Frankenstein, Minister of Health

14 FRANKENSTEIN, MINISTER OF HEALTH

What is the value of the argument that says we must not play God or go too far against nature?

SCENARIO 1: POSTHUMAN

If geneticists of genius enable us to enhance to a considerable extent our muscular, perceptual, affective, and cognitive capacities, as well as our size and other aspects of our external form, our present criteria for identifying membership in the human species will necessarily be modified.

If it becomes possible by chemical or mechanical means to instill all manner of beliefs, desires, and sensations in our brains, techniques of surveillance and manipulation of minds could be taken very far: the very notions of personal experience and of the freedom of our inner conscience would not be able to resist.

If the transplanting of natural or artificial organs no longer poses any technical problem, the ideas we form of the sacred, indivisible, and unavailable character of the human body and of its intimate links to our personal identity are destined to change.

If reproductive human cloning becomes possible, we will probably be obliged to renounce the idea that a personal future of which we know almost nothing is constitutive of our identity.

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If the aging process is better understood and better controlled, if we live infinitely longer in good health, our conceptions of what a “wasted” or a “successful” life is cannot remain the same.

If it becomes possible to create transhuman, posthuman, or subhuman beings, cyborgs, or chimeras, the ideas we form of the limits of the moral community, that is to say, of the beings we have chosen not to treat as things, goods simply to exploit or to consume, are liable to be profoundly transformed. It would be absurd to deny that if all these knowledges and techniques became readily applicable and accessible, there would be practical consequences so far as our own lives were concerned.

Would they all be negative? Might they radically modify our conceptions of ethics?

We are still very far from understanding all the implications of the applications of biomedical technologies.

We can envisage the possibility of their rendering certain preconceived ideas concerning human nature obsolete and modifying our conceptions of the good.

But why should they affect our conceptions of justice and their exigencies, such as the equal access of all to desirable technical innovations?

Do you think that we should ban the realization of these biotechnical projects even if everyone could profit from them equally?

Do you think that we should ban the realization of these biotechnical projects even if it could help to eliminate certain natural inequalities between people?

Do you think that we should ban the realization of these biotechnical projects without taking justice into account, simply because it would jeopardize our conceptions of human identity?

Do you think that we should ban the realization of these biotechnical projects without taking justice into account, simply because it would jeopardize our conceptions of the good?

Do you think that it would be possible to accept certain of these projects but not all of them, or do you think that we should ban all of them without exception, for fear of a slippery slope that would lead us inexorably from the most tolerable to the most monstrous?

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SCENARIO 2: TOO HUMAN

At the age of forty, women still have on average half of their life ahead of them, and their longevity is set to rise. Assisted by medical advances, they will remain in good health for longer and longer, thereby able to preserve and nurture both their skills and their looks. The possibility of freezing an ovum will allow them to conceive a child belatedly without risks for the child’s health, and even to do so after menopause. Equality with men as regards procreation will cease to be a utopia.

However, women seem overwhelmingly inclined to reject such a prospect. It is rejected entirely by 92 percent. Only 8 percent of Frenchwomen under the age of forty seem ready to countenance such a possibility. And, within this group, only 3 percent say that if they had the chance, they would “certainly” do it, while 5 percent say that they would “probably” do it! Why? In their explanations, they say that we must not “go too far against nature.” Yet they have largely accepted chemical contraception. Wasn’t that a clear goodbye to nature?

What is the value of the argument that says that we must not go “too far against nature”? Like all very general notions, “nature” has several senses. For John Stuart Mill, there are two main ones: 1. “Nature” means everything that exists and everything that could exist according to physical laws (which excludes miracles but not GMOs).

2. “Nature” means the world as it would be without man’s intervention (which excludes, directly or indirectly, everything that exists on the planet).

In the first sense, the idea that man must follow nature is absurd, for man can do nothing else but follow nature. Everything that he lives or feels depends upon the laws of nature. Everything that he does, everything that he makes rests upon the laws of nature (even the GMOs).

In the second sense, the idea that man must follow nature is irrational and immoral.

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Irrational: Every human action amounts to altering the course of nature, and every useful action to improving it. Doing nothing “against nature” would amount to doing nothing at all! One could also say that “taking nature as a model” in the second sense would imply an absolute ban upon every technological innovation, including the hammer.

Immoral: If man did everything that nature does, we would find him absolutely monstrous: “In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. . . . Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed.” I would add, concurring with Mill (something of a habit of mine), that the duty to follow nature (or the ban on going against nature) in both senses flouts several elementary rules of moral reasoning.

To say that man must follow nature (or not go against nature) violates the rule: it is pointless to oblige people to do what they do necessarily.

Indeed if man can do nothing else but follow nature (in the first sense), what is the point of hammering away at the notion that it is his duty to do so? What is the point of recommending that he do what he is already doing?

Furthermore, appeals to nature in the second sense, in order to say what is good or bad, just or unjust, consistently violate the rule: “one cannot derive an ought from an is.”

This rule does indeed imply: 1. It is not because something is natural that it is good.

2. It is not because something is not natural that it is bad.

The appeal to nature leads us, finally, to flout the principle that like cases must be treated alike, and to invent all sorts of “slippery slopes.”

To say that there is a slippery slope amounts to asserting that, if we tolerate a particular action whose moral value is the object of a controversy

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(euthanasia, research on embryos, abortion, and the like), we will thereby necessarily come to tolerate actions whose morally reprehensible character is not the object of any controversy, such as the wholesale elimination of the poor, the weak, the ugly, and the handicapped or belated infanticide. If we prefer not to end up drawing such inadmissible conclusions, we would do better not to put ourselves on the slippery slope that necessarily leads to them.

The problem raised by this argument is that the reasons for which we should necessarily end up with unacceptable conclusions are either hidden or unfounded.

The case of the public debate on cloning is interesting because we can clearly see how the idea that we must not “go too far against nature” or “take ourselves to be God” entails an unconsidered use of the slippery slope argument and other errors of moral reasoning.

1. Cloning techniques could of course be put to malevolent purposes.

Yet the same holds for other techniques of artificial procreation also, which is not sufficient reason to justify the banning of them. No one, for example, thinks that we should ban in vitro fertilization outright under the pretext that one day a tyrannical government might compel women to carry frozen embryos in order to repeople a nation whose workforce had been depleted by retirements. Why does cloning cause us to fear the worst? Is this not a groundless fear of a slippery slope?

2. It is fairly easy to understand what could justify a massive demand for cloning for therapeutic purposes, even if we are against its implementation for all sorts of reasons, religious ones among others. But what could really justify a demand for massive reproductive cloning? The rule it is pointless to ban people from doing what they will not do in any case is flouted.

3. Cloning is often denounced as a violation of the person because the child born thus would be the product of a purely instrumental project. But if we had to ban every reproductive project that could be judged to be “instrumental,” there would not be many left. For centuries we made children so as to be looked after, cared for, and sustained when we grew old or fell ill. We cannot claim that such parental projects were not instrumental, and yet no one seems to think that they were particularly immoral.

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In reality, the project of making children is always more or less instrumental. We continue to reproduce in order to guarantee a measure of material or aective security, to give pleasure to our partner or our relatives, and so on.

It is only in the case of cloning that the supposedly instrumental character of reproduction is judged to be immoral or monstrous. Why? The rule treat like cases alike is violated.

From the fact, however, that the majority of the arguments against cloning have to be rejected because they violate the elementary rules of moral reasoning, it does not follow that there are good reasons for promoting it.

A thought experiment could help us to see why.

It is not completely far-fetched to envisage a situation in which men’s natural fertility would be threatened by a general and irreversible impoverishment of human sperm. In the circumstances, cloning could represent a reasonable solution, perhaps the only one, to the problem of the survival of the human species.

Can we envisage other cases that could justify a promotion of cloning? If not, why should we promote it?