The 2003 lecture series on technology and society, sponsored by the Center’s Project on Biotechnology and American Democracy, concluded with three speakers in May and June. Brief excerpts from their lectures follow.
From Eric Cohen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, "Embryo Research and the American Character," given May 1:
The two major concerns of a conservative bioethics [are] the greatness of the great and the dignity of the weak. Conservatives admire the great humanity of those who run and swim and compose and fight, and we fear a Brave New World where the aspiration to excellence is smothered by pharmacological contentment, or where excellence becomes more artificial than real, more machine than human, or so technical that only the technicians can understand it. But conservatives also defend the dignity of those who will never run or swim or compose or fight, and the dignity of those embryos that cannot yet do these things. And we argue against those who claim that the very lack of these powers makes such lives not worth living or protecting, and against those who are tempted to seek equality by aborting (or euthanizing) the imperfects.
We are, in other words, for the highest human types and the most vulnerable human types. We are for unconditional love and conditional excellence. We are for treating seemingly unequal things (like early-stage embryos) more equally, and for treating truly unequal things (like Olympic athletes) less equally. We are against screening and aborting individuals with low IQs, and against treating individuals with low IQs as valedictorians—or drugging them so they have the self-esteem of valedictorians.
In the end the Brave New World frightens and disgusts us because it is a world without love and a world without excellence. It is a world where nobody aspires to anything lofty, noble, or daring, and where nobody must love another when such love is fragile, mysterious, and hard.
From Adam Wolfson of The Public Interest,"Biotechnology and the American Project," given May 22:
What is it about biotechnology and its advances that we conservatives find troubling? . . . First, the continued development of biotech in certain directions will require the violation of truly basic moral strictures. Second, biotechnology will initiate a revolution in how we think about family, parenthood, the relation between the generations, work and achievement, and many other areas of human life. And third, biotechnology could bring about a fundamental rupture in human history leading us into some kind of post-human age. . . .
The second conservative concern with biotechnology has to do with the transformative effects it may have on our understanding of ourselves and how this new understanding might eventually become embedded in social practices and institutions. In my view, at least, this is where biotechnology’s greatest challenge lies. . . . What’s at issue is the shaping of public opinion in potentially harmful directions. . . . Eugenic controls are a radically new type of authority or power . . . quite different from the sort of control exercised through education or socialization. A person can overcome or at least revise these parts of his personal history or makeup. Indeed, one might say that this is what it means, at least from the terms of modern liberalism as we understand it today, to be an individual—to take control over one’s past and to make it one’s own, to be autonomous. However, genetic control cannot so easily be shaken or thrown aside . . . . [E]ugenic control threatens two of modern liberalism’s central principles, autonomy and equality.
From Peter Lawler of Berry College, "Biotechnology and Compassionate Conservatism," given June 5:
Libertarians see biotechnology as a compassionate away to bring compassion to an end. Today biotechnology really does promise to make the time of our deaths very indefinite. Maybe all genetically based diseases can be cured, and that’s most or maybe all diseases. And regenerative medicine may be able to rejuvenate every bodily organ. . . . The promise of biotechnology is that we can replace natural evolution with conscious and volitional evolution, and so inaugurate a new birth of indefinite human progress away from blind and pitiless natural domination. . . .
But would the biotechnological achievement of indefinite longevity really free human beings from being defined by their contingency and mortality? Is there any real evidence that biotechnology can produce anything other than an intensification of our Lockean individualism? . . . Our experience will be that nobody need die any more, but it is still possible for a healthy person to, say, be blown up into a million pieces in an accidental explosion.
It would seem that life would become more ordinary or less accidental than ever. What Pascal calls human greatness and misery—the results of our anxious contingency—would disappear. But from a more Pascalian view, the near-disappearance of death as a necessity would actually make our lives more accidental.
