Petri Dish Politics

Biotechnology will make it possible for us to live longer and better. So why are some people dead set against it?

Ronald Bailey from the December 1999 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Leon Kass is disheartened by this prospect. "We triumph over nature's unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and our fickle opinions," writes Kass in the September issue of Commentary. In other words, he is against human freedom because he doesn't think we can handle it. Ultimately, Kass wants to preserve the "freedom" of some portion of humanity to be miserable, sick, and unhappy. But if they were truly free, would people choose to suffer or to subject their children to such suffering? Not likely.

Kass does have a point, however, when he writes in Commentary, "Even people who might otherwise welcome the growth of genetic knowledge and technology are worried about the coming power of geneticists, genetic engineers, and, in particular, governmental authorities armed with genetic technology."

There is a threat of government control. Some intellectuals are already succumbing to the temptation of government-supported and mandated eugenics, lest the benefits of genetic engineering be spread unequally. "Laissez-faire eugenics will emerge from the free choices of millions of parents," warns Time magazine columnist Robert Wright. He then concludes, "The only way to avoid Huxleyesque social stratification may be for government to get into the eugenics business."

Clearly we must be on guard against any attempts to harness this new technology to government-mandated ends. But a Brave New World of government eugenics is not an inevitable consequence of biomedical progress. It depends instead on whether we leave individuals free to make decisions about their biological futures or whether, in the name of equality or of control, we give that power to centralized bureaucracies. Huxley's world had no "laissez-faire eugenics" emerging from free choice; Brave New World is about a centrally planned society.

A biological future without a plan is exactly what scares critics on both the right and the left. "Though well-equipped [through biotech], we know not who we are or where we are going," Kass fearfully writes. If we know not who we are, surely advances in biotech are helping us to understand more completely who we are. As for where we are going, the fact that we don't know is why we go. Over the horizon of human discovery Kass sees a territory marked, like the maps of yore, "Here be monsters." To avoid the supposed monsters, Kass wants humanity to stay quietly at home with its old conceptions, technologies, traditions, and limited hopes.

If we use biotech to help future generations to become healthier, smarter, and perhaps even happier, have we "imposed" our wills on them? Will we have deprived them of the ability to flourish as full human beings? To answer yes to these questions is to adopt Rousseau's view of humanity as a race of happy savages who have been degraded by civilization. The fact is that previous generations have "imposed" all sorts of technologies and institutions on us. Thank goodness, because by any reasonable measure we are far freer than our ancestors. Our range of choices in work, spouses, communities, medical treatments, transportation--the list is endless--are incomparably vaster than theirs. Like earlier technologies, biotech will liberate future generations from today's limitations and offer them a much wider scope of freedom. This is the gift we will give them. Like all technologies, biotech could be abused, but using it is not, as Kass and Paul Johnson would have us believe, the same as abusing it.

Scientific facts will not resolve these issues. On the one hand, people who see human genes as the defining essence of humanity will object to stem cell research and a good deal else in the coming biotech revolution. One the other hand, people who see human beings as defined essentially by their minds will have fewer moral objections.

At a hearing earlier this year, Edward Furton, who works at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to "please remember in your deliberations that millions of your fellow citizens hold that the human embryo is a human life worthy of the protection of the law." He added, "As a result of the tainted origin, many Americans who have deeply held moral objections to embryo destruction may choose not to receive any benefits from this new research."

No one is suggesting that people should be forced to use medicines that they find morally objectionable. Perhaps some day different treatment regimens will be available to accommodate the different values and beliefs held by patients. One can imagine one medicine for Christian Scientists (minimal recourse to antibiotics, etc.), another for Jehovah's Witnesses (no use of blood products or blood transfusions), yet another for Roman Catholics (no use of treatments derived from human embryonic stem cells), and one for those who wish to take the fullest advantage of all biomedical discoveries.

In a sense, the battle over the future of biotech --and, if Fukuyama is correct, the future of humanity--is between those who fear what humans, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, might do with biotech and those who think that it is high time that we also eat of the Tree of Life.