Nature, Nurture, and No-Self:
Bioengineering and Buddhist Values
By Michael G. Barnhart
PART 2
Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
Brooklyn, New York
MBarnhart@kbcc.cuny.edu
Contemporary biotechnology has developed an astonishing range of competences in a very short period of time, but much of what it promises lies in the future. Even genetic tests for various heritable illnesses are dependent on results from the Human Genome Project, which aims to map the entire human genetic code. Consequently, much of the resulting moral debate involves either deploring worst-case future scenarios or alternatively finding reasons why the risk of various horrifying scenarios is overstated. Nowhere is this pattern more evident than in the recent flap over the issue of human cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer, hereafter SCNT).(13) Every argument ever deployed against such reproductive technologies as in vitro fertilization (IVF), artificial insemination by donor, somatic cell and germ line cell genetic engineering, and genetic research into human violence and sexual orientation, just to name a few, was advanced in a flurry of condemnation. Though few have risen to the defense of cloning, the same serviceable arguments that defended past technologies can be and have been marshaled in its defense.
First, the criticism. Writing in The New Republic, the eminent and longtime critic of biotechnology Leon R. Kass remarks,
People are repelled by many aspects of human cloning. They recoil from the prospect of mass production of human beings, with large clones of look-alikes, compromised in their individuality; the idea of father-son or mother-daughter twins; the bizarre prospects of a woman giving birth to and rearing a genetic copy of herself, her spouse or even her deceased father or mother; the grotesqueness of conceiving a child as an exact replacement for another who has died … the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to control its destiny; man playing God. … Revulsion is not an argument … however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it.(14)
Let us call this the Frankenstein or playing God argument. Kass himself has made it before, most notably in condemning assisted reproduction and such techniques as IVF.(15) In regard to cloning, Kass argues that there are three distinct objections that fall under the Frankenstein argument:
- (1) Cloning “threatens confusion of identity and individuality”;
- (2) Cloning encourages us in the “commodification of new life”; it leads us to regard procreation more as the “production of human children as artifacts, products of human will and design”;
- (3) Cloning “represents a form of despotism of the cloners over the cloned, and thus (even in benevolent cases) represents a blatant violation of the inner meaning of parent-child relations, of what it means to have a child, of what it means to say ‘yes’ to our own demise and ‘replacement.’”
By this last objection, Kass has in mind the mystical significance, or as he says, “soul-elevating power,” that sexuality has in its role as “an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names … children are a testament to the possibility of transcendence.”(16)
Much of the weakness of the playing God argument does not lie where Kass seems to think. That is, it is not that human repugnance isn’t an argument against some human practice. In fact, from a Buddhist point of view, I will argue that it may well be a good indicator that moral principle is at stake. Rather, the weakness is more in how we should interpret the significance of the three areas of repugnance. To start with (1), cloning might well engender the sorts of confusion that Kass mentions, and certainly no one thinks such confusion a good thing. The question is: Does cloning necessarily engender such confusion? Or is this only a possible negative effect? And if so, couldn’t we possibly do things to avoid against or mitigate such confusion of identity? For example, perhaps cloning should only be employed for a parent willing to accept suitable counseling and follow-up. Only if cloning necessarily or unavoidably causes such confusion is it worthy of our absolute condemnation. So, if that which appears repugnant in regard to cloning can be dealt with, then we have no reason to deplore cloning altogether. However, if the genetic copy is unavoidably in some measure the original because it is the copy, then cloning necessarily confuses our sense of individuality.
The same considerations apply to the second objection Kass mentions. Cloning may indeed feed into a human tendency to confuse progeny and product, to commodify children and life in general for that matter. Does it do so necessarily? Only, I think, if you believe that we are actually producing children, that is, designing and producing children after the manner of God. In fact, all SCNT does is allow us to substitute one set of DNA for another, and thus represents only a difference in the degree of our control of our offspring from the old-fashioned way of sexual procreation, not a difference in kind. We no more create life in the one case than we do in the other. I assume God has no need for cloning. However, if one believes that to control the genotype is to control the person in all his or her complexity, then cloning would be the production of people.
As to Kass’s third concern, that cloning breaks with our longstanding understanding of transcendence, our wager with death as it were, again we must wonder whether the prophesied effects are merely possibilities among others or whether they necessarily afflict the cloners and the cloned. Kass seems to be claiming that cloning irrevocably breaks the connection of sex and birth, or sex and procreation. In elaborating on (3), Kass contrasts natural acts of procreation with cloning, insofar as procreation is “saying yes to the emergence of new life in its novelty, saying yes not only to having a child but also, tacitly, to having whatever child this child turns out to be. In accepting our finitude and opening ourselves to our replacement, we are tacitly confessing the limits of our control.” By contrast, “In cloning … overbearing parents take at the start a decisive step which contradicts the entire meaning of the open and forward-looking nature of parent-child relations.
The child is given a genotype that has already lived, with full expectation that this blueprint of a past life ought to be controlling of the life to come. Cloning is inherently despotic, for it seeks to make one’s children (or someone else’s children) after one’s own image … despotism—the control of another through one’s will—it inevitably will be.”(17) In short, Kass seems to believe that such consequences are virtually inevitable. One cannot clone without despotically ruling the life of another. And presumably anything we might do to limit cloning to those who don’t seek to despotically rule the life of another would therefore be in vain.
Two underlying assumptions seem to underpin the authority of Kass’s arguments. On the one hand, he appears to believe that short of remaking oneself (or another), one would have no compelling reason to clone a human being. On the other hand, he offers a kind of genetic determinism: By controlling the genotype of another, we are controlling, manufacturing, and manipulating the identity and individuality of the other. We are illicitly appropriating a power that should belong only to God. Much of his objection to the practice has to do with the inevitability of confusion of identity, commodification of the human being, and despotic control of the other. Such inevitability is so only if we cannot avoid such consequences, and such consequences are unavoidable only if we accept the thesis that to control the genotype is to control the person.
Especially if we consider the reasons why individuals might actually wish to clone, any objection to cloning’s dangers would have to rest on an assumption of genetic determinism.(18) Commonly, parents might wish to clone in order to avoid passing on unwanted genetic defects from one parent to their offspring without introducing donated sperm or eggs and hence an external biological heritage. Individuals might also wish to clone in order to provide a sibling with bone marrow or a compatible kidney, transplantable organs, or tissues. Experiments in cloning might also provide vital information on the process of cell specialization and therefore give science the ability to grow scarce organs for transplant in the laboratory. While not everyone would approve of all such uses of cloning, most would concede that these are not reasons that suggest a desire for despotic control of one’s offspring or to continue one’s own personal existence in perpetuity. If we cannot keep cloning to such uses, it must be because the very act itself implicates us in a power that is not ours to use, the power to create and control the person by creating and controlling the genotype.
Of course, to be fair to Kass, he might only be arguing that those who would be attracted to cloning would be those who sought a Godlike power over their offspring, not that cloning actually gives one that power. However, if that is the case, then much of his concern loses its urgency, because in that case, we ought to worry about people’s motives, not the existence or availability of the practice. Our repugnance is not for the practice itself, but for certain uses of it. But given the ways Kass describes his sense of repugnance and the claims he makes regarding the “decisive step which contradicts the entire meaning of the open and forward-looking nature of parent-child relations,” it is for the practice itself that Kass reserves his moral condemnation. Which is to say, the process itself is inappropriately deterministic. A similar kind of genetic determinism also underlies another familiar objection to biotechnologies such as cloning. Hans Jonas and Joel Feinberg have on separate occasions argued the case that cloning might well violate one’s right to ignorance in regard to the future or one’s right to an open future.(19) That is, insofar as a later clone must live in knowledge of life’s likely outcomes for his or her genotype, or to the degree that one’s future may be foreshadowed, one’s basic individuality and autonomy has been compromised.
As Dan Brock has pointed out, the only way in which a later clone’s right to an open future, or a unique identity for that matter, can be taken away is if genetic determinism is true.(20) If it is not, then “if the twin’s future in reality remains open and his to freely choose, then … [no one] has violated his right to ignorance or to an open future.”(21) Even if someone undertakes to mislead the clone as to the openness of his future, no one can in fact violate his putative right to his future unless we accept what Brock labels a “crude genetic determinism.” All of which brings us to the possible defenses of cloning. Two related arguments must be mounted. The first consists of the rejection of genetic determinism together with an assertion of a right to procreative freedom; the second involves a weighing of potential risks and benefits. With genetic determinism disposed of, the possibility of an a priori argument against cloning, based on its evident injustice to the cloned, is foreclosed.
The idea that cloning simply represents a technological extension of our ordinary powers as parents to obtain the best for our children so that cloning becomes an exercise of procreative freedom completes the moral argument in favor of the prima facie acceptability of cloning. A favorable balance of benefits over risks is obtained when we realize that the risks to the clone are minimal, or at least no worse than in cases of IVF, a currently accepted practice of assisted reproduction.(22) Whatever harms may be involved, they are of a very general social sort, the kind that are notoriously hard to document or evaluate, such as the diminution of human respect for life. In any case, we will generally assess such claims by looking for evidence of such consequences in existing practices that are similar, such as IVF, where the evidence is at best equivocal. Such risks, when weighed against the benefits of exercising one’s procreative freedom, which will always involve action taken to control how one’s children turn out, together with possible benefits associated with the reasons why people are actually tempted to try cloning, suggest that what was before a demonized practice may be distinctly reasonable.
Hence, in contemporary bioethical debate, the question as to whether we should or should not utilize various genetic technologies seems to hinge on whether we are playing God in some important sense. Those who think we do play God and that that is a bad thing seem to do so because they regard us as in fact usurping a power that is not ours to have. In other words, they believe in genetic determinism whatever they may profess, because the plain fact is that we can only play God if in fact our power over our genetics is a power over our person. Those who defend these practices do so by first denying the truth of genetic determinism, and thus our power to actually play God, and then outlining the fairly modest and reasonable motivations that in fact tempt us in our use of whatever technology.
By Michael G. Barnhart
Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
Brooklyn, New York
MBarnhart@kbcc.cuny.edu
Copyright 2000
Source Journal of Buddhist Ethics
