Reason Magazine - Contributors

Nietzschean Endgame

info@reason.com (Francis Fukuyama) — Sat, 23 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

I think that one of the great virtues of Greg Stock's book is that he is willing to take some risks in predicting what kinds of changes might be in store in the long-run future in terms of enhancement technology. Most people in the scientific community are not willing to speculate out beyond the next five to 10 years. I urge people to read the last chapter of Redesigning Humans if you want to understand why I'm worried about biotechnology.

In that chapter, Stock suggests a number of things that might happen in a future world in which various forms of enhancement become safe, effective, and inexpensive. Among other things, he suggests that reproduction via sex may disappear altogether as a result of the difficulties of handling artificial chromosomes in vivo. Reproduction could not happen outside a lab. We could freely alter our personalities and moods through a combination of drugs and genetics.

But most importantly, the human race disappears. He suggests that there will be differentiation within our species, and, in effect, new speciation. Some groups of people may decide to enhance their children for musical ability, some for athletic prowess, others for math or literary ability. There will be a basic social divide between the enhanced and the unenhanced, and in the competitive situation that will emerge, it will be difficult for people not to join into this genetic arms race. Moreover, genetic differentiation will become a cornerstone of international politics. If we and the Germans decide not to take part, the Chinese will charge ahead with self-enhancement, and then we as a nation will be challenged to follow suit.

What I don't understand is why anyone thinks that in this kind of world -- one in which the existing genetic homogeneity of the human race is being undermined -- we will be able to continue to live within the nice, liberal democratic framework that we currently enjoy. Stock argues as if we can presume the continuity of that political world, and that the biggest arguments we will have will concern whether we have a little more regulation and less progress, or the reverse, and get to fully enjoy the technological paradise opening before us.

But as I noted earlier, in this kind of world Nietzsche is the best guide to what politics will be like. What is going to happen to equality of opportunity when a non-musically enhanced child aspires to be a musician, which has become not just the territory of a guild of musicians, but of a subspecies of musicians whose total genetic identity is tied up in that form of life? Why shouldn't the enhanced start demanding superior political rights for themselves, and seek to dominate the unenhanced, since they will in fact be superior not just as a result of acquired social status and education, but of genetic enhancements as well? What is going to happen to international conflict, when other, hostile societies are not just culturally different, but not fully human, either?

The fact is that there will be no theoretical or practical reason at that point not to abandon the principle of universal human equality (i.e., the one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence). It is strongly believed in today in part as a matter of faith, but also in part because it is empirically supported. When the principle was enunciated in 1776, blacks and women were not granted political rights in North America because it was believed that they were too stupid, or too emotional, or otherwise lacking in some essential human characteristic to be granted equal rights. This view resurfaced as scientific racism in the early 20th century, and one of the great achievements of our time is that both the empirical doctrine and the politics built on it have been discredited.

So if we are going to embrace this technology and the prospect of human self-enhancement, we ought to do it with our eyes open. We should say, with Nietzsche, that this is a wonderful opportunity because we can finally transcend liberal democracy, and reestablish the possibility of natural aristocracy, of social hierarchy, of the pathos of distance (i.e., the inability to empathize with the suffering of others), and otherwise usher in an era of "immense wars of the spirit."

As I said, I'm grateful that Greg Stock has clarified all of these issues for us.

Upholding Norms

info@reason.com (Francis Fukuyama) — Thu, 21 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

I think Gregory Stock has misunderstood a couple of the points I was trying to make in my initial response. The issue with regard to sex selection is not that it would be a serious problem in this country; it's possible now, after all, but not widely practiced. The point is that individual choice coupled with the spread of cheap biomedical technologies can quickly produce population-level effects with serious social consequences. In other words, the problem with eugenics is not simply that it is state-sponsored and coercive; if practiced by enough individuals, it can also have negative consequences for the broader society.

I suspect that if the U.S. ever gets into something like this in the future, it will have to do with potential "enhancement" targets other than sex. One I speculate about in my book is sexual preference: It seems pretty clear to me that if parents, including ones who are perfectly accepting of gays today, had the choice, they would select against their children being gay, if for no other reason than their desire to have grandchildren (contrary to Stock, by the way, gays can't reproduce, so I'm not quite sure how they'd do germline intervention to produce gay children). The proportion of gays in the population could drop quite dramatically, and I'm not at all sure that society as a whole (let alone gays as a persecuted minority) would be enhanced as a result.

Governments can intervene successfully to correct individual choices like these. The severe sex ratio imbalance in Korea that emerged in the early 1990s was noticed, and the government took measures to enforce existing laws against sex selection so that today the ratio is much closer to 50-50. If the government of a young democracy like Korea can do this, I don't see why we can't.

The reason I noted that life extension coupled with diminished capability can create negative externalities was not to suggest that we should ban or regulate such procedures. Stock is perfectly right that we already have adopted a lot of medical innovations that produce this tradeoff, and that we can't stop future advances for this reason. The reason this is an important issue is that in contemporary debates over stem cells and cloning there is an unquestioned assumption that anything that will prolong life or cure disease is obviously desirable and automatically trumps other ethical concerns.

This is not obvious to me. Anyone who has walked around a nursing home recently (as I have) can see that past advances in biomedicine have created a horrible situation for many elderly people who can't function at anything close to the levels they'd like, but who also can't die. Of course, new advances in biotechnology may provide cures for degenerative, age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, but the research community is in effect just cleaning up the mess it created. So when we are balancing near-term rights and wrongs, the argument that more medical advance is necessarily good needs to be treated with some skepticism. At the hearing on the Weldon bill banning cloning last summer, a representative of a patients advocacy group said the baby boomers were getting older and desperately needed cures for a variety of diseases with which they would soon be afflicted-as if research cloning would prevent them from ever having to die. If you want a real nightmare scenario, consider one in which we double life spans but increase periods of debility by a few decades.

Stock is correct in saying that much of my interest in having new regulatory institutions in place has to do with ethical and social consequences of new technology, and not simply safety. States intervene all the time to shape norms and produce certain social outcomes. Incest is an example, and it seems to me a very apt analogy to reproductive cloning. Of course, you can find sympathetic situations where an individual might want to clone, say, a dead child. But you can also find sympathetic situations where you might want a brother and sister to marry and have children (e.g., they have grown up apart, have no dangerous recessive genes, etc.).

But the fact that there are certain sympathetic cases does not mean that society would be better off without a ban on incest. The possible benefits of cloning need to be balanced against social harms. Consider the following scenario: A wife decides to clone herself because a couple cannot otherwise have children. As their daughter grows up to be a teenager, the husband will find his wife growing older and less sexually attractive. In the meantime, his daughter, who will be a physical duplicate of her mother, will blossom into sexual maturity and increasingly come to resemble the younger woman the husband fell in love with and married. It is hard to see how this situation would not produce an extremely unhealthy situation within the family; in a certain number of cases, it would lead to incest.

Stock is using a rhetorical ploy in suggesting that I am recommending new, tyrannical government intrusion into private lives. Rather, I am recommending an extension of existing institutions to take account of the new possibilities that will be put before us as a result of technological advance. This may result in regulation irksome to industry and to certain individuals, but it will be no more tyrannical than existing rules banning incest or, in the case of the Koreans, banning sex selection. All societies control social behavior through a complex web of norms, economic incentives, and laws. All I am suggesting is that the law part of the mix will need to be updated and strengthened in light of what is to come.

Sensible Restrictions

info@reason.com (Francis Fukuyama) — Tue, 19 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

Gregory Stock offers two sets of arguments against restricting future biotechnologies: first, that such rules are unnecessary as long as reproductive choices are being made by individual parents rather than states, and second, that they cannot be enforced and will be ineffective even if they were to be enacted. Let me respond to each in turn.

While genetic choices made by parents (either in the short run, via preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and in the more distant future, through germ-line engineering) are on the whole likely to be better than those made by coercive states, there are several grounds for not letting individuals have complete freedom of choice in this regard.

The first two are utilitarian. When we get into human germline engineering, safety problems will multiply exponentially over what we today experience with drug approval. Genetic causation is highly complex, with multiple genes interacting to create one outcome or behavior, and single genes having multiple effects. When a long-term genetic effect may not show up for decades after the procedure was administered, parents will risk a multitude of unintended and largely irreversible consequences for their children. This would seem to be, prima facie, a situation calling for strict regulation.

A second utilitarian concern has to do with possible negative externalities, which is the classic ground for state regulation, accepted by even the most orthodox free-market economists. An example is sex selection. Today in Asia, as a result of cheap sonograms and abortion, cohorts are being born with extremely lopsided sex ratios-117 boys for every 100 girls in China, and at one point 122 boys for every 100 girls in Korea. Sex selection is rational from the standpoint of individual parents, but imposes costs on society as a whole in terms of the social disruption that a large number of unattached and unmarriageable young males can produce. Similar negative externalities can arise from individual choices to, for example, prolong life at the cost of a lower level of cognitive and physical functioning.

A further set of concerns about the ability to "design" our children has to do with the ambiguity of what constitutes "improvement" of a human being, particularly when we get into attributes of personality and our emotional makeup. We are the product of a highly complex evolutionary adaptation to our physical and social environment, which has created an equally complex whole human being. Genetic interventions made out of faddishness, political correctness, or simple whim might upset that balance in ways that we scarcely understand-in the interests, for example, of making boys less violent and aggressive, girls more assertive, people more or less competitive, etc. Would an African-American's child be "improved" if we could genetically eliminate his or her skin pigmentation?

The final issue concerns human nature itself. Human rights are ultimately derived from human nature. That is, we assign political rights to ourselves based on our understanding of the ways members of our species are similar to one another, and different from other species. We are fortunate to be a relatively homogenous species: Earlier views that blacks were not intelligent enough to vote, or that women were too emotional to be granted equal political rights, proved to be empirically false. Greg Stock's final chapter opens up the prospect of a future world in which this human homogeneity splinters, under the impact of genetic engineering, into competing human biological kinds. What kind of politics do we imagine such a splintering will produce? The idea that our present-day tolerant, liberal, democratic order will survive these kinds of changes is far-fetched: Nietzsche, not John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, should be your guide to the politics of such a future.

Stock's second set of arguments concern his repeated assertions that no one can stop this technology. He is certainly right that if some future biotechnology proves safe, cheap, effective, and highly desirable, government would not be able to stop it and probably should not try. What I am calling for, however, is not a ban on wide swaths of future technology, but rather their strict regulation in light of the dangers outlined above.

We today regulate biomedical technology all the time. People can argue whether that technology is properly regulated and where exactly to draw various regulatory lines. But the argument that procedures that will be as potentially unsafe and ethically questionable as, say, germline engineering for enhancement purposes, cannot in principle be regulated, has no basis in past experience.

We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did, and allowed doctors to deliberately inject infectious substances into their subjects. We today enforce rules permitting the therapeutic use of drugs like Ritalin, while prohibiting their use for enhancement (i.e., entertainment) purposes.

The argument that these technologies will simply move to more favorable jurisdictions if they are banned in any one country may or may not carry weight; it all depends on what they are and what the purpose of the regulation is. I regard a ban on reproductive cloning to be analogous to current legislation banning incest (indeed, many of the considerations are a virtually identical mix of safety and ethical reasons). The purpose of such a ban would not be undermined if a few rich people could get themselves cloned outside the country, and in any event, much of the world seems to be moving rather rapidly to a global reproductive cloning ban. The fact that the Chinese may not be on board shouldn't carry much weight; the Chinese involuntarily harvest organs from executed prisoners as well and are hardly an example we would want to emulate.

I don't think that a set of regulations designed to focus future biomedicine on therapeutic rather than enhancement purposes constitutes oppressive state intervention or goes so far beyond the realm of what is done today that we can declare its final failure in advance. Greg Stock is in effect saying that since rules against doping in athletic competitions don't work 100 percent of the time, we should throw them out all together and have our athletes compete in the future not on the basis of their natural abilities, but on the basis of who has the best pharmacologist. I'd rather watch and participate in competitions of the old-fashioned kind.