Ethics & Biotechnology

Anthony Dyson, John Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134874613
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The development of biotechnology has produced nothing short of a revolution, both in our capacity to manipulate living things from single plant cells to human nature itself, but also to manufacture brand new life forms. This power to shape and create forms of life has sometimes been described as the power to "play God" and this book is about the ethics of "playing God" in the field of biotechnology. International scholars cover moral dilemmas posed by biotechnology, from the smallest cells through animals to the engineering of human beings.

1

MODERN ERRORS, ANCIENT VIRTUES

Stephen R.L.Clark

SETTING THE SCENE

Biotechnology is the art of manipulating living forms as though they were machines. We have been manipulating, and transforming, living forms since we adopted pastoralist ways—by breeding, domestication, training—but it is only recently that anyone has supposed that we could alter outward forms or behaviour by interfering with the inner mechanisms, the mechanical, biochemical and genetic processes that sustain outward shapes and motions. In the past we could do little more than select parents with desirable characteristics in the hope that they would engender what we wanted, and—once the offspring were there—punish or cajole them to do what we wanted. Biotechnology offers the hope that we could achieve a more secure result by altering the biochemical base on which the characters we desire are founded. It is not clear whether, once the possibility is realized, we could retain our present conceptions of human life. If we could engineer saints, heroes, savants, slaves or psychopaths to order, would any of us be human any more?²

But that issue is not my present concern, except indirectly. If biotechnologists are ever to succeed, they must engage in invasive experimentation on living systems. Eventually, they will experiment on ‘human beings’. But their chief victims will at first be non-human, even though the drift of their endeavours must be to transform human beings into the very things that we have reckoned merely animal, of whom Aquinas said that ‘they do not act, but are acted on’. Before we allow that denouement we should pause to reconsider what our right relations with the animals on whom we—and biotechnologists—rely might be.

The topic of animal experimentation arouses many passions. On the one hand are those who see it, straightforwardly, as torture, the deliberate inflicting of pain on defenceless creatures. On the other, those who as passionately believe that we must go on learning how animal organisms work if we are to continue to discover cures for disease and disability. Some of the latter, historically, have held that Animals’ hardly feel at all, or (if they do) it doesn’t matter much. Others hold only that some pains are unavoidable if science is to progress, but that the scientists concerned will certainly be doing their best to ensure that as few and as trivial pains as possible are caused to our unwilling collaborators. The most recent British Act on the treatment of experimental subjects in the United Kingdom requires that animals judged likely to be suffering intense and long- lasting pain be killed. Often enough, neither side can quite believe that the other can be serious. Fox-hunters typically believe that hunt saboteurs are communists or worse; saboteurs typically believe that hunters are bloodthirsty yuppies or worse. So also here: experimenters think protesters are sentimental Luddites; antivivisectionists believe that scientists are career-conscious sadists. Both sides can occasionally uncover reason to suspect that they are right.

But the issue can be approached academically, with hatred and contempt for none, and it better had be if we are ever to be able to approach it politically as well. Such academic treatment has its own drawbacks. It must take place within a shared tradition of reasoned argument, and that very tradition may, historically, have built-in limitations. Patriarchalists can often sound to themselves like reasonable people just because it has been axiomatic that reason is a masculine preserve. Feminists who set themselves to argue with the enemy sometimes feel themselves at a disadvantage if they have to do so in a masculinist tongue, and respond by denouncing ‘reason’ as a patriarchal tool. Much the same problem faces radical zoophiles: it is ‘obvious’ to any reasonable person that Animals’ matter infinitely less than ‘humans’, and anyone who doubts that this is true cannot be serious. I remain convinced that Reason transcends tradition, even though it must take shape therein, and that we ought always to suspect what ‘reasonable people’ say.

Experimentation is not the only—or even the most significant—area in which our relations with non-human animals need to be reconstructed. I have already mentioned parallel disputes about the rights and wrongs of hunting. Hunters in these settled islands insist upon the need to control animal populations and the relative humanity and success of hunting with hounds (as opposed to trapping, poisoning or shooting); they also associate themselves with hunters in quite different milieux, for whom hunting is a necessary stay against starvation. Those opposed to such local practices doubt the sincerity of spokesmen for field sports in making those associations: shooting and trapping somehow become humane when they in their turn must be defended against complaint; the needs of hunter-gatherers are not those of the Home Counties. But hunting, shooting, fishing (however significant they may be as totems) are also not the major cause of animal exploitation or employment. It is not unreasonable for huntsmen and experimentalists alike to comment that their victims are numbered in hundreds or thousands, while the victims (direct and indirect) of our agricultural and domestic cruelty are numbered in many millions. Huntsmen and experimentalists constitute easily defined targets: those who finance what radical zoophiles consider cruelty in and around farms are still most of the population. Even our casual kindness and protective sentimentalism, exercised on furry creatures close at hand, is often exploitative—a fact we find as difficult to face as patriarchalists do the oppressive quality of their sentimental ‘respect’ for women.

The point of these reminders is just this: experimentalists can usually insist that they are as likely to obey the unspoken laws of humane life as anyone else. There is little reason to suppose that there are more cruel and negligent people in the scientific world than anywhere else. There may be fewer sentimentalists, simply because people unable to control immediate impulses of unreflective kindness or distaste will not go far in the profession. But the standards scientists work to will be very much like those of society in general. Why, then, should they be condemned? A partial reply might draw upon the undoubted internationalism of science: the scientific community, properly enough, does not draw its standards only from one nation’s mind-set. Britons in the USA, for example, are regularly reminded that their own (maybe sentimental) concern for animals is not widely shared. American children, quite apart from the pervasive influence of a sentimentalized brutality enshrined in Wild West stories, are educated in school biology to discount the thought that animals can suffer pain or boredom or annoyance. Such ill-argued behaviourism is much less of a cultural force in Britain, and our national myths are of a more domestic kind. There are, after all, forces that do incline the scientifically trained to discount more of their untutored or their cultured sentiment than others. On which more below.

But the chief point I wish to insist on here is this: it may well be true that scientists mostly act upon the very same moral assumptions as non-scientists, and that their treatment of animals is no worse (and may sometimes be much better) than others’. The radical charge against experimentalists is not that they are unusually cruel or negligent, but that they act out—in a particularly noticeable form—assumptions deeply ingrained in contemporary culture which are actually false or wicked. Those who are seriously and deeply concerned about the whole practice of animal experimentation (and not just about occasional and obvious abuses) challenge human culture.

II THE IMPORTANCE OF SCEPTICAL ENQUIRY

So what are these assumptions, and if they are false (or even obviously false) how can they still be influencing us? It is important to remember that we are all inclined to go on acting on ideas that we actually know are false. One of the most difficult of lessons to learn is simply to eject hypotheses that we have found are false. You may find that surprising: surely we are all honest and reasonable people here, quite ready to try out hypotheses and abandon those that we have found are wrong? Of course there will be some hypotheses of which we are so fond that we will find it hard to agree that they are false. But once the point is made, that so they are, of course we shall abandon them. To say and believe that they are false just is to abandon them.

Unfortunately things are not quite so simple. An idea once entertained has its own influence. We are all bedevilled by hypotheses long since proved false, that we do not wish true, which yet control our actions and beliefs. The trouble often lies with the very principle of non-contradiction, that is the principle of rational thought. We do not want to contradict ourselves, and for that very reason cannot quite give up any idea, however foolish, that we have once given room to. We prefer to devise all manner of epicycles and ad hoc inventions rather than admit that we were, simply, wrong. But even that is not the whole explanation. It just seems to be the case that we find any sort of spring-cleaning very difficult. Psychologists have tried the following experiment: the subject population are asked for their opinion on some leading figure of the day, and then told a story very much to that person’s discredit. Obviously enough their opinion of the figure goes down. They are then told that the story was entirely, absolutely, false, and their opinion sought once more. It remains far more unfavourable than it was when they began. The moral, simple-mindedly, is that mud sticks. More generally: we are often moved in ways that rationally we could not defend by the lingering effects of stories that we know or believe are false. Without an occasional dose of deliberate, sceptical enquiry, we shall continue to misdirect ourselves.

Such scepticism is a philosophical tool, and philosophers, like everyone else, are all too inclined to relapse upon the certainties born of beef and backgammon once the mood has passed. Perhaps that is inevitable, and I must accept that most of my readers will regard my attack on our present presuppositions as deliberately extreme, a device to be accepted as a way of pulling us back towards the ‘norm’ of moderate concern for animals. I doubt myself if there is any real content or foundation for that norm: my scepticism lies deeper, however uncomfortable even I may find it. Consider it possible, please, that we have all been wrong, and that the way to truth requires a really radical repentance. Unless you take that seriously you will not even gain the advantage of a moderate dose of scepticism, and still be left enacting ideas that you know are false.

III EGOISM

The first and obviously false assumption is egocentrism. It is obvious (who could seriously doubt it?) that there are entities distinct from me, who carry on existing when I do not think of them, who owe me nothing and do not think of me at all. A true account of things will not pick Me out as something special, will not set the worlds in orbit round my centre. The true and only centre of the worlds is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.³ Yet every day I act as if the things I do not know about (or choose to neglect), from the dripping tap to the dying Ethiopian, do not exist. Only the most rigorous employment of a sane imagination allows me to admit the obvious: that those who die in pain are no less pained because I do not think of them, that my friends exist when they are out of sight, that what I do not know about at all may yet be real.

Practical solipsism is closer to us than we usually suppose, and there have even been philosophers, and very distinguished ones, who have endorsed a full-blooded solipsism. But most of us are probably too nervous to stand quite alone! The nearest we can get to sheer, unashamed egoism is to identify ourselves with clans or castes or companies against Them. Moral behaviour begins in loyalty to just such groups, just such an insistence on ‘doing good to our friends and harm to our enemies’. Our ‘friends’ are simply those with whom we belong, and who belong to us. If a supposed ally, one of Us, is caught considering the interests of Them (as it might be injured Argentinians or class enemies or animals), We are yet more enraged. Those who give Them any thought at all are judged to have betrayed Us, and to be secretly enamoured of the alien ways We impute to Them. We know all this for nonsense, but still act as if it were true. They are ‘animals’, in the sense beloved of judges: uncultured egoists eager to satisfy their every impulse. Real animals are seen as symbols of the alien ways we impute to Them in considering Them animals. So anyone who wishes to give real animals a hearing must be on Their side.

But try to consider things as they would appear to an ideal observer, or to the Creator-God: why should, say, a dog, a rat, a monkey be required to live a tedious and imprisoned life, and die an agonizing death so that a hominid be spared the least discomfort?⁴ Because we are hominids we may prefer (egocentrically) that nonhominids pay the price of living, but how could we persuade any ideal observer, God or disinterested jury that our preferences have more weight than those of the dog? Why isn’t that just like saying that my personal comfort must be more important, absolutely, than your vital needs?

IV HUMANISM

The second principle behind our doings is humanism, which purports to offer some reason for that prejudice that would or should persuade an ideal jury. The humanist revolution demanded that we attend to all members of our species, whatever their particular relation to us may be. Whereas pre-humanist societies endorsed a rigorous division between Us and Them, between our fellowship and foreigners, humanists believe it obvious that all (and only) human beings deserve the same respect. Foreigners are of no other kind than I, and all our conspecifics differ from non-human beings in deserving an absolute respect. Old-fashioned liberals identify the ‘rights of man’ as rights to life, liberty and property. It would be wrong on these terms to kill, control or dispossess any human being. Liberals in the sense now generally meant impose more positive duties on us all, of care for the afflicted: human rights include the right to be fed, clothed, educated and cared for (even to have annual paid holidays). In practice even such modern liberals do not admit to any enforceable duty so to care for more than their fellow-nationals; and old-fashioned liberals, regrettably, have not always recognized the claims to liberty and property of those they reckon ‘savages’. But humanism, in libertarian or welfare forms, has played a part in the extension of existing rights and privileges from members only of our class or sex or nation to the whole species. Where unembarrassed groupies (so to speak) think it only right to pursue Our interests at whatever cost to Them, humanists insist on taking account of Theirs, and reckon it absurd to think that what is bad when done to one of Us is somehow quite all right when done to Them.

Unfortunately for those outside the magic circle, humanism disallows even such paltry rights as had been conceded to non-humans. Hindu respect for ‘sacred cows’, or Jain disinclination to kill or hurt any living creature, or ‘primitive’ respect for ‘totem animals’ are easily equated with sentimental concern for pets: proofs that the animalist is personally inadequate, starved of human affection and neglectful of their ‘real’ human duties. Such humanism, of course, may also insist that certain styles of human living are unworthy of the name: sadistic enjoyment even of non-human pain, or negligent treatment of the animals one owns, are ways of not living up to the humanist’s ideal. But it has never been easy to explain quite why such active cruelty or negligence is wrong, if only human interests matter to the rational mind. If humans matter so much more than non-humans it must be that they are of so radically different a kind that it is hard to see that ‘hurting animals’ is of the same kind as ‘hurting humans’. Perhaps the sadist’s error just is to suppose that he/she is hurting animals—but negligence or indifference are then not crimes.

This is the kind of humanism often deployed by experimentalists. Ethical considerations preclude invasive experimentation upon ‘human beings’, but not on ‘animals’, because all and only human beings merit rational respect: the most that animals can expect is sentimental interest of a sort that should not stand in the way of human interests. Animals either don’t feel pain, or boredom, or distress, or else the ‘pains’ they feel are of another, and less interesting, kind than ‘ours’, because ‘we humans’ are another sort of thing, objectively, than them. A report some years ago from China suggested that biologists there were seeking to produce a human-chimpanzee hybrid which would be available as an experimental subject when ‘ethical considerations’ forbade the use of truly human stock.⁵ Chinese authorities, of course, show little enough concern for human rights, but the same strange disjunction features in western ideology as well. It is only pure human nature that requires respect. Why?

One version of humanism is no more than the near-solipsism that I described before, and so no real answer to the question why God should prefer to hurt non-hominids. Imaginary cases may help to distinguish this variety from the more ‘objective’ kind: merely ‘subjective’ humanists do not suppose that intelligent extraterrestrials need, in moral reason, to give any weight to human interests over those of terrestrial organisms more to their taste. The medieval knight who preferred to save a lion rather than a snake, ‘because it seemed the more natural creature’, perhaps expressed a similar subjective preference for fellow-mammals. Betelgeusian arachnoids might well prefer spiders, and ‘we’, correspondingly, need feel no qualms about the arachnoids, however civilized they were. On these terms, humanists only urge us to identify with human beings and things that look like human beings: creatures that have faces benefit from stray affections. ‘Objective’ humanists think otherwise, that all and only ‘rational’ beings (or beings of the same real kind as rational beings) deserve respect. The arachnoids ought to be treated well, and should, in reason, treat ‘us’ well. What matters is the mind behind the face.

Both sorts of humanist usually make two assumptions: first, that a species is a natural kind (a notion that now has very little biological backing), and second, that the human species is the unique embodiment (on Earth at any rate) of sacred Reason (a notion that almost no philosophers—other, I must admit, than theists like myself—now take seriously even if they still endorse humanistic values). After all, not all our conspecifics are actually rational, nor are they all so easily identified with. Some moralists are ready to write off imbeciles, or human beings too unlike themselves, but humanism, in whatever form, still demands that all our conspecifics have equal rights (whatever they are). So subjective and objective humanists alike must include in their concern all such as are of one kind with the rationally active or the sympathetic few. It is that very notion of ‘one natural kind’ that is now suspect.

A biological species is not now thought to be a set of organisms with a shared, essential nature, such that there is or could be an organism ‘typical’ of the species and that other organisms may be more or less ‘defective’ specimens. That notion of speci...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• SOCIAL ETHICS AND POLICY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 MODERN ERRORS, ANCIENT VIRTUES
• 2 BIOTECHNOLOGY AND AGRICULTURE
• 3 GENETIC ENGINEERING AND THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE
• 4 THE FRUITS OF BODY-BUILDERS’ LABOUR
• 5 THE MORAL STATUS OF EXTRACORPOREAL EMBRYOS
• 6 IVF AND MANIPULATING THE HUMAN EMBRYO
• 7 MANIPULATION OF THE GERM-LINE
• 8 HOW TO ASSESS THE CONSEQUENCES OF GENETIC ENGINEERING?
• 9 WHO OWNS MO?
• 10 WHAT ‘BUGS’ GENETIC ENGINEERS ABOUT BIOETHICS
• 11 CATEGORICAL OBJECTIONS TO GENETIC ENGINEERING-A CRITIQUE
• 12 BIOTECHNOLOGY, FRIEND OR FOE? ETHICS AND CONTROLS
• 13 GENETIC ENGINEERING AND ETHICS IN GERMANY
• 14 GENETIC ENGINEERING IN THEOLOGY AND THEOLOGICAL ETHICS
• Index