|
Print format
Debating the
Human Future
Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The
Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. With a Foreword
by Leon R. Kass. M.D., Chairman. Public Affairs. 352 pp. $14 paper.
Reviewed by Diana Schaub
On the
cover of Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The
Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics is the
image of a fingerprint. It’s an inspired choice, for the
fingerprint, as the Council’s Chairman, Leon Kass, explains
in the Foreword, “has rich biological and moral
significance.” The fingerprint is at once emblematic of our
common humanity and our individual uniqueness. No two are
alike; even identical twins have distinct fingerprints.
Presumably a cloned human being also, as a sort of
delayed–entry twin, would not be a perfect repeat, at least
not all the way down to the tips of his fingers.
DNA is not
the whole of our nature. It is, however, a good deal of it,
and the question raised by recent scientific developments is
whether and how much we ought to stick our fingers in it.
Ought we to put our own impress upon the means by which
human beings come to be? As Kass points out, fingerprints
are the marks left by our grasp on things—a grasp that is
sometimes illicit. This is why the police know as much about
fingerprints as scientists do. And it is why the decisions
to be made about cloning are properly political decisions.
It belongs to citizens and legislators to police the bounds
of the human grasp, to determine what may be manipulated,
manhandled, and doctored, and in what ways. While the
liberty of the mind is by right absolute, actions may, with
justification, be restricted or forbidden.
Let me
suggest another metaphoric image that comes to mind while
reading the Report: not the fingerprint but the
navel, and especially the exercise referred to as
“contemplating your navel.” I intend the expression rather
unidiomatically. “Contemplating your navel” usually means to
relax and withdraw from the world in favor of
self–absorption, to zone out, waste time, and daydream. This
isn’t what I mean. I mean, rather, that the Bioethics
Council has performed a true omphaloskepsis: it has
meditated on the human core and deepened our
self–understanding by reflecting on matters often
overlooked. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the
inhabitants of the World State are “hatched” and “decanted”
rather than born; I surmise that Huxley’s Betas, Deltas, and
Epsilons, manufactured in uniform batches by “Bokanovsky’s
process,” are entirely without belly buttons. So, while we
still have them, we might do well to contemplate them.
In effect,
that is what the Report does. It explores the meaning
of procreation and the human significance of sexual
reproduction. It articulates the links between sexual
reproduction and the ground and purpose of the human family,
the continuity of the generations, the formation of
individual identity, and the bearing of our freedom and our
mortality. The Report enables us to understand all
that is at stake in the advent of asexual reproduction.
Cloning is a form of generation that would confound the
generations—a woman who had herself cloned would be both
mother and identical twin sister to her clone. She would in
effect have become the mother of herself.
To aim to
be the mother of oneself is the height of hubris and
despotism. It is the crime of incest—the begetting of one’s
own upon one’s own—scientifically perfected. The cloning of
human beings would be the triumph of the Machiavellian
project to conquer fortune and bring everything within the
power of human choice and calculation. By raising serious
doubts about that modern project, the Report offers a
vindication of the element of chance in human life. It shows
how human dignity is bound up with the lottery of nature and
how the ground of human dignity could be imperiled by the
attempt to extend human control over the human essence. The
counsel of wisdom and prudence is to stick with our
old–fashioned, erotic, and happy–go–lucky mode of generation
rather than embracing the new science of solitary
self–genesis. We should remain true to the belly button—the
belly button which reminds us of our indebtedness to our
origins, but which also bespeaks our directedness toward a
self–standing existence.
In its
combination of profound reflection on human nature with
immediate policy concerns and decisions, the Report
is reminiscent of The Federalist Papers, a work that
Jefferson judged to be “the best commentary on the
principles of government which ever was written.” I predict
a similar authoritative status for the Report in the
sphere of bioethics. In a sense, the Report is even
more remarkable than The Federalist Papers, inasmuch
as the latter had a partisan, and even propagandistic,
purpose. Imagine if we instead had a document called The
Constitution Papers, a joint product of Federalists and
Anti–Federalists, laying out for the citizenry the full
panoply of argument and counterargument. That is what the
Report is like. Even when it gives expression to the
Council’s unanimous opposition to
cloning–to–produce–children, it details the arguments that
might be mustered in support of such cloning. But especially
when the topic is cloning–for–biomedical–research, where the
Council was itself split, the Report, with a united
voice, carefully delineates both the majority and minority
views, and seeks to bring them into conversation with one
another. This dialectical approach is so rare one hardly
knows how to respond.
Certainly,
one comes away with new respect for the potential of
reasoned discourse within a democracy. Moreover, I, at
least, came away with the conviction that if one were, with
an open mind, to read the whole of the Report,
including the appendix of personal statements, one would be
persuaded of the rightness of banning all human cloning,
whether for the purpose of children or research. In the
pageant of arguments, some of them look distinctly thin and
weak. And yet, dampening one’s hope that truth will emerge
the winner from the staging of such a pageant is the fact
that the participants themselves, despite their respectful
listening to one another, did not achieve agreement. Well,
they did and they didn’t. On the question of
cloning–to–produce–children, there was welcome unanimity.
However, on the question of cloning–for–biomedical–research,
there was a deadlock, with seven members in favor of
permitting it, seven for banning it, and three in the middle
in favor of a moratorium. What does this deadlock portend
for the future?
In the end,
the seven in favor of a permanent ban were willing to join
with the three in favor of a temporary ban in order to
produce a majority recommending a moratorium. From what we
have seen so far in Congress, the deadlock is being repeated
there. Indeed, the deadlock over
cloning–for–biomedical–research may actually make any sort
of legislative action unlikely, even a ban on
cloning–to–produce–children (and this despite the near
universal opposition to such cloning). The division over
cloning–for–biomedical–research is a division not so much
over cloning as over the status of the human embryo, cloned
or not. Until that larger issue—with its implications for
embryo research in general, as well as for the current
practice of in vitro fertilization, and of course
abortion—is resolved, we risk ending up with a laissez–faire
policy on cloning that very few Americans want.
It is
heartening that the split within the Council was not between
scientists and humanists. For instance, four of the six
M.D.s voted for the moratorium on research cloning, and in
some cases clearly favored strengthening that to a ban. It
seemed, indeed, that those who knew most about embryology
spoke most persuasively about the unsustainability of the
claim that fourteen–day–old and younger embryos might be
treated with less than full human respect—because less than
fully human. Dr. William B. Hurlbut, for instance, both in
his detailed responses on the subjects of gastrulation and
twinning, and in his general explanation of potentiality and
organismal unity, shows how the evidence of science supports
the claim that the early embryo has an inviolable moral
status.
Kass
reminds us in his Foreword that “reasonable and morally
serious people can differ about fundamental issues,” but I
take it that this unique experiment in clarifying the
differences is undertaken in the hope that such
clarification will lead to the concord of truth. In other
words, this is not a matter about which we can just agree to
disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with
one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason
with a capital R out there somewhere, and that reasonable
people, were they perfectly reasonable, or even just
sufficiently reasonable to the occasion, would arrive at it.
As Lincoln said of the slavery controversy, “Whenever the
issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter
thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference
between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled,
and it will be done peaceably too.”
Now maybe
the cloning controversy is not like the slavery controversy.
Certainly, we hope there is no looming prospect of civil war
should the division of opinion continue. Kass suggests there
is another difference as well. He writes that
with
slavery or despotism, it is easy to identify evil as
evil, and the challenge is rather to figure out how best
to combat it. But in the realm of bioethics, the evils
we face (if indeed they are evils) are intertwined with
the goods we so keenly seek: cures for disease, relief
of suffering, and preservation of life. When good and
bad are so intermixed, distinguishing between them is
often extremely difficult.
In talking
of the complexity and difficulty of the bioethical
enterprise, Kass was perhaps being diplomatic. This remark
would be in the same vein as the “reasonable people can
differ” statement, inasmuch as it gives further reason for
why they might differ.
And yet,
for all that is admirable and impressive in the Report,
I do have some misgivings. I would point out, for example,
that it was not at all easy to bring men to see slavery as
evil, particularly not once the practice of slavery was
well–established in the life of the nation. Moreover, in the
controversy over slavery, as Lincoln himself admitted, there
were legitimate goods at stake for the slaveholding
South—among them security, self–preservation, and the
preservation of their way of life, states’ rights, specific
constitutional guarantees, and I suppose a certain kind of
honor. Yet Lincoln’s acknowledgment of the weightiness of
the South’s legitimate concerns didn’t stop him for a moment
from declaring slavery an evil and insisting that one cannot
attain those real human goods by the route of perpetuating
slavery. There is a difference between granting credence to
the goods sought by one’s opponents and granting credence to
their arguments or plans.
Armed as we
are now with this invaluable Report, it seems to me
time to frame the issue more sharply. Cloning is an evil,
and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates
the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent
human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass
scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to
extract medical benefits for those who have greater power.
It is slavery plus abortion.
Is it,
then, either incorrect or misleading or unhelpful to see the
dispute over cloning as of a piece with the slavery crisis
and the abortion debate? And further, if the example of
Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and
the intertwinedness of good and evil and the intractability
of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and
more likely that we will end up in Brave New World, where
despotism masquerades as a conception of the good? The motto
of the World State with which Huxley’s novel opens is
“community, identity, stability.” I suspect our own path to
biomedical despotism will be guided by the words “progress,
compassion, and choice.”
Diana Schaub
is Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political
Science at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2003 First Things 129 (January
2003): 50-53.
www.firstthings.com
Print format
|