In December, the President’s Council on Bioethics released Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (HarperCollins). The six-part report provides a balanced but critical assessment of actual and prospective developments in biotechnology. It soberly considers efforts to make “better children” through genetic screening and embryo testing, and to modify behavior with psychotropics like Ritalin. It critiques widespread efforts to attain “superior performance” through drug use, especially in sports, and concludes that such practices, by thwarting standards of traditional competition, may undercut the values associated with “natural” efforts. It raises fundamental questions about extending significantly the human life span or even (for some true believers) recasting aging as a conquerable disease. It considers the promises and perils of seeking “happy souls” through mood-enhancing drugs, and reflects on key aspects of human experience that may be undercut or even lost by such interventions.
Unlike some earlier commissions (and its own earlier report on cloning), the Council here does not make specific recommendations. Instead, it initiates a broad-ranging, perhaps prophetic, public debate. While it discusses the topics noted above, the report is less concerned about offering a “list of many things to think about than a picture of one big thing to think about: the dawning age of biotechnology and the greatly augmented power it is providing us, not only for gaining better health but also for improving our natural capacities and pursuing our own happiness.”
Since its inception, the Council has been accused of being politically conservative, especially in contrast to the membership of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton. That may well be the case. Still, the Council is literally “conservative” in two deeper and more positive senses than its critics (including many of my colleagues) seem willing to admit. First, popular pundits, and the cheerleading scientists on whom they rely, often rush to characterize new possibilities as posing unique dilemmas that elude the traditional categories of political and moral thought. By contrast, the Council resists conflating scientific with moral novelty: “the age of biotechnology is not so much about technology itself as it is about human beings empowered by biotechnology” and the ways that human desires themselves may “be transformed and inflated by the new technological powers.” Second, in bioethics, as elsewhere in the academy, increasing allegiance is paid to the canons of postmodernism, whereby appeals to broader understandings of the goods of persons and society are reflexively viewed as evidence of elitism or oppression or both. The report, while acknowledging a diversity of views about enhancement, seeks to anchor its discussion in shared moral and metaphysical concerns-the nature of human nature, and the social and political implications of unfettered choices in altering the human prospect through biotechnology. In both these commitments-to a “classical” style and in its appeal to the commonweal-the Council may be swimming against intellectual fashion, but the effort is bracing.
The report identifies many “familiar bases of concern”-about safety and efficacy, about justice in the likely distribution of the benefits of enhancement, about commodification. Of greater interest are concerns the report labels “essential”-the need to respect embodied human nature as “given” and “gifted,” as more than merely “raw material to be molded according to human will”; and the need to avoid interventions that, in merely producing results (euphoria, say), sever such effects from the source of their human meaning: “The point is less the exertions of good character against hardship, but the manifestation of an alert and self-experiencing agent making his deeds flow intentionally from his willing, knowing, and embodied soul.”
These are large and hotly disputed claims. Invoking human nature as a “given” and deserving of respect does not, in itself, illuminate the choices to be made about what enhancements are morally acceptable. Nor do artificial means necessarily taint the ends achieved; we all know persons whose true character seems more, rather than less, evident after taking antidepressants. For readers seeking clear and unambiguous guidelines, much of the discussion will seem quite imprecise.
Despite that imprecision, I applaud the Council’s effort to widen the philosophical scope of public discussion. Daniel Callahan has spoken with regret about the “moral minimalism” at work in how most bioethical issues are framed these days. Bioethics often appears timid about engaging the larger questions that animated the field in its infancy: What do we mean by a good life, by a good death? What is the nature of human nature? Are there appropriate limits to our quest to overcome finitude and suffering?
The contrast between the Council and the advocates of inevitable progress is clear. On the latter side stand those who appeal to human mastery, to technique, to new ways of responding to human misery; the examples they deploy are invariably wrenching individual cases. How dare we argue against the imperative of science, expressed in Francis Bacon’s dictum as “the relief of the human estate”? Who, save the inveterate pessimist, will not find in the promises of biotechnology a cornucopia of benefits?
Those more cautious about the meaning of biotechnology, including many members of the current Council, are hardly opposed to finding cures for genetic diseases or responding to significant suffering. Yet the report provides a broader vantage from which to assess such advances. A central problem in bioethics is that, in the interest of methodological purity and in deference to “pluralism,” it tends to restrict the range of our moral considerations by discounting appeals to imagination and intuition as merely “speculative” musings. Yet imagination is no idle power when thinking about where we may be headed in our Promethean quest to change human nature. The wisdom we seek may be better found by enlisting vision and imagination rather than dismissing them.
