Human genetic engineering is one way in which humans can relate to nature. Nature includes the natural environments in which our species lives. It includes our species as it has evolved through natural selection. Our is a species with a capacity for creating artifacts, culture, and understandings of ourselves as moral beings. The borders between our genes and their environments are porous with our cultures. These borders are so porous that the distinction between nature and culture often collapses. For the position I develop in this book, namely bioethics as political theory, or political bioethics, they are profoundly intertwined. They are intertwined as genetic science and biotechnology, both cutting-edge expressions of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse of the European Enlightenment. Already in those centuries, two understandings of the term nature emerge that continue to define core aspects of possible human genetic engineering in the twenty-first century: nature as the basis for social equality among persons, and nature as the basis of human identity. In the unfinished project of modernity, prospects for engineering in a just society must improve upon the Enlightenment legacy of contemporary genetic science and biotechnology by reconceptualizing nature and its relationship to culture, above all with respect to equality and inequality among persons. This book gives itself that task.
0.1 Equality among Members of the Species
In the name of natural equality, various Enlightenment thinkers reject feudal hierarchies that distribute social standing on the basis of birth. But those same thinkers promptly legitimize observable inequalities among human populations – predictably to the disadvantage of the non-white populations of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Voltaire (1694–1778) promotes a certain égalité: all men are equal who by their nature possess the skills relevant to their role in human community. Yet he immediately deploys phenotypical differences between dark- and light-skinned humans to situate each “race” within a discriminatory hierarchy of humankind. (Phenotypical features are the visible characteristics of an organism that follow from the combined effects of genes and environment.) He subordinates sub-Saharan Africans to Europeans: “one could say that, if their intelligence is from no species other than our own, then it is a very inferior intelligence indeed” (Voltaire Reference Vladeck1878 12:357).Footnote 1 He subordinates Jews with the same gesture: “One may regard them the very way we regard black people: as a species of inferior humans” (11:223).Footnote 2
From an ethical viewpoint, Kant (1724–1804) implies that all persons are free by virtue of their species membership alone: “Because the begotten is a person, and because it is impossible to conceptually grasp the begetting – by merely physical means – of a being endowed with freedom, so from a practical standpoint we can only regard the following idea as thoroughly correct and even necessary: to regard the act of [physical] procreation as an act by which we have placed a [moral] person in the world” (Kant Reference Kant1968: 280–281).Footnote 3 Yet from an anthropological standpoint, Kant declares various human groups (defined in terms of “race”) unequal to each other: “In the white race, humankind finds its highest perfection. By comparison, the yellow Indians are much less able. Black people are much less able still, and some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have the least ability of all” (Kant Reference Kant1923: 316).Footnote 4
In his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Diderot (1713–84) champions diversity among individuals and among cultures. He champions his own version of the idea of a “great chain of being”Footnote 5 to legitimize social inequalities among different human communities. He sanctions them as inequalities that follow from differences in motivation, productivity, and social utility. According to his Encyclopédie article titled “Animal,” “Some men have a very strong faculty of thinking, acting, and feeling whereas others have a faculty less strong, and this faculty becomes ever weaker the lower on the continuum we descend, and apparently at some distant point it disappears” (Diderot Reference Diderot1966 12:642).Footnote 6 His article on “Humaine Espèce,” or the human species, concludes that “originally there was but one sole race of men” but now one can see that some of the non-European peoples constitute “a degenerate race of men,” “rude, superstitious and stupid,” with all the “traits of a primitive race.”Footnote 7 They possess “neither morals nor religion.”Footnote 8 And, he adds, “in general black people are weak-minded” (Diderot Reference Diderot1966 18:348, 344, 345, 347).
For Rousseau (1712–78), nature not human society offers the way of life most appropriate to humankind. His conception of the natural condition of our species betrays neither racism nor anti-Semitism. Yet his notion of the “noble savage,”Footnote 9 which serves as the very fulcrum of his civilizational critique in his Discours sur l’origine es les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, too easily resembles the domesticated slave of European colonialism.
In these foremost contributors to a world-historical movement that changed the world in profound ways and remains an ongoing project for many persons and communities today, the Enlightenment is Janus-faced. One face regards nature as yielding to culture: culture as human will and imagination in its limitless plasticity, as the capacity to shape and endlessly reshape ideas, artifacts, and institutions. The opposite face regards nature as a limit to human belief and behavior: the “natural” as a standard by which to reject the “unnatural.”
Today this same Janus-face gazes out from the debate over human genetic engineering. Enlightenment ambivalence toward nature disallows the age-old belief that there is some kind of “human nature” – a natural or metaphysical or theological something that provides a fixed, unchallengeable and unchanging normative foundation for human belief and practice.
One abiding topic of human belief and practice concerns questions of equality and inequality among individuals. The debate over human genetic manipulation poses the old Enlightenment question anew, and in a new form: Do the observed social inequalities among persons somehow follow from “nature” – or instead from culture, as social constructs? Where communities come to view inequality as a matter entirely of social construction, rather than as a result of anything natural, there human nature more and more becomes human culture.Footnote 10
If humans are morally responsible for the cultures they create, then they are responsible for the social inequalities within communities and across communities. Those Enlightenment thinkers who accept such responsibility are in favor of revising and improving human culture. Humankind, too, has always been an Enlightenment project of optimization – and now, in our age of biotechnology, all the more so. In this respect, contemporary biotechnology perpetuates elements of the original Enlightenment project. And it perpetuates these elements not only with respect to individuals, in somatic engineering, but also with regard to the species, in germline engineering. In his role as chief editor of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published in 28 volumes between 1751 and 1772, Diderot (Reference Diderot1966 5:642) exemplifies this optimizing project: the Enlightenment seeks nothing less than to “change the common way of thinking”.Footnote 11 In nearly 72,000 articles, the Encyclopédie shows how: it would optimize all of human culture by unleashing the potential of rational progress, not only at the level of individuals but in the species entire.
0.2 The Identity of the Human Species
Yet just as the original Enlightenment is, in part, morally ambivalent, so too is the contemporary Enlightenment project of human optimization through genetic engineering. It approaches the human embryo as an object of human technology and medical intervention. It views the embryo as a sliver of nature that (within significant limits) may be made to yield to culture, even to the point of humankind taking control (within significant limits) over some aspects of its own genome and, one day perhaps, over some aspects of its own evolution, by engineering the human germline.
Here the human body appears to bioengineers principally as a phenomenon of the natural environment, one capable of being “improved” according to human design and preference. For example, current average life expectancies might be viewed as defective and inadequate, perhaps even as a disease to be cured. The ambivalent Enlightenment perspective thus transforms at least some anthropological constants into technical options. What we humans are by nature becomes dependent, to an extent, on decisions we make as creators and carriers of culture.
As nature gradually becomes an Enlightenment undertaking of humankind, human nature gradually becomes in part a contingent expression of human will and cultural imagination. The skeptical face of Janus asks, Does intervention violate individual autonomy as well as species-identity? The other, optimistic face inquires, Is intervention in the human genome a matter of technological freedom and perfectionism? The optimistic answer: As a project for increasing human freedom through technology, genetic manipulation promises freedom from diverse forms of misery, such as bodily and mental disease and disability, and freedom to greater self-determination of our physical and psychological selves (quite beyond current reproductive technologies, organ transplantations, or medically assisted suicide).
Indeed, bio-optimism regards genetic enhancement as a moral imperative.Footnote 12 If, with Kant, one finds the meaning and purpose of nature in the existence of moral beings, and in their moral behavior, then genetic manipulation – to the extent that it “improves” human nature – constitutes the “perfecting” of what Kant calls “die Schöpfung,” creation. A Kantian (Reference Kant1963: 148) argument for reproductive cloning and germline gene therapyFootnote 13 would advocate, as an ethical duty, the “perfection” of man’s natural being.Footnote 14 If rational nature exists “as an end in itself,”Footnote 15 then an enhanced human being might well be regarded as more “rational” than one not enhanced (because human reason commands human improvement) and, if so, enhancement becomes a moral imperative.
By contrast, the skeptical Janus-face sees human genetic engineering as a self-destructive “dialectic of Enlightenment” in which humankind, in its relation to nature, reverts from a species of domination to one of servitude. By engineering its genome, humankind violates species-identity as well as individual autonomy. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (Reference Axel and Farrell1981: 193) describe a “dialectical entanglement of enlightenment and domination, a dualistic quality within a kind of ‘progress’ that leads at once to both cruelty and emancipation” – such that “freedom within political community cannot be separated from Enlightenment thought” because the “social institutions in which it inheres already contain the germ of regression.”Footnote 16
Although the authors – refugees from Nazi Germany, writing in exile, Los Angeles, 1944 – were not writing about genetic engineering, their thesis is plausibly extended to it. Their term freedom within political community captures today’s increasingly powerful biotechnological capacity and its rapid development. The same could be said of their other term: the germ of regression.
Creating Human Nature charts a path within the European Enlightenment, between its two faces. As it does so, it is inevitably speculative inasmuch as the relevant phenomena – beginning with the sheer complexity of polygenic organisms, let alone the nature of human intelligence or the epigenetic effects of social environments – are not well understood, in part or in whole, and they will continue to challenge human insight for a long time to come. In the meantime, speculation about future genetic engineering faces the often daunting task of distinguishing between realistic and unrealistic extrapolations of current scientific understanding and technological capacity.
In the face of such discouragements, Creating Human Nature identifies some of the ways that genetic manipulation need not spell a fateful dialectic of Enlightenment. The case is more easily made for therapeutic intervention, which, in the clearest of cases (and many cases are less than clear), aims at prophylaxis, for example to control for birth defects, or a congenital predisposition to cancer, or Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The case is less easily made with respect to the biotechnological “enhancement” of the eight-cell human embryo’s genetic composition (rendering a healthy person “more than well”). To be sure, and as I show, the distinction between therapeutic and enhancing deployments often and easily collapses. More generally, even a cautious embrace of Enlightenment meliorism raises difficult moral and political questions.
Creating Human Nature focuses on the peculiarly political dimensions of human genetic engineering. I call this approach political bioethics (quite beyond bioethics as an abstract moral project or as a practical set of administrative principles to regulate clinical medical practice).Footnote 17 Chapter 1 develops this notion at length. It argues that bioethics belongs to the political sphere insofar as bioethics involves intractable moral questions (involving difficult issues regarding regulatory choices) that cannot have “correct” answers. At least in a liberal democratic society, such decisions can at most be procedurally legitimate. The idea of procedural legitimacy is one way to address the questions, Can politics ever be ethical? Can ethics ever be nonpolitical? Perhaps if ethical entrepreneurs can bring their principled analysis and conclusions to bear in public policy, politics can be ethical. Alternatively, if politics – in pursuit of power, influence, and effect – inevitably colonizes ethical thinking, distorting its normative potential by subverting its moral integrity, then ethics can never be nonpolitical. The ways in which policymakers systematically co-opt professional ethicists discourage the possibility of ethical policymaking. Annabelle Littoz-Monnet (Reference Littoz-Monnet2020) provides empirical evidence that ethics cannot be nonpolitical in the face of bureaucratic, regulatory capture guided not by truth but the effort to achieve predetermined goals, where ethical expertise provides neither guidance nor oversight but simply facilitates the nonethical or unethical imperatives of policymakers. If the integrity of ethical examination requires the integration of nonexperts, indeed of a cross-section of the community, then democratic debate about regulating scientific and technological innovation might indeed generate bioethical expertise independently of political interests. It might insulate ethical examination from the imperatives of policymaking so that bureaucrats cannot preemptively depoliticize issues and close down needed debate. It might, in other words, prevent the colonization of the ethical by the political.Footnote 18 But by what organizational means can a public – much of which is disinterested, or not scientifically literate, or simply misinformed – participate helpfully? There is no consensus in modern Western societies about the kind of normative framework that might guide public deliberation and decision. Creating Human Nature is my response to this quandary.Footnote 19
By way of anticipating the political nature of all the chapters quite beyond the first, I now show more generally how the technological manipulation of the human genome – in individual bodies as well as in the germline of our species – has profoundly political dimensions. I do so with regard to (a) how the boundaries between the natural phenomenon of human genes and the cultural phenomenon of human-built environments are porous, (b) how human identity must be related to genetic information, (c) how questions about human nature are always also questions about human genetics, and (d) how some of the social values and political visions entailed by the prospect of human genetic engineering implicate justice in multiple senses.
0.2.1 The Porous Boundaries between Genes and Their Environments
Even as natural organisms, humans are immediately entwined with the myriad cultural constructions of their communities, including the cultural abstractions of regulatory norms, political understandings, and legal systems. Communities perpetually socialize members into these abstractions and frequently struggle to gain for them their widest possible embrace. The question for political bioethics is, In regulating human genetic engineering, which political visions, what sorts of moral principles, what kinds of legislation and socialization, might guide liberal democratic communities, and guide them well? Plausible answers to these questions presuppose the answer to other questions: From a normative standpoint, what kinds of political communities should we want, and for what reasons? Contained within the question, What should humans want?, is another: What exactly are we humans that we might persuade ourselves that we should want to be particular kinds of beings in particular kinds of political communities? And to the extent that we humans can engineer our own biology, the question now becomes, What kind of human nature should we aspire to, and for what reasons? Political bioethics might best respond by addressing both the complexity of the gene–environment relationship and the profound indeterminacy of human identity.
To regard humans as the result of both nature and nurture says nothing about the relative contributions of each. How one regards the relative division of labor between biology (here in the form of genes, G) and culture (here in the form of environment, E) is, according to political bioethics, a matter of taking into account a person’s normative preferences and political identity.
Consider an equation that is biological – but also, from this perspective, political: G × E (the symbol “×” indicates that the relationship between G and E is more complex than a merely additive one). The equation states a proposition about what humans are (but only with respect to genes and their environments) and how they came to be that way. Some scientists would expand the equation to G × E × HE, where HE refers to heritable epigenetic factors (the topic of Chapter 9). They would expand the equation to include some of the biological consequences, for human bodies, of some aspects of the communities in which people live and reproduce those lives. They would render it political bioethical in the attempt to understand how environment, lifestyle, biography, and even parents’ and grandparents’ experiences may interact with an individual’s genome (in the fetal stage) to produce changes experienced throughout his or her life (and sometimes even passed on to the next generation). They would render it political bioethical also in the attempt to analyze how prenatal and early postnatal environmental factors may influence the adult risk of developing various chronic diseases and behavioral disorders (Jirtle and Skinner Reference Jirtle and Skinner2007). Political bioethics seeks to explain why children born during the Dutch famine of 1944–45 had increased rates of coronary heart disease and obesity in light of maternal exposure to famine during early pregnancy (compared with persons not so exposed) (Painter et al. 2005).
The gene–environment entwinement also has dimensions of a political bioethical quality. Its multidimensionality marks a complexity in both nature and culture. Complexity is both dangerous to human life and necessary for human life. The manipulation of that complex entwinement poses political questions about the acceptability of dangerous risk-taking. Let me explain.
The gene–environment entwinement is multidimensional, beginning with the sheer complexity of the instructions for human life. Evidently “most mutations to functional genes are thought to be harmful” (even as beneficial mutations drive natural evolution); as “many as 75 percent of mutations that swap one DNA base for another within genes cause some sort of reduction in survival or reproductive output” (Solomon Reference Solomon2016: 17). And instead of a “single important genetic variant (or allele), there are often hundreds or thousands that contribute to variation in a given outcome,” that is, not one “gene for X” but rather “many variants with small effects” (Conley and Fletcher Reference Conley and Fletcher2017: 5). Perhaps “93 percent of genes in the human genome are in some way connected,” such that “if you tweak a gene in one corner of the network, it may have unanticipated consequences in the actions of other genes” (ibid., 50). As a form of tweaking, human genetic engineering raises very great risks of unintended consequences – in part because the relevant phenomena are so extraordinarily complex.
Complexity in nature parallels complexity in the human culture that manipulates nature. They parallel one another at the level of risks. Consider the unintended consequences around the year 1600 of European colonialism in the Americas, including a small pox pandemic and massive deforestation but also the global trade that followed. Or the unintended consequences of the European Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century “when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several ‘greenhouse gases,’ in particular CO2 and CH4” (Crutzen and Stoermer Reference Crutzen and Stoermer2000: 17–18). Or when “analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane” (Crutzen Reference Crutzen2002: 23). Or when, in 1784, James Watt invented the steam engine. Consider the human impact on the planet’s ecosystems and geology, on the lithosphere, the atmosphere, and the ecosphere – a risk now so significant that our planet will bear a destructive human signature for millennia, and perhaps for millions of years (the topic of Chapter 10).
Yet even though complexity is part of the danger to the very human life that complexity makes possible, complexity in the shape of genetic diversity is necessary to life. The complexity of genetic diversity constitutes the raw material for evolution by natural selection: the more diverse a population is, the more it can respond to the forces of natural selection. Species diversity increases the odds of species survival; less diverse species are at greater risk of extinction.
Correspondingly, manipulation of the very complex human genome will always involve significant risk, with consequences for human society and the natural environment, consequences some of which cannot be anticipated. The political bioethical question is, Are the risks of genetic engineering unacceptable given the sheer causal complexity of the human organism, in addition to various causal interdependencies (as they inform evolutionary theory, for example)? Another political bioethical question: Is risk taking necessary for the survival of the species? And another: To the “extent that genetic interventions can be used to enhance strengths and compensate for weaknesses in creative ways that expand opportunity without ‘normalizing’ their recipients,” might genetic interventions one day shape a “social force in improving tolerance for human diversity” (Juengst Reference Juengst, Savulescu and Bostrom2009: 57)?
0.2.2 Human Identity and Genetic Information
As a form of information, genetic identity has political dimensions. Consider two that may endanger a person’s legal and social status within political community: the control and handling of an individual’s genetic identity, and the possible moralization of a shared human identity.
From a standpoint of justice, any form of genetic information is vulnerable to abuse. For example: Can genetic information be owned and, if so, by whom? “Newborns cannot give consent to have their genome sequenced, but they must live with the consequences of this decision for the rest of their lives. Should information about adult-onset conditions such as depression or high blood pressure be disclosed to parents, effectively taking away a child’s right not to know (in the future)” (Conley and Fletcher Reference Conley and Fletcher2017: 175)? Genetic information, when controlled and handled by others, is political where it affects the individual’s life and welfare. Political are the questions, What rules should govern the influence others may wield over an individual’s genetic information? Should the individual have a right not to know? Should employers and insurance companies have access? Any particular answer to these questions likely presupposes some conception of the person’s moral worth.
Further, genetic screening will sometimes lead to false positives. Someone so diagnosed may never suffer the diagnosis, yet she and her family will needlessly suffer the anxious yet pointless anticipation that she may still become ill in line with the diagnosis. Or the information may be inaccurate or mistaken yet nonetheless affect how the individual is seen and treated in political community (consider, for example, an insurance company’s or an employer’s interest in a client’s or employee’s genome map). The question poses itself: To what extent should individuals not only control their genetic information but be empowered to challenge and change information held by private and public institutions, especially when the person regards the information as mistaken?
Finally, genetic information may allow medical professionals to predict the person’s receptivity to different treatments. To make an individual’s access to health care or quality education (among so many other social resources) dependent on whether she can afford it is not so different from providing or withholding resources such as medical treatment dependent on the person’s genetic code. (A just community might condemn both as morally reprehensible.) In other words, private genetic information may become a standard part of governmental calculations about the best distribution of such precious social goods such as health and education.
Genetic information may also pose a political risk to collective human identity. For example, “scientific belief in nativism, inborn factors, and innateness” may serve “as a proxy for hard-hereditarianism especially of the right-wing kind” (Meloni Reference Maurizio2016: 186). On this view, “human beings are born with pre-existing cognitive structures and age-specific capabilities for learning that lead them naturally into society” (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2000: 155). According to Meloni (ibid.), this view in recent decades has become a “political tool of the promotion of a defense of a particular conception of Western democracy.” A view more popular on the political left than on the right claims that if human nature is a blank slate, “with no innate structure of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character” (Chomsky Reference Bostrom and Sandberg1987: 154), then it is defenseless against “the ‘shaping of behavior’ by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee” (ibid., 254).Footnote 20
Regardless of the merits of their respective analyses, the authors show how human identity is easily politicized in a moralistic way. Dubious as such is the claim that our species, understood genetically, possesses some kind of given, objective standard by which to recognize, criticize, and resist authoritarian political community. But when human genetic engineering is thought to implicate human identity in the sense of altering collective political dispositions and preferences, it may well risk a person’s legal and social status within community.
0.2.3 Human Genetics and Human Nature
Additional political bioethical claims: human genetics implies nothing about human nature as a standard by which to guide human behavior in ways just and moral. Genetic knowledge does not provide humankind with any kind of model of human genetic “normality.” Claims about “normality” are more likely to be social evaluations than scientific descriptions. So if “natural selection does not homogenize the individuals of a species,” then the “search for a normal … nature and body type is futile. And so it goes for the equally futile quest to identify ‘human nature’” (Smail Reference Smail2008: 124–125).
The question of whether some types of genetic engineering might change the very nature of human beings is a matter solely of cultural preferences. If it ever became possible to endow a person with particular traits, or an organ, or an addition to the brain, traits or organs or additions that no human previously possessed, the organism will certainly have changed in terms of how it can be described scientifically. But whether its human nature thereby is also changed would remain a matter of cultural framing and particular value commitments. It would remain a question of political bioethics.
Genetic science also provides no guidance for such questions as: Is human nature damaged by re-engineering it according to human design? Is a fertilized human egg cell capable of “possessing” dignity and rights? If not, then at what point along the developmental continuum might it be thought to acquire such dignity – and how? Does pre-personal life (such as the eight-celled embryo) partake in some form of morality? Should it be assigned legal rights? Would the genetic manipulation of an embryo violate the embryo in some moral sense?
Even though genetic science entails nothing about morality, all cultures regularly tie human biology and human culture to one another. We do so when we wonder if, as human biology becomes in some part an undertaking of human culture, human nature increasingly becomes a contingent expression of human will and imagination (Sagoff Reference Sagoff, Baillie and Casey2005: 72). And we do so in such analyses as this: “Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible”; a human being is the “being whose essence is in not having an essence” (Lewontin Reference Lewens, Hannon and Lewens1992: 123).
0.2.4 Justice and Human Genetic Engineering
Choices among different forms of organization and regulation involve questions of justice. Philosophers often distinguish two senses of justice. They speak in a narrow sense of moral duties the individual is owed, duties he or she can claim, sometimes as legal rights. Philosophers speak in a broader sense of the individual’s moral duties toward others, especially but not only in the public sphere. Some of the social values and political visions entailed by the prospect of human genetic engineering implicate justice in both senses. Consider three examples.
First, the prospect of human genetic engineering poses questions about how best to categorize a life form at different stages of development. Political community must decide, for example, whether pre-personal life (an eight-cell embryo, say) can bear rights, either as such or because it lies on a continuum that leads to an unmistakable human recognizable in community as capable of bearing rights. Community must determine what members owe – morally – not only to fellow humans but to pre-personal life as well.
Second, human bodies and human psyches are fragile and enduringly vulnerable to suffering. The prospect of human genetic engineering might transform the way we humans think about our suffering. Would we still find moral ennoblement in persons confronting their limitations in ways that render them humbler and more modest than they might otherwise be? Might a political community be morally obligated not to genetically manipulate anyone for the purpose of overcoming his or her relevant limitations? What if a community rejected as hubris any effort of genetic engineering to extend “normal” life spans beyond what is possible through purely cultural measures (such as the progressive health insurance and public health programs of the modern welfare state)? Would it then be morally obligated not to genetically engineer anyone? Or should any political community feel morally obligated to support those forms of genetic engineering that might reduce all genetically based forms of suffering?
Third, some of the ways that humans are embedded within complex social networks with other humans might be powerfully impacted by genetic engineering. Consider athletics, in most cases a group activity organized around various understandings of how to evaluate individual and group performance. If a political community feared that biomedical enhancements of athletes confounded “naturally” occurring differences in athleticism and so destroyed the very object of competition, would athletes be morally obligated not to seek enhancements – and would political community be morally obliged not to offer them?
Questions about justice return us to where I began this introduction: by arguing that human genetic engineering is an extension of the rationalizing project of the European Enlightenment, one that impacts issues of equality and inequality among persons, among groups, and even among global regions. Creating Human Nature engages that project as it practices political bioethics. I now show how with a chapter-by-chapter overview.
0.3 Overview
The book is divided into three parts. Part I develops the political bioethics of regulation along four dimensions: method (proceduralism), standards of validity (more than local, less than universal), notion of human nature (socially constructed), and conception of human dignity (autonomy).
Chapter 1 asks: How might a liberal democratic community best decide whether parents should be allowed to genetically modify their offspring and, if so, within what limits? It proposes a procedural form of decision-making, combining expert bioethics committees and deliberative democracy. From the standpoint of political liberalism, bioethics so understood goes beyond bioethics as an abstract moral project, or as a set of clinical principles that regulate medicine. It aspires to become a democratic project of majoritarian proceduralism that involves ordinary citizens as far as reasonably possible in discussing and even deciding some bioethical issues toward regulation, legislation, and public policy.
Chapter 2 shows that efforts to regulate biotechnological manipulation of humans through fixed, universal standards remain unpersuasive. As an alternative standard for the regulation of human genetic engineering, it proposes a non-universalistic notion of human nature. It constructs human nature as the product of contingent and particular social learning processes. Human nature so understood can provide normative standards that emerge in learning processes, toward agreement locally (but not universally), as a source of regulatory norms for national political organizations but not for global citizen assemblies. These standards are possible because they practice interpretive pluralism, ambiguity, and political compromise.
Chapter 3 observes that complex modern societies confront abiding competition among different normative understandings and commitments that render agreement difficult on urgent issues of bioethics and biotechnologies. It shows how disagreement follows in part from essentialist understandings of human nature as well as from essentialist understandings of human rights. It argues against essentialism in conceptions of human rights and human nature and seeks broad agreement on how to regulate human genetic engineering by means of a naturalistic understanding of both human nature and human rights. It construes human nature politically as oriented on human rights. The respective notions of human rights and human nature are linked in answer to the question, Might we humans construct the human nature we have reason to prefer precisely by constructing the human rights we have reason to want? The linkage offers a normative standard that – if adopted as a presupposition by participants in the debate on the legal regulation of human genetic engineering – could contribute to a wide embrace of any answer then produced.
Chapter 4 shows that debates on how a liberal democratic community might best regulate human genetic engineering invariably deploy the usually undefined term human dignity. Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. This chapter rejects the viewpoint of “genetic essentialism”: that the human genome is inherently invested with a moral status. Correspondingly, human rights (which might offer regulatory guidance) are not well understood in terms of genetic essentialism. The chapter develops an alternative understanding of both human nature and human rights: dignity as the decisional autonomy of future persons, held in trust by the current generation. A future person could be expected to have an interest in decisional autonomy. Popular deliberation, combined with expert medical and bioethical opinion, can generate principled agreement on how the decisional autonomy of future persons might be configured at the point of genetic engineering from which that future person will develop.
Part II focuses on human intelligence as perhaps the single most challenging target of possible future genetic editing. It is challenging along three dimensions: toward including citizens as robust participants who would otherwise be excluded because of severe cognitive disability; aiding politics by artificial intelligence but always preserving the uniquely human capacity for mutual responsibility-taking; and identifying the uniquely political quality of debates on whether primary education would be improved by personalized curricula tailored to the individual pupil’s genome.
Chapter 5 argues for the cognitive engineering of future persons who, at the stage of development, indicate severe cognitive disability, toward providing the future citizen with a capacity for autonomous participation in the political life of her liberal democratic community. Because various cognitive capacities are relevant to civic participation, cognitive disability can be a political disability. If aspects of participation are equally desirable for the good of the individual and for the collective good, then some forms of cognitive engineering are warranted in a just community, which should then regard, as a political imperative, the provision of the relevant cognitive engineering to the extent possible.
Chapter 6 compares the genetic enhancement of human intelligence with artificial intelligence (where the term intelligence is no less indeterminate). It identifies the political capacity of human cognition as the capacity for a mutual attribution of responsibility, in terms of which members of a community understand themselves in civic relation to each other. Whereas genetically engineered human intelligence does not threaten this capacity, future forms of AI might. Yet for reasons of convenience and efficiency, and in hopes of diminishing the frequent failures of conventional politics, AI may tempt citizens one day to outsource forms of social integration that otherwise require a politics of mutual attribution of responsibility. The outsourcing of a unique capacity of human intelligence to AI would undermine democratic political community.
Chapter 7 analyzes not human genetic manipulation but rather the idea of genetically informed personalized primary education. Education so understood involves the use of individual genotypes to tailor curricula to children by deploying individual-level genetic characteristics, in this way to improve child learning by configuring the educational environments guided by predictions about a child’s genetic potential. This idea confronts the entwinement of nature and nurture in three ways. It confronts the interrelationship between the pupil’s genes and her social environment; the possibility of unintentionally exacerbating social inequalities in providing personalized primary education; and the challenge that conventional approaches to primary education pose to this proposal for a genetically informed approach. Along these dimensions, political bioethics identifies fundamental ambiguities in evaluating the potential benefits, as well as the potential harms, of deploying genetic information in the classroom.
Part III considers several of the ways in which human genetic engineering confronts different kinds of questions about social inequalities: as a possible means to free some persons from the political disadvantages of some genetic disabilities; as a possible means to identify sources of adverse epigenetic effects in the local population for which the community, as one corporate body among others, might be held responsible; and as a meliorist tool of the Anthropocene that will not necessarily perpetuate anthropocenic depredations.
Chapter 8 suggests that, if individual autonomy is a feature of individual well-being, then physical or mental disability can be seen to reduce the disabled person’s well-being. Prospective parents might exercise procreative autonomy to screen their embryos for genetic disabilities toward selecting a disability-free embryo. In so doing, the parents seek to facilitate the expectable possible autonomy of a future person, their child. These two forms of autonomy – the autonomy of a future person and the parents’ procreative autonomy – are challenged by a third: the autonomy of a disabled person whose genetic characteristics were not screened for disability at the embryonal stage of life, hence a person not “chosen” for her disability-free genetic constitution. The chapter argues against a human right that would prohibit all forms of genetic selection, and for a human right to freedom from genetic disability.
Chapter 9 explores the possibility that epigenetic research may offer an additional means to identify cross-generational transmissions of social inequalities. If some epigenetic effects on a fetus can adversely affect an individual’s life-long health, then the mother’s (and perhaps the father’s and the grandparents’) life-experiences effectively disadvantage that individual. If those effects were beyond the control of the forebears when they occurred, then the effects may be the moral if not legal responsibility of the community or sectors within in. In a polity that practices some form of corporate responsibility, epigenetics could be deployed toward the social justice of identifying the source of negative epigenetic consequences for health and of then assigning communal responsibility.
Chapter 10 analyzes human genetic engineering as a technology of the Anthropocene. To name this particular geological epoch the “Age of Humankind” is to mark the profound and enduring ways humankind has affected our planet. It has done so largely through the unintended and unwanted consequences of technological development – and the cultural orientations that foster them. The peculiarly political dangers of the anthropocenic technology of genetic engineering follow from the difference between technical and political cognitive styles. A technical style is guided by instrumental imperatives, seeking the optimal deployment of practical means to achieve preset goals that it does not place into question. By contrast, a political style (in the form of linguistic, symbolically mediated interaction) can be guided by valid social norms. The anthropocenic dangers of genetic engineering will only be avoided if a political community practices socially responsible genetic technology toward realizing the promise of human genetic engineering: to modify some inherited traits into something somewhat responsive to some human preferences and aspirations, thereby reducing human misery and improving possibilities for human flourishing.
From the preceding chapters the Coda distills the core intuition of political bioethics: bioethics as a matter ultimately of political deliberation. Guided by a “soft” naturalism that rejects a scientism that would reduce cultural and normative thinking to natural science, political bioethics is based on an epistemic dualism that bears within itself a certain tension. The objectifying attitude of a naturalist approach to genetic phenomena stands in charged and complicated, causal and conceptual relation with the intersubjective need for moral, legal, and above all political guidelines by which political community might regulate genetic manipulation. As political theory, bioethics attempts a plausible, practical relationship between science and morality. It does so by engaging a notion of political integrity that combines analytic description (of genetic phenomena) with normative evaluation (toward regulating engineering). It combines the cognitive bases of natural science with the prescriptive, critical knowledge contained in normative claims.
