In ur genez, clozin’ ur futurz
24 Apr, 09 | by Iain Brassington
We all know the “open future” argument against genetic modification of humans: that it’s part of being a human that we are apparently in control of our own lives and that a parent who tried to impose a “model” on us would thereby wrong us. I’ve never been sure, in all honesty, whether this tells us about the morality of engineering kids genetically, or about the morality of being a very pushy parent - but, in a sense, it doesn’t much matter. Closing down an open future might well be morally problematic.
Having said that, xkcd explains the upside…
I think the “pushy parent” problem is not well understood or recognised, which often means that the genetic modification apologists are able to present their arguments as progressive and liberal. As is often the case with technology change, we look at the present through a rear-view mirror, as Marshall McLuhan put it, and walk backwards into the future. Let me recall an instance I found amusing that illustrates this point.
About three years ago I attended a study day in bioethics at a university with large medical ethics and law department. (There are no prizes for identifying the university or individuals in this little story) The morning session finished with a paper from a professor who is a leading advocate of “human enhancement”. The professor presented his standard argument that enhancement is the future and I raised my usual objection that it is past. Of course the known past is never as sexy as the unknown future, so it might have appeared that I was the “conservative”.
During the lunch break I happened to sit on a long table some four places away from a professor of medical law. I could quite clearly hear the conversation of the law professor who began to discuss with one of the students the problem of square pegs in round holes. The professor explained that there were always a number students that had been channelled into the law by pushy parents, many of the parents being themselves in the law. The students were often unhappy with the career their parents had pushed them into and wanted to be engineers, actors, or anything but a lawyer. ’I am very surprised’, the professor declared, ’that in this day and age there are so many parents that want their children to follow in their footsteps‘. Unfortunately it is not surprising.
I think it is important analyse the “pushy parent” phenomenon. When questioned on this point the new-eugenicists immediately retreat to their moral high ground - treat humans as ends in themselves not means to ends. Back down in the real world people do treat humans as means to ends (at least some of the time) and no amount of figure wagging from on high is going to change that in the near or indeed the distant future. The “smart” technology, on the other hand, might well be available in the not too distant future.
One of the problems of doing “applied ethics” can be found in the word “applied”.
Keith Tayler
April 25th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Hmmmm… I wonder where the department you have in mind might have been…
I’m not quite sure that the position you outline does the work you want, though: while it’s true that pushy parents might think that genetic fiddling will help little Jocasta to become the Olympic-standard lettuce-grower they always wanted her to be, it’s still the pushiness that’s the moral problem, rather than the genetics: after all, the genetic modification won’t give them what they want. It doesn’t work like that. And if that is correct, then we can perhaps add another problem to our list of considerations - scientific ignorance - but, still, genetics per se won’t have crossed the radar…
Iain Brassington
April 25th, 2009 at 8:56 am
We appear to be in complete agreement!
My little story was not meant to do more than illustrate how a professor of medical law, having just listened to a lecture on how good and wonderful the “new” science of eugenics is, can raise the problem of pushy parents and not realise how it was linked to the lecture. The “pushy parent” and the other social, economic, and political forces are a major problem.
I am in total agreement with you that ignorance of the science and technology is another problem. It is interconnected with the pushy parent problem, but, as someone who has maintained that an understanding of science and technology will in itself simplify many of the ethical issues they raise, I am inclined to place it ahead of the parent problem. What for example is the point of endlessly discussing the ethical issues “behavioural genetics” when we know next to nothing about it and the very meaning of “genetic” is still fuzzy.
My own academic interests lie in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence research. For about forty years I have in my own small way been debunking the AI hype and myth. Evolution theory and genetics, especially when they become the subject of a eugenics pipedream, are making many of the mistakes computing made when it degenerated into the AI research programme. (Obviously there is proper AI research - but that is another story) As with AI, evolution theory and genetics have attracted a large number of “philosophers” (as they did a century or so ago) who do not understand the science and technology. Even if they do, they do not appear to have learnt that the science, as was the case a century or so ago, could be wrong. But again, it is much sexier to fantasize about future than understand the past and present.
So I think we are in agreement - science and pushy parents are the nub of the problem.
Keith Tayler
April 25th, 2009 at 2:50 pm