GenEthics and Religion

G. Pfleiderer, G. Brahier, K. Lindpaintner, G. Pfleiderer, G. Brahier, K. Lindpaintner

• Publisher: S. Karger
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9783805589734
• eBook ISBN: 9783805589741
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Human gene and cell technology is a diverse and rapidly evolving field of research. As genes represent the 'blueprint' of an organism, their analysis and manipulation is a challenge to our understanding of human nature. Stem cell research, genetic testing, gene therapy, therapeutic and reproductive cloning - all these fields of application have been raising fundamental ethical and religious-theological questions: When does human life begin? Should human beings be allowed to interfere with natural procreation or to manipulate the genome of their own species? Is genetic engineering tantamount to 'playing God'? Based on the symposium 'GenEthics and Religion' held in Basel, Switzerland in May 2008, this volume examines the role religion can play in establishing ethical guidelines to protect human life in the face of rapid advances in biology and especially gene technology. It does so in a multidisciplinary way with contributions by philosophers, theologians, human geneticists, and several bioethicists representing the Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist perspectives. The essays illustrating a diversity of views and expressing the problems and self-critical reflectiveness of religious ethicists have been brought up to date and discuss the importance of religious ethics in society's discourse on gene technology.

The Function of Religion in GenEthical Debates: Critical Analyses

Pfleiderer G, Brahier G, Lindpaintner K (eds): GenEthics and Religion. Basel, Karger, 2010, pp 40–51

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Global Bioethics, Theology, and Human Genetic Engineering: The Challenge of Refashioning Human Nature in the Face of Moral and Religious Pluralism

H.Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.

Department of Philosophy, Rice University, Houston, Tex., USA

There Is No Substantive Secular Global Bioethics to Guide Human Genetic Engineering

The possibility of human genetic engineering underscores our lack of agreement regarding morality, human flourishing, and the meaning of human existence. In particular, it is impossible to justify a single, common canonical and content-full bioethics as an authority to guide human genetic engineering. The impossibility is grounded in a number of substantive impediments. First, our societies are marked by the culture wars [1], struggles among the partisans of different moral, religious, and metaphysical views as to which view should constitute the dominant or leading culture (i.e., the Leitkultur), and what the content should be for a bioethics of human genetic engineering. Moreover, there is no basis to hold that all secular moral disagreements can be set aside by philosophical reflection and sound rational argument, in that the disputing parties often do not agree about the basic premises and rules of evidence that lie at the foundations of their disagreements. As a consequence, the contentions are interminable. Even with regard to secular moral concerns, we are destined to live in the culture wars, including strident disagreements regarding the use of human genetic technologies, including human genetic engineering.¹ This state of affairs is often obscured by paradoxically passionate proclamations of consensus in the face of persistent disagreements. There are assertions of a common morality, including supposedly universally accepted lists of indubitable human rights, evidence contrary to their supposed indubitability notwithstanding. Matters are further complicated by the profound moral and metaphysical gulf separating those who recognize that God exists and those who deny His existence, as well as the gulf separating the various religions. In closing, I explore what Orthodox Christianity knows to be appropriate for a bioethics of human genetic engineering in order to lay out a religious understanding in principle sympathetic to genetic engineering, as well as further to underscore the moral religious diversity characterizing the human condition.

The Plurality of Moralities

If one means by a morality a generally coherent set of settled judgments about what it is to act rightly, about what the good is we should pursue, and about what it means to be virtuous as well as to have a good character, we do not share one morality, even as a secular morality. Moralities can be different, even if these moralities share the same values but rank them differently. Common moral values do not constitute a common morality. For example, different rankings of liberty, equality, prosperity, and security will justify either a social-democratic morality and polity such as in Germany or an elitist, capitalist polity, such as in Singapore. Differences will also be a function of disparate views regarding right-making conditions. Moralities are different when they justify discordant views about the cardinal elements of human life, such as when it is obligatory, permitted, or forbidden to take human life, tell lies, have sex, redistribute property, and/or engineer human biological nature. These differences are reflected in disagreements regarding such issues as the moral propriety of abortion, homosexual acts, redistributive taxation policies, social-welfare states, capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the genetic engineering of human biological nature.² There is a plurality of moralities and therefore a plurality of applied ethics, including genethics.

This moral diversity constitutes an impediment to discovering a single, content-full, secular, global bioethics and therefore a common substantive genethics. Moreover, the diversity cannot be set aside through sound rational argument. Agrippa, a 3rd-century philosopher, observed that there are five reasons to hold that philosophical argument will not resolve foundational moral disputes: (1) after 700 years, no one had succeeded by means of sound rational argument to resolve conclusively the disputes at hand; (2) disputants lodge their arguments within their own perspectives and therefore argue past each other. Moreover, absent commonly justified basic premises and rules of evidence, disputants (3) argue in a circle, (4) beg the question, or (5) engage in an infinite regress [12, 13]. As a consequence, morality remains irreducibly plural, and therefore bioethics, including genethics, is irreducibly plural. Different bioethics are grounded in different moral, religious, and metaphysical views, and a final choice among them cannot be made on the basis of a secular sound rational argument. Given this circumstance, one would expect the disputatious character of the moral discourse that we in fact encounter. Moral diversity is substantive and manifest [14].

It is in light of this diversity that one can appreciate why there will not be moral agreement as to whether

1 human biological nature should be maintained as we find it and that no human genetic engineering should be allowed;

2 human biological nature should generally be maintained as we find it, and human genetic engineering should be used only to correct diseases and defects, but not to enhance human nature beyond the general character of humans as we now find them (although the goals and boundaries between treatment and enhancement will be significantly disputed)³;

3 human biological nature as we now find it may be enhanced, although the enhancement should be constrained by certain substantive binding norms (about which there will be considerable dispute);

4 human biological nature may be enhanced as long as one proceeds prudently with the consent of the actual persons involved and without malevolence to future persons. In the last case, one is left with a range of acceptable futures. Absent knowing what God requires, man is the measure of all things, and we do not share a common canonical view of morality and human flourishing. The possibility of human genetic engineering discloses the diversity of views regarding human flourishing.

Recognizing our moral diversity does not entail affirming a moral relativism or denying that there is a canonical moral truth. The character of our moral pluralism does show that secular moral reflection is unable to determine the nature of that truth. That is, one may be forced to embrace a secular moral epistemological skepticism but not a metaphysical moral skepticism [16]. In any event, one finds a plurality of bioethics of human genetic engineering, ranging from those which enthusiastically endorse human genetic enhancement, such as John Harris [10], to those which would wish to forbid these interventions, such as Jürgen Habermas [9]. Intractable moral controversy will characterize genethics. Genethics is plural.

The Illusion of Consensus

One might still hope to deny this conclusion regarding the salience of moral pluralism by observing that, if there is in reality such moral diversity, why do so many reasonable people talk about the possibility or even claim the reality of consensus? There are at least six features of the sociology and politics of moral claims that account for the obscuring of moral diversity and the creation of an illusion of consensus, if one means by consensus a common agreement regarding some moral matter, not simply the predominance of a particular moral viewpoint or the dominance of a political or social coalition among persons who share strategic political and social interests.

1 There is often a sampling bias on the part of those who proclaim consensus – those with whom many work and live tend to be like-minded, thus obscuring the depth of actual moral diversity.

2 There is the pressure of political correctness, which tends to hide diversity, in that people tend not to voice views openly that will provoke a strong condemnation from those dominating the public forum.

3 There is paradigm-grounded blindness to moral diversity, given the false consciousness a paradigm can support. Because all are guided by the paradigms they embrace, they tend to discount the positions and viewpoints of opponents through regarding them more as noise than as information. Nor are those with whom they disagree, along with their positions, included in the wide reflective equilibria of those who proclaim a consensus or the existence of an overlapping consensus.

4 There is also the force of the strategic agendas that underlie the creation of ethics commissions and committees, which help to create an illusion of general consensus – usually, those establishing ethics committees do not appoint persons with significantly divergent moral views because the result would be endless debates and not the production of recommendations, especially not the recommendations that those creating the commission would find acceptable.

5 There is the self-interest of those who hold a particular moral position which induces them to ignore moral and religious difference – this discounting of moral difference advantages those who wish to sell their services as moralists by allowing them to claim that they know, can explain, and can defend the moral viewpoint of reasonable persons, rather than to acknowledge that they are advocates of a particular moral or philosophical sect shaped by a particular sense of, and presuppositions regarding, the morally reasonable.

6 There are political advantages to advancing one's views as rationally canonical so that one is warranted in ignoring or marginalizing the views of one's opponents as irrational. That is, by claiming that one's moral views are self-evidently right, one may succeed in establishing one's particular agenda, such as having a particular list of human rights accepted without subjecting those rights’ claims to the usual critical political processes of controversy, compromise, and amendment (e.g., leading persons falsely to conclude that certain moral claims are self-evident). These various factors in different ways both create the illusion of consensus and render the illusion of consensus attractive. Claims of consensus, though unfounded, are explicable.

Finally, even if there were per impossibile a consensus in the sense of full agreement on a moral issue, the question would then arise as to what would follow morally from such a consensus and why. That is, even if a consensus were to exist, its capacity to identify moral truth would remain unestablished, because one must first show that the consensus is well founded in terms of the merit of the claims advanced, independent of the consensus itself. After all, the history of moral views demonstrates that different views are preponderant at different times in human history. The consensus of a particular majority is of no self-evident moral significance. In short, one must first establish what follows morally, why, and when, from the mere fact of the matter that many agree to a particular moral fashion.

Separated by Heresy and Disbelief

The plurality of secular moral visions and views regarding the permissibility of human genetic engineering is compounded by the plurality of religious moral visions, as well as by the starkness of the gulf separating the moral life-world of committed theists and that of committed agnostic (not to mention atheist) secularists. The contrast between the life-world and metaphysical commitments of those who recognize the universe as issuing from the creative act of God, versus those who approach the universe as if it were ultimately meaningless, as if it came from nowhere, went nowhere, and for no ultimate purpose, will differ regarding the significance of human biological nature and its morally permissible alterability. Those who know that God exists, and who know that He is someone like traditional Christians know Him to be, experience everything differently from committed secularists, in that they recognize that the world is not surd, but the creation of a very particular personal God. For those who recognize all being as grounded in the creative act of God, all of created reality can thus be recognized deo-centrically as united properly towards one focus. This is acknowledged by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), as when he affirms that acting as if God existed provides the basis for approaching reality with the heuristic expectation of deep unities in nature [see, for example, ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’ A672-675 = B700-703]. In terms of this point of focus, one can then begin to ask about the proper use of human genetic engineering in light of what humans are ultimately meant to be. In contrast, the agnostic secularist who does not even accept Kant's as-if God must regard all as coming from nowhere, going nowhere, and for no discernible ultimate purpose. Within this perspective, there is nothing humans are really meant to be. In this perspective, humans are left with creating moral narratives guided by different visions of human flourishing, so that their accounts of human genetic engineering will always be plural.

Also and quite importantly, absent rightly recognizing God, morality is itself importantly transformed in its significance: there is no longer a necessary unity of the genesis, justification, and motivation for morality or a clear rational ground for the claims of morality always trumping those of prudent rationality. This state of affairs led Kant, who was likely an agnostic if not an atheist,⁴ to assert that the absolute claims of morality are in the end incoherent, absent at least acting as if God existed. As Kant puts it, it is ‘our duty to promote the highest good; and it is not merely our privilege but a necessity connected with duty as a requisite to presuppose the possibility of this highest good. This presupposition is made only under the condition of the existence of God, and this condition inseparably connects this supposition with duty. Therefore, it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God’ [18]. Anscombe (1919-2001) is even more...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Foundations: Hermeneutic and Conceptional Reflections
• The Function of Religion in GenEthical Debates: Critical Analyses
• Examining Constructive Efforts of Religious GenEthics (I): Christian Theological GenEthics
• Examining Constructive Efforts of Religious GenEthics (II): Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist GenEthics
• Author Index
• Subject Index