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August 22, 2006
The ethics of biotechnological experimentation with human subjects is a critical moral point in which science and ethics intersect; and it is one that involves the relation between the scientific enterprise and the social values. It is at this point that the modernist goals of medical progress run up against our concern for the inviolability of the human person, and this is a place where society, usually with more-than-willing collaboration of scientists and physicians, erect restrictions, mostly procedural, on what scientists and physicians may freely do to human beings. Ethics then leds to politics as regulation of the questionable means used to pursue excellence or human perfection.
Some argue that we need to decide where the line is between legitimate therapy and enhancement, and argue that in the course of drawing that line, we also beed to try to articulate what human goods are at stake in drawing a line, whether for moral or regulatory purposes. This often focuses on the means used , it can also focus on the modernist aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires. The problem is the drive to mastery of nature.
This is the perspective of Heidegger and Adorno and suprisingly it makes contact with Michael Sandel on the President's Council on Bioethics. He says that the main problem with enhancement and genetic engineering is not that they undermine effort and erode human agency. The:
... morally troubling feature is a kind of hubris and a picture -- a world picture in which we, as human beings, aspire to mastery or sovereignty or control -- ultimate control -- over nature and ourselves such that we come to be and to see ourselves as self-creating beings who can make ourselves over according to our desires.
He calls this the the hubris objection. He adds that, unlike accounts that emphasize the loss of human powers and the erosion of human agency, the hubris objection can explain our moral hesitation to embrace certain genetic alterations of animals. The genetic improvement of animals---- altering the gene that makes chickens want to run free--- represents the ultimate human dominion and mastery.
In his background paper Sandel goes on to say that:
If something like this is true, then the philosophical stakes in the debate over enhancement and genetic engineering are higher than we are accustomed to think. Sorting out the ethics of enhancement will force us to reopen questions that have been largely ignored since the 17th century, when the mechanist picture of nature came to prominence in moral and political philosophy. From the start, the project of mastery and the mechanist picture have gone hand in hand. The discovery that nature was not a meaningful order but a morally inert arena for the exercise of human will gave powerful impetus to the project of mastery, and to a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given. We may now have to choose between shaking off our unease with enhancement and finding a way beyond mechanism to the re-enchantment of nature.
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