University of Rochester. He also works on a
grant training clinicians in evidence-based family practices forpeople with
serious and persistent mental illness, co-sponsoredby the NYS Office of Mental
Health and University of Rochester Medical Center.

Categories: Genetics, Ethics