'This is revolting and turns my guts. Gawd knows what these barmy scientists
are up to and what they have already got lurking in test tubes in the lab'.
So wrote one correspondent to The Scotsman in response to a report
that three teams of British scientists are seeking to create 'hybrid' embryos
for medical research. The scientists want to transfer a human cell nucleus
into an animal egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The resulting
embryo would then be harvested for stem cells, to aid research into possible
cures for conditions such as Alzheimers' and motor neurone disease. Scientists
are keen to implant the human nucleus into an animal egg because human eggs
are in short supply.
The hybrid cells would, as scientists point out, be 99.9 per cent human and
0.1 per cent cow or rabbit. But the very thought of such cells created fantastic
visions of half-man, half-rabbit monsters - and not just among correspondents
to The Scotsman. ‘There is a lot of innate wisdom in the yuk
factor’, observed Josephine Quintavalle of the lobby group Comment on
Reproductive Ethics. ‘My question is: what will the scientists actually
create?’ The government seems to feel the same. It is committed to banning
the creation of hybrid embryos (though it has not yet got round to drawing
up the legislation) and has called on funding bodies 'to make clear that they
will not fund or support research involving the creation of such hybrids'.
In January the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) - the body
that regulates embryological research in this country - postponed until autumn
any decision on whether to license the procedure.
A sense of 'yuk'. And a fear of rampant science unrestrained by ethical concerns.
These have becoming over-riding responses of many people to advances in biotechnology.
Politicians and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic have, at best.
pandered to such emotions and, at worst, encouraged them. The philosopher
Dame Mary Warnock, who chaired the committee that in 1984 drew up early guidelines
on embryological research, suggests that policy makers should take gut feelings
seriously. For 'morality to exist at all', she argues, 'there must be some
things that, regardless of consequences, should not be done' because crossing
such barriers generates 'a sense of outrage... a feeling that to permit a
practice would be indecent or part of the collapse of civilisation'. When
President George Bush last year vetoed legislation that would have provided
public funding for stem cell research he warned that there can be no 'crossing
the line' that 'would needlessly encourage conflict between science and ethics'.
Many people recognise the medical benefits that biotechnologies may bring.
But many also fear that such benefits may be purchased at too great a price.
The image we have is of an unending conflict between an amoral science, hellbent
on progress at any cost, and those who seek to restrain scientific advancement
and place it within a moral framework. How can we defend the dignity of human
beings from being eroded by techniques such as cloning? Is it possible to
stop science treating human beings as mere objects? Questions such as these
betray a deep anxiety not only about the very character of scientific research
and also about the ways in which biotechnologies appear to throw up new ethical
questions and problems that threaten to overwhelm us.
There is, in fact, little new either in the repugnance elicited by medical
progress or in the ethical problems it poses. Every new biotechnological advance,from
vaccines to blood transfusions to organ transplants, has been greeted with
a 'yuk' response. And not just scientific advances. Social practices that
we now take for granted - such as 'mixed race' marriages and the right of
gay couples to adopt children - were once, and often still are, regarded with
great moral distaste. Far from being repositories of innate moral wisdom,
yuk responses are often expressions of deep-seated social prejudices.
The ethical dilemmas biotechnologies pose are also often longstanding. In
the same week as the furore over hybrid cells, another controversy erupted,
this time over the treatment of Ashley X, a severely disabled nine-year old
American girl who whose uterus and breast glands had been surgically removed
in order to prevent her growing bigger and reaching puberty. Her family and
doctors claim that without such treatment, Ashley could not be properly cared
for at home. Outraged critics accused doctors of playing God, of treating
a human being as an object and of encouraging prejudice against the disabled.
The response to this case reveals that it is not just the production of hybrid
cells or the development of cloning techniques that create such ethical debates.
Biotechnologies raise not new ethical dilemmas, but old ethical ones in a
new context. In part that new context has been created by the pace of scientific
advance in fields such as embryology and genetics. But it has also been created
by growing social uncertainties. We live in an age of tremendous confusion
and dislocation - moral, political and social - and these have helped shape
the public’s attitude both to science and to ethics.
There are few things that have more changed our world than has science. From
Galileo to Darwin, from Newton to Einstein, scientists and their discoveries
have helped transform material conditions and opened up new social and moral
vistas. Yet it is the very notion of human-directed change that many people
today find so troubling.
This is an age of cynicism and scepticism, particularly about human capacities.
There is a widespread sense that every impression that humans make upon the
world is for the worse. The attempt to master nature seems to have led to
global warming and species depletion. The attempt to master society has given
us Auschwitz and ethnic cleansing. 'In a real sense', the late ecologist Murray
Bookchin noted, 'we seem to be afraid of ourselves - of our uniquely human
attributes. We seem to be suffering from a decline in human self-confidence
and in our ability to create ethically meaningful lives that enrich humanity
and the non-human world.'
While human activity is held in low esteem, nature is becoming deified. In
almost every aspect of life - from health treatments to food production -
the 'natural' is regarded as morally superior to the artificial, or human.
'The "natural"', as the American mathematician Norman Levitt has
put it, 'is the virtuous opposite of the degraded manifestations of humanity’s
fallen state'. Nature 'is the code word for the way things are meant to be
rather than the way they are.'
The disillusion with human activity, on the one hand, and the deification
of nature, on the other, has transformed not just our view of science but
also our understanding of ethics. Historically, the scientific revolution
developed as part of a broader transformation of the way people understood
the relationship between humanity and nature. Reason and experiment came to
replace revelation as the sources of knowledge, and there emerged a growing
conviction that humankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints
of nature and the tyranny of Man, through the agency of its own efforts. The
result was the development of humanism and the creation of a more human-centred
morality. Notions of right and wrong became increasingly regarded as human,
rather than divine, creations and ethical concerns as growing out of human
needs. Knowledge itself was seen as an ethical good and the exploitation of
knowledge to advance social, scientific and medical progress a moral imperative.
Today's debased view of humanity is, however, giving rise to a very different
notion of ethics. On the one hand ethics seem to have taken over our lives.
From shopping to health treatments we are constantly urged to be 'ethical'.
At the same time, though, ethics seem to have been drained of much of their
traditional meaning. Questions of right and wrong are judged less in relation
to human needs than as a means of deciding how best to reduce the impact of
humanity on the planet. To be 'ethical' has come to mean producing fewer humans,
consuming fewer goods, tampering less with nature - in other words it has
become synonymous with restraint and caution.
All this has distorted the debate about the ethics of biological technology.
Scientific advances that threaten to transform our relationship with nature
are often seen as unnatural, and hence unethical. 'Have we the right', the
molecular biologist Ervin Chargaff asks, 'to counteract, irreversibly, the
evolutionary wisdom of millions of years?' According to a European Parliament
committee report on genetic engineering 'each generation must be allowed to
struggle with human nature as it is given to them, and not with the irreversible
biological results of their forebears' actions'.
The idea that nature embodies certain verities, and these verities define
the boundaries that we transgress at our peril, is at the heart of contemporary
fear of the new biology. It is a view that turns ethical arguments on their
head. Take for instance the debate about human cloning. Ever since the birth
in July 1996 of Dolly the sheep at Scotland's Roslin Institute, there has
been universal condemnation of the idea that humans too may be similarly duplicated.
Unesco has declared cloning to be 'contrary to human dignity'. President Bush
has insisted that 'we recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare
parts, or creating life for our convenience'. Cloning, the European parliament
declared, 'is a serious violation of fundamental human rights and is contrary
to the principle of equality of human beings as it permits a eugenic and racist
selection of the human race'.
Yet if we move away from what bioethicist John Harris has called 'olfactory
moral philosophy', there are no reasons to regard as unethical the cloning
of humans. There is, on the other hand, something deeply immoral about a campaign
that seeks to block the advancement, not just of reproductive technology,
but also of other medical techniques based on cloning methods which could
potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, and lessen the suffering
of many more.
Critics of cloning present three main ethical objections. The first is that
in creating exact copies of people we undermine human dignity and personal
identity. Any human child conceived through cloning will certainly be the
genetic twin of the person who is the cell donor. But to have the same genome
is not to be the same person. Genes play an important part in shaping who
we are. But in no way do they determine who we are, or how we behave. After
all natural clones - identical twins - far from being duplicates of each other,
often differ in everything from their fingerprints to their political convictions.
The second objection is that cloning turns human beings into means, not ends.
Cloned children, critics argue, will simply be the means for their parents'
self-aggrandisement. This may well be true, but it is also true for many children
born in conventional ways. In any case, as John Harris points out, in many
areas of life - in employment, family relations, sexual relations - we use
people at least partially as means. If in everyday life we take a pragmatic
approach to the Kantian maxim that 'the individual should never be thought
of merely as a means, but always also as an end’, why not in relation
to medical advances too?
Thirdly, critics claim that cloning is unnatural. 'From time immemorial',
the American writer Jeremy Rifkin argues, 'we have thought of the birth of
our progeny as a gift bestowed by God or a beneficent nature'. According to
Rifkin, 'the coming together of sperm and egg represents a moment of surrender
to forces outside of our control'.
Cloning is certainly unnatural. But then so is virtually every human activity.
The whole point of any medical intervention, from taking an aspirin to heart
surgery, is to ensure that humans are not at the mercy of 'forces outside
our control'. The real argument here is an argument against conscious design
- 'Better by Accident than by Design' as Josephine Quintavalle has put it
in the title of an essay. It is an attitude that fits in well with contemporary
anxieties about human intervention. But the very existence of an ethical world
depends on the human capacity for conscious design. What allows humans to
live in a moral world is our ability to distinguish between right and wrong,
and to act upon that distinction to transform both ourselves and our world
for the better.
An undesigned world would be an unethical world. That is why we need to turn
the argument about science and ethics on its head. There are no moral reasons
for not pursuing cloning technology or for preventing the production of hybrid
cells. But there is something morally repugnant about the campaigns against
such technologies. By restraining research, opponents are helping to prevent
the development of new medical treatments that draw upon these techniques,
and hence allowing many people to suffer unnecessarily.
Much the same is true in the debate about so-called 'designer babies'. There
is nothing morally problematic, John Harris suggests, in allowing a child
with 'a particular skin colour, hair colour, eye colour or a range of useful
abilities... to be born or created'. Such a child would not be born in a harmed
condition, nor would it be harmful to others. However it would be morally
problematic to choose to create a child with severe disabilities. Given that
scientists are now developing techniques - such as preimplantation genetic
diagnosis or PGD - that enable parents to screen embryos for genetic defects
such as cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anaemia, the demand that we leave it
to accident rather than design is not to abjure choice. It is to take a conscious
decision to risk the possibility of bringing into the world a child with severe
disabilities knowing that we might have been able to prevent his or her pain
and trauma. Here, as in the debate about cloning, ethical fears about scientific
advances are ensuring unnecessary suffering.
None of this is to say that new technologies do not raise important questions
both about how to regulate society and about what it is to be human. The prospect
of widespread genetic leads to questions about how to organise health insurance
in the future. It also raises issues about individual rights and privacy.
New neurological techniques raise similar issues, and may in time lead to
debates about the meaning of selfhood, agency and responsibility.
Issues such as these cannot, however, be rationally debated if we begin with
the presumption of an inevitable clash between science and ethics and of the
need for ethical restraints on scientific advances. The real struggle is not
between science, on the one side, and morality on the other. It is between
different visions of what it is to be ethical. It is time we stopped indulging
the myth that the moral high ground is necessarily occupied by those wish
to place a restraining hand on scientific research and started making the
case instead for a human-centred morality that seeks rationally to use scientific
advances to alleviate suffering and improve our lives.