What ethical challenges are raised by new technologies like genetic engineering and human cloning?
People will vote with their feet once those technologies offer significant benefits. At the moment they have concerns about nature or God, but that will change if you can double somebody’s lifespan with genetic engineering, which we’ve done in animals. People will use genetic engineering if you can ensure that your child won’t get Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease or diabetes. When it offers spare organs and the cure of aging, then of course it will be used...
So you don’t see any fundamental ethical objection to human cloning?
In reality, hardly anybody does. Remember that 1 in 300 pregnancies involves clones. Identical twins are clones. They are much more genetically related than a clone using the nuclear transfer technique, where you take a skin cell from one individual and create a clone from it.
But twins are not something we engineer. That just happened.
One of the big mistakes in ethics is to think that means make all the difference. The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
So the idea that we could play god and tamper with the laws of nature, creating things that wouldn’t otherwise exist, is a red herring?
We’re playing god every day. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, the natural state for human beings is a life that’s nasty, brutish, and short. We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. The challenge is to decide how to change the course of nature, not whether to change it. Our whole life is entirely unnatural. The correction of infertility is interfering in nature. Contraception is interfering in the most fundamental aspect of nature...
This raises the specter of tinkering with our genes. You could create smarter, stronger, more beautiful children.
Indeed, you could. In my view, we should choose genes if those characteristics affect a person’s happiness. A rising percentage of kids today are on Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. But that’s not because there’s suddenly been some epidemic of ADHD. It’s because you’re crippled as a human being if you have poor impulse control and can’t concentrate long enough, if you can’t defer small rewards now for larger rewards in the future. Having self-control is extremely important to strategic planning, and Ritalin enhances that characteristic in children at the low end of impulse control. Now, if you were able to test for poor impulse control in embryos, I believe we should select ones with a better chance of having more choices in life, whether you want to be a plumber, a taxi driver, a lawyer, or the president...
But eugenics just means having a child who is better in some way. Eugenics is alive and well today. When people screen their pregnancies for Down syndrome or intellectual disability, that’s eugenics. What was wrong with Nazi eugenics was that it was involuntary. People had no choice. People today can choose to utilize the fruits of science to make these selection decisions. Today, eugenics is about giving couples the choice of a better or worse life for themselves.
We’ve talked about new reproductive technology. Do we also need to rethink the ethics of how people die?
There are two aspects that we’ll have to confront. One we’re already confronting—how we die—which I think is ethically uninteresting. Of course people should be allowed to decide when and how they exit this world. The reason we have laws against it are either religious or based on arcane, outdated laws, like your body belonged to the King and you couldn’t render it unfit for fighting! Now, these are quite inappropriate in a secular society. If I want to end my life and someone else wants to help me, what business is it of the state or other people to interfere?
So you’re not one of these people who thinks the prospect of death somehow gives life meaning?
No, not at all. The prospect of failure gives life meaning. The reality is people are often prepared to embrace death when it’s not staring them in the face. Some people choose euthanasia not because they want death, but because they don’t want any longer the poor quality of life they have. But if you’re in full health, there are very few people who actually want to die just because they’ve lived too long. I think the challenge is to continue to reinvent yourself and your life. You’re already seeing people today having two or three careers, two or three families during their lives, and they don’t say they’ve had enough. I want to go on as long as possible.
http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/the-philosopher-who-says-we-should-play-god
Courtesy of http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/GeneralPrimaryCare/53437?isalert=1&uun=g906366d4503R5793688u&xid=NL_breakingnews_2015-09-08
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