The Repugnance of "Repugnance" -- We're all now wearily familiar with Leon Kass's "wisdom of repugnance" arguments. I want to point out a class of cases in which these arguments (if we're charitable enough to consider them arguments) commit the fallacy of begging the question, that is, of using the conclusion as a premise in the argument, merely assuming what needs to be proved.
For just about any intervention in the genome, Kass's tactic is to say that the intervention itself, or one if its allegedly likely consequences, strikes our native moral sense as repugnant. This, of course, assumes that the human moral sense is constituted in such a way as to deliver authoritative judgments that we have good reason to trust, rather than delivering manifestations of, say, ingrained prejudice.
Now, suppose that I believe that utilitarianism is true (just as an example), and that we morally ought to be totally impartial about the welfare of persons. People starving in Africa count exactly as much as your own children, or your beloved grandmother, or yourself. And so buying a new SUV to take the kids to soccer practice is exactly morally equivalent to standing idly by while a baby drowns helplessly in a puddle at your feet. The money spent for the SUV could have saved countless lives. But our native moral sense is a more or less accidental product of the course human evolution happened to take, and it happens to have a built-in bias for advancing the welfare of our genetic relatives and the members of our local tribe. So our evolutionary endowment, our moral sense as it is presently configured, interferes with our ability to recognize the equal importance of everyone's welfare, and with our motivation to provide for strangers on an equal basis as our own friends and family. We are constitutionally unable to do our moral duty. UNTIL NOW! Advances in genetic engineering (just suppose) have made it possible to reconfigure the human moral sense for the total impartiality utilitarianism demands. So morality demands that we manipulate the human genome to make a truly moral world finally possible (although our moral sense naturally makes it hard to see that this is so).
How can Kass (or an intellectual clone thereof) reply to this? Suppose he says, "We all agree that manipulating the genome to alter the human moral sense is morally repugnant." Well, then he's begging the question. My toy utilitarian is challenging the authority of our moral sense. The claim is that we need to alter the moral sense, because it now gets in the way of being genuinely moral. An appeal to the moral sense assumes what needs to be shown: that the moral sense as it is presently constituted has rational authority.
You could even make it much simpler and just do the following: Make a list of all the very morally worthy and life-enhancing procedures Kass finds repugnant. Now, declare that what we need to do is re-engineer people so that we don't find those things repugnant anymore, because those kinds of unreasoned sentiments prevent us from improving our lot here on Earth. How can a Kassian respond? The only non-fallacious course is to argue for the moral authority of the human moral sense as it is presently constituted, without assuming its authority in the argument. And that's what I want from Kass, and from all those who argue via "the argument from 'yuck.'" And that's what we never get.
Posthuman Blues -- I haven't read Francis Fukuyama's new book, Our Posthuman Future, but I did get a chance to chat with the man himself a couple weeks back in St Louis. While I don't agree with him on most counts, I respect the fact that he didn't resort to table thumping "repugnance" assertions about genetic manipulation, but rather set forth creative and thought-provoking arguments. Here are two that struck me (as best as I remember them).
First, about life extension... Our worldviews tend to get cemented into place sometime in our twenties. The usual course of things is that generations die out and are replaced by the next in line. And this is one main way the world changes. It is common for academic fields, for instance, to become ossified as the elderly doyen of the discipline wields his influence over the research programs for decades. The field is revitalized only when the master succumbs, releasing the creative energies he has suppressed. The same can and does go for society as a whole. However, suppose life expectancy is increased to, say, 200 years. We won't then see this generational churning, and as a consequence we may get locked into the control of elder generations for long stretches, stifling innovation and social evolution. And we don't want that.
Second, about cloning.... Suppose an infertile couple decides to have a daughter by creating a clone from the mother's genes. The daughter, a perfect genetic replica of the mother, grows up into late adolescence, and the father finds himself looking into the very face of the young women he fell in love with so long ago. Won't he experience uncanny echoes of his desire for his young wife? But it is not his wife; it is his daughter. Does this not create an unhealthy, perhaps dangerous, psychosexual tension in their relationship. Can their relationship ever be normal? And doesn't a daughter deserve that?
I was about to grace you with my replies, but I think it might be fun to see what others come up with first (and I need to go to bed). I think the debate over scientific freedom is likely to be among the most important, with the most profound consequences, over the next decades. So if you disagree with Fukuyama, as I do, you need to know what to say. Technology is opening up possibilities we don't yet know how to think clearly about. So it won't be easy. But we've got to give it a shot. So shoot!
Telos Schmelos -- All this talk about embryos is frustrating. It's frustrating because there's little middle ground between 'lump of cells' talk and 'person' talk. There's little middle ground because there's little middle ground between reality and fantasy. There's really no getting through, is there? The "it's a person because it's a potential person" argument is just so shoddy that one despairs for Reason (the faculty, not the magazine) when it is advanced. But, hey. I'll just try again...
To say that something is a potential x is a way of saying that it is NOT an x. I am a potential brain surgeon. But I CANNOT sever your corpus collosum. Because potential means not actual. I'm a potential serial murderer. I'm a potential father. I'm a potential car crash victim. But I'm not hunted by the police, don't get deductions for dependents, and haven't been eulogized. Potential persons are not actual persons, that is, aren't persons at all, just as I'm not a corpse at all. Rights are something persons have. Things that aren't persons don't have them. Potential persons aren't persons. So potential persons don't have rights!
Got that? Well, no. No you didn't. Oh well. What? I forgot to address the hypothesis that bad fairies spoil milk, or that superspecial spiritual substances animate fertilized gametes. Oh, and that superspecial spiritual substances magically create binding moral obligations on all of humankind! (You mustn't hurt me! I'm imbued with superspecial spiritual substance!) Well, I wouldn't call it forgetting exactly... but I try. I try.
Who's Afraid of the Bourgeoise? -- The anti-American Jew-haters, that's who. Insightful essay by David Brooks. (Thanks to Farsam for the last two links.)
e-mail: flybottle -at- willwilkinson -dot- net
