The Sydney Morning Herald today features an article byBill McKibben who celebrates and romanticises human imperfections and then uses his tastes to mount a *moral* argument against improvement through genetic engineering. Let me place a disclaimer here – I’m not trying to argue that genetic engineering should be compulsory, I’m not even trying to argue that it should anyone social obligation to improve the species through genetic engineering. All such matters are matters of taste – I watch with amusement colleagues who obsess over their diets and exercise regimens while I chomper away at American fastfood and spend most of my life sitting down – and I’m glad they’re not trying to impose their puritanical versions of extropianism on me. However by the same token, bogus arguments which end up with policy conclusions proscribing ‘designer babies’ and which seem to be based on nothing more than the author’s ‘ugh’ factor shouldn’t be treated as if they were serious philosophical arguments. And every line when a ‘why?’ question comes up when I read McKibben, he doesn’t answer my question, which suggests there isn’t much of an argument, just a litany of the author’s autobiographical details.
He writes:
the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous in an entirely new way. They look forward to a world of catalogue children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that have always been at the centre of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots.
Firstly there’s a lot of reason to suspect the concept of free will is meaningless and incapable of operationalisation. So discourse would be much improved by dumping the concept. And any discourse which makes use of the concept is equally meaningless. Think of it this way – say agent A reacts to a stimuli B by action C. Now, if action C was somehow dictated by a chain of cause and effect which originated in some biochemical processes at work since the beginning of agent A’s life, perhaps this is what McKibben means by A lacking ‘free will’. A lacks free will in the sense that his reactions were predetermined. But what is the alternative? Is the alternative that perhaps there was some random element to reaction C coming out instead of reaction D? Is introducing an element of randomness in the chain of cause and effect equivalent to introducing free will? But if that’s so, then, all natural phenomena can be said to have free will owing to the fact that we know that strictly mechanistic linear models of cause-effect don’t apply even to natural phenomena – the so called ‘chaotic dynamics’ picture of the world.
So I suppose what McKibben means is some reaction that isn’t assimilable into some cause-effect chain. A bit like an unmoved mover. A bit like God actually. I think the concept of free will is a bit like the concept of God – at best one can be agnostic about its existence. And what the hell does he mean ‘fate and free will’ and how is that better than a genetic destiny that has been partly determined by a human choice? In fact isn’t the latter fate which has been partly determined by human choice according to McKibben’s own weird view of the world preferable to one that has been left to ‘blind chance’? Or is he just turning the popular expression ‘Shit happens’ into some sort of Kantian imperative?
However ignoring all these considerations and taking McKibben’s metaphysical verbiage as valid for the sake of argument, what does his claim boil down to? Say, if I happen to be a child of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who is born without Tay Sachs disease owing to concerted efforts by my community
Concerted efforts by Ashkenazi Jews to use genetic testing to screen for Tay-Sachs, devastating neurological disorder that was high risk for Askenazi Jews, has resulted in virtual elimination of Tay-Sachs; success has emboldened new effort to use screening to eliminate nine other genetic diseases from Ashkenazic population; some geneticist see effort as payoff of Human Genome Project, but others worry about how people will use sreening information and whether or not they should
Yeah I can imagine one day this child growing up into an adult and lamenting McKibben-style: “My state of well-being owing to lack of Tay-Sachs disease, I wonder, oh I wonder, if only my parents had let it be, whether I would not have had it anyway. How dare they deprive me of experiencing this possibility, how dare they? Better to be a puppet of mystical concepts of ‘fate and free will’ than a puppet of scientific endavours aimed at improving my well-being’.
Also, what is the difference between a woman deciding not to get pregnant at 50 because of the heightened risk of Down’s Syndrome that comes with late pregnancy and a women who employs other state of the art methods of reducing the risk of disability in the child? What about a woman who decides not to smoke and drink during pregnancy? It seems to me that the degree of eugenics in these cases is indeed, as my formulation suggests, a difference in degree rather than in kind from the more ambitious attempts at voluntary eugenics (like the screening out of Tay Sachs disease) that some parents might choose to practice.
Hopes of enhancement and immortality are widely and superficially appealing, drawing on the overpowering love we feel for our children and on our weakness for technological consumerism.
Why isn’t what we’re doing now to stay alive – for instance, wearing a mask in the presence of a SARS sufferer, avoiding working in places filled with abestos, putting flouride in the water – why aren’t all these things ‘technological consumerism’ relative to what our primate ancestors experienced, pray tell? It seems where we draw a line on this is a personal matter of our own internal trade off. For instance, I don’t want to spend my life eating stuff which tastes like cardboard so I’m willing to shave a few years off my life in exchange for eating whatever I want, rather than eating what my health-obsessed colleagues eat.
It’s all too easy to imagine that a society that celebrates botulism toxin injections to fight wrinkles might fall for gene injections that seemed to promise a ticket to Harvard, not to mention immortality. But they reflect the shallowest idea about human life – the sense that more is always better. In fact, it is in our limitations that we find our meaning. An eternal robot might be nifty, but it wouldn’t be human
What the hell is this supposed to mean? How does wanting to be smarter or healthier or wanting to have healthy and smart children if possible have to do with ‘more is better’ other than in the sense of ‘more well being is better’? If the latter, what exactly is wrong with that? And isn’t the genuine sense of well-being that we experience come from overcoming our limitations rather than revelling in them? Is McKibben saying we won’t have enough limitations to overcome if we’re born too smart and healthy? What an optimistic man. Incidentally by McKibben’s chain of logic, isn’t Homo Sapiens to Homo Erectus as ‘the eternal robot’ is to Homo Sapiens? Perhaps McKibben would approve of genetic engineering back to our primate ancestors given the increased degree of personal authenticity to revel in our limitations that this will confer upon us.
Gregory Stock, director of the program in medicine, technology and society at UCLA, has written that “the human mind cannot be the highest summit of cognitive performance”. Measured in computations per second, that is certainly true – heck, an executive at Advanced Cell Technology has predicted that scientists soon will be able to add 20 or 30 IQ points to an embryo.
But the human mind may nonetheless be the apex of thinking machinery simply because it is able to hold things in balance, to understand that more can be too much and that there are thresholds we don’t need to cross
So not only is a higher IQ not a sufficient condition for wisdom (almost certainly true) but a higher IQ may be incompatible with the current levels of wisdom which have brought us the Holocaust, Hutu-Tutsi massacres, S11, etc? Declining returns of IQ to wisdom? Interesting concept. Either McKibben has a higher IQ than me which is why I can’t understand why this should be so, or he has a lower IQ than me and therefore is conferred with an ineffable wisdom which renders greater insight into this curious relationship than I am capable of mustering.
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