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August 23, 2006
Sitting behind the public debates about biotechnology and the regulation of human cloning is a concern about the use of biotechnical powers to pursue the age old dream of "perfection," both of body and of mind. It is often surfaces in comments about the pursuit of optimum babies, "man playing God," or about the Brave New World or a "post-human future." Then the concern drops into the background. But this concern about using biotechnology to achieve human perfection to overcome the limitations of bodily decay, psychic distress, and the frustration of human aspiration never goes away. It keeps on re-surfacing.
In a 2003 lecture entitled Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Improvement Leon R. Kass, Chairman of The President's Council on Bioethics, addresses this concern from a bioethical perspective. He said that these are powers that affect the capacities and activities of the human body, powers that affect the capacities and activities of the mind or soul, and powers that affect the shape of the human lifecycle, at both ends and in between. He adds:
We already have powers to prevent fertility and to promote it; to initiate life in the laboratory; to screen our genes, both as adults and as embryos, and to select (or reject) nascent life based on genetic criteria; to insert new genes into various parts of the adult body, and someday soon also into gametes and embryos; to enhance muscle performance and endurance; to replace body parts with natural or mechanical organs, and perhaps soon, to wire ourselves using computer chips implanted into the body and brain; to alter memory, mood, and attention though psychoactive drugs; and to prolong not just the average but also the maximum human life expectancy. The technologies for altering our native capacities are mainly those of genetic screening and genetic engineering; drugs, especially psychoactive ones; and the ability to replace body parts or to insert novel ones.
He states that these powers have not been developed for the purpose of producing perfect or post-human beings. They have been produced largely for the purpose of preventing and curing disease, and of reversing disabilities. Yet the "dual use" aspects of most of these powers, encouraged by the ineradicable human urge toward "improvement" and the commercial interests that see market opportunities for non-therapeutic uses. Once in the marketplace , these techniques and powers can be deployed to produce desires where none existed before, and things often go where no one ever intended.
In his lecture Kass leave aside the pursuit of optimum babies or better citizens, to concentrate on the strictly personal goals of self-improvement, to those efforts to preserve and augment the vitality of the body and to enhance the happiness of the soul. He says that:
These goals are, arguably, the least controversial, the most continuous with the aims of modern medicine and psychiatry (better health, peace of mind), and the most attractive to most potential consumers---probably indeed to most of us. It is perhaps worth remembering that it was these goals, now in the realm of possibility, that animated the great founders of modern science: flawlessly healthy bodies, unconflicted and contented souls, and freedom from the infirmities of age, perhaps indefinitely We are already walking down this pathway are we not? With respect to the pursuit of "ageless bodies," we can replace worn out parts, we can improve upon normal and healthy parts, and, more radically, we can try to retard or stop the entire process of biological senescence. With respect to the pursuit of "happy souls," we can eliminate psychic distress, we can produce states of transient euphoria, and we can engineer more permanent conditions of good cheer, optimism, and contentment eg., Ecstasy, (the forerunner of Huxley's "soma" ) and powerful yet seemingly safe anti-depressant and mood brighteners like Prozac.
Kass introduces the distinction between 'therapy' and 'enhancement' to explore this ethically: 'therapy' is the treatment of individuals with known diseases or disabilities; enhancement,' is the directed uses of biotechnical power to alter, by direct intervention, not diseased processes but the "normal" workings of the human body and psyche (whether by drugs, genetic engineering, or mechanical/computer implants into the body and brain). He goes on to say that:
Those who introduced this distinction hoped by this means to distinguish between the acceptable and the dubious or unacceptable uses of biomedical technology: therapy is always ethically fine, enhancement is, at least prima facie, ethically suspect. Gene therapy for cystic fibrosis or Prozac for psychotic depression is fine; insertion of genes to enhance intelligence or steroids for Olympic athletes is not. Health providers and insurance companies, by the way, have for now bought into the distinction, paying for treatment of disease, but not for enhancements.
Kass then argues that this distinction is inadequate and finally unhelpful to the moral analysis. He says that:
Needless arguments about whether or not something is or is not an "enhancement" get in the way of the proper question: What are the good and bad uses of biotechnical power? What makes a use "good," or even just "acceptable"? It does not follow from the fact that a drug is being taken solely to satisfy one's desires that its use is objectionable. Conversely, certain interventions to restore natural functioning wholeness----for example, to enable postmenopausal women to bear children or sixty-year-old men to keep playing professional ice hockey--- might well be dubious uses of biotechnical power. The human meaning and moral assessment are unlikely to be settled by the term "enhancement," any more that they are by the nature of the technological intervention itself.
What needs to be question is the idea of human perfection and Kass argues that a flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or untroubled soul--genuine human flourishing, he says, is rooted in aspirations born of the kinds of deficiencies that come from having limited and imperfect bodies.
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I was starting to read this article and then it trails off . . . Do you have the rest of it?