Moral status and Human Enhancement

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 346-381

  Buchanan, Allen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 76849096914     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01166.x     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. For some prominent and recent examples, see Jeff McMahan, "Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1996): 3-35.
2. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006).
4. Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
5. Elizabeth Anderson, "Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life," in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 277 98.
6. Expressing this worry, Francis Fukuyama suggests that, "The ultimate question raised by biotechnology is, What will happen... oncewe are able to, ineffect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?".
7. See Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 9-10.
8. As stated, this statement is ambiguous. It could mean that some peoplewill actually have a lower status, or that theywouldbe simply treated as if they did. Iwill consider both alternatives inthis article, but will focus on the former. JeffMcMahan also considers the possibility that enhancement could produce beings with a higher moral status than persons in "Cognitive Enhancement and Moral Status" (unpublished paper). Daniel Wikler explores the possibility that if some but not all were sufficiently cognitively enhanced, it might be justifiable for the enhanced to restrict the legal rights of the unenhanced. He does not frame his discussion in terms of different moral statuses, but as I argue below, it is directly relevant to that issue.
9. Daniel I. Wikler, "Paternalism in the Age of Cognitive Enhancement: Do Civil Liberties Presuppose Roughly Equal Mental Ability?" in Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 341-55.
10. In what follows, I examine both Kantian and utilitarian conceptions of moral status, in an effort to make sense of the worry that enhancement might produce beings with a higher moral status. It might be said that in doing so I have failed to consider two alternative sources of concern. The first is the idea, present in some variants of the Christian tradition, of a 'great chain of being', created by God, with human beings at the top, placed there in a position of rightful dominance over the rest of creation. On this view, for humans to create beings who were "higher" than human beings would be to act contrary to God's design and would presumably be wrong for that reason. There is a familiar ambiguity in this first view: is it that humans are entitled to dominate lesser creation simply because God willed that those who were at the top of the great chain of being should dominate, or that God willed that we should dominate because it is fitting that those with 'higher' capacities should dominate thosewith lower ones? The latter alternative points toward a second view, reasonably attributed to Nietzsche, expressible in nontheological terms: those who have superior (more evolved or developed or more complex?) capacities are entitled to dominate. I will not consider the theological view here, not only because those bioethicists who voice the worry about enhancement producing unequal moral statuses insist that they are not relying on theological premises, but also because I think the descriptive idea of a great chain of being, and along with it the notion that nature is teleological in any way relevant to morality, has been irrevocably discredited by evolutionary science. I will engage the Nietzschean view to this extent: I will argue that the most familiar and plausible view of moral status rules out the claim that greater strength or power, or even virtue, itself entitles one to a higher status. At this point I will only say that the Nietzschean view seems either to confuse the possession of a rather arbitrarily constricted set of individual excellences with basic moral worth or to be the utterly implausible claim that power grounds right, that the more powerful are entitled to more because they are more powerful.
11. See, for example, Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially chapter 3.
12. See, for examples, Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future; and Erik Parens, "The Goodness of Fragility: On the Prospect of Genetic Technologies Aimed at the Enhancement of Human Capacities," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 5 (1995): 141-53.
13. It is worth noting that on this definition of enhancement, an enhancement need not improve one's well-being overall. Enhancement thus defined means an improvement in our capacities, but not all such improvements may make us better off. Nevertheless, enhancements would generally be pursued in the expectation that they would make us better off. That expectation might be unfounded in some cases. For example, improved cognitive performance might not make us better off overall.
14. The qualifier 'biomedical' is important here, because as I have argued elsewhere, human capacities can be and have been enhanced by technologies (such as literacy, numeracy, and computers) that are not biomedical. In the rest of this essay, for the sake of brevity, Iwill sometimes omit the adjective 'biomedical', but unless otherwise specified the discussion will be limited to enhancements brought about through the application of biomedical technologies to humans.
15. McMahan, "Cognitive Enhancement and Moral Status" (unpublished paper); Wikler, "Paternalism in the Age of Cognitive Enhancement."
16. See Leon Kass, "The Wisdom of Repugnance," in The Human Cloning Debate, 2nd ed., ed. Glenn McGee (Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000), pp. 68-106.
17. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future; and Norman Daniels, "Can Anyone Really Be Talking about Ethically Modifying Human Nature?" in Human Enhancement, ed. Savulescu and Bostrom, pp. 25-42.
18. The difficulty in finding a trait or fixed set of traits that all humans and only humans possess is similarly seen in various attempts todefinebiological species. In fact, evolutionary theory suggests that variation within a species, and the vague boundaries between them, make species essentialism implausible.
19. Marc Ereshefsky makes this point in his article, ″Species," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2007 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2007/entries/species/). Accessed 28 December 2007.
20. In the past, it was said that interfertility was a marker for "species boundaries," but given the development of assisted reproductive technologies and of asexual reproduction (in the form of cloning by nuclear transplantation), it is difficult to justify putting much weight on this criterion. More generally, the advent of technologies for transferring genetic material not only within but also across biological lineages renders the notion of "species boundaries" itself suspect. It is interesting to note that what may be the most detailed recent attempt to argue that there is a fixed human essence and that one can determine fundamental issues about which sorts of beings (e.g., embryos) have human rights simply assumes-contrary to contemporary biological science-that there is a fixed set of traits that all and only human beings have.
21. Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Doubleday, 2008), chap. 3.
22. In a paper pursuing the same strategy of trying to base claims about human rights on a biological notion of human beings that ignores what contemporary biology tells us about species, Robert George and Patrick Lee appear to make the mistaken inference: Typical, unimpaired, mature individuals of kind H (human beings) have properties that confer human rights. Embryos are human beings (members of kind H [human beings]). Therefore embryos have human rights.
23. Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, "The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity," in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington, D.C.: (http://www.bioethics.gov), 2008), p. 429.
24. Lee and George simply assert-they do not argue-that "the criterion for full moral worth [and having human rights] is having a nature that entails the capacity... forconceptual thought and free choice-not the development of that natural capacity...." But that assumption begs the very question at issue, namely, whether a being such as an embryo, which lacks the capacitiesordinarily thought to confer the moral statusof a personandthe rights this entails, has the moral status of a person. For a detailed analysis of the difficulties of grounding conclusions about rights on appeals to human nature.
25. see Allen Buchanan, "HumanNature and Enhancement," Bioethics 23 (2009): 14-50.
26. My concern here is not to defend this conception of human rights, but to plumb its implications for the prospect of biomedical enhancements. For a systematic critique of it, see Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
27. Indeed, if 'humanity' refers to the class of persons, it does not even imply that the concept of human rights applies to all human beings in the biological sense, since not all of these are persons.
28. Most secular theories of human rights agree that human rights are grounded in the interests of capabilities that (normal) human beings have, but some theories hold that a sound justification for the ascription of human rights to individuals requires premises that refer not only to individuals' capabilities or interests, but also to facts about institutions. Nothing in these theories requires that only human beings have the interests or capabilities in question.
29. I am grateful to Janet Radcliffe-Richards for this point.
30. As indicated in n. 3, their concern may have another source: they may have tacit religious beliefs or strongly teleological beliefs of a nonreligious sort to the effect that there is a natural order and that the creation of beings with a higher moral status than humans (or persons) would destroy or disturb it. For a critique of this type of view, see Buchanan, "Human Nature and Enhancement."
31. See Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint.
32. This description of "development as enhancement" is compatible of course with a recognition that the processes of development involve losses as well as gains and in no way implies that people in less-developed countries are inferior people.
33. See Allen Buchanan, "Enhancement and Human Development," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 18 (2008): 1-34.
34. This formulation is intended to be broad enough to cover the distinction Jeff McMahan makes between interests and time-relative interests.
35. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 232-242.
36. This notion of mutual accountability encompasses a range of broadly contractualist views, including those of Stephen Darwall and T. M. Scanlon. Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint; T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
37. On such views it is the capacity to engage in certain kinds of relationships that counts, but these can rightly be described as capacities nonetheless.
38. Although I believe there is much to be said for the view that interest-based conceptions are implausible because they are committed to the view that talk of the moral status of persons is a misleading way of talking about the special importance of certain kinds of interests, nothing I say in the remainder of this article depends on that being the case.
39. This objection was raised by Jeff McMahan, at a conference on Enhancement and Human Nature, in Hong Kong, December 7, 2007.
40. The notion of inviolability at issue here is one that limits inviolability to beings that have rights. Ronald Dworkin develops a different conception of inviolability that is not limited in this way. He uses 'inviolability' and 'sacredness' interchangeably, although he does not invoke the religious connotations of the latter. According to Dworkin, something (including inanimate objects such as great works of art) can have inviolability because of the creativity involved in their histories. Because I am concerned here with notions of inviolability that are spelled out in terms of rights, I will not pursue Dworkin's discussion further.
41. I thank Jeff McMahan for pressing this objection also.
42. Of course, the claim that differences in capacities for well-being should not determine who is to be sacrificed means here only that having relatively greater capacity should not count. This is compatible with requiring that those who are to be eligible, in a fair lottery, for being saved through the sacrifice of others, must be capable of significantly benefiting from being saved.
43. George Annas, "Cell Division," Boston Globe, April 21, 2005.
44. See also George Annas, American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 51.
45. For a perceptive and sensible effort to throw cold water on Annas's confident predictions of "genetic genocide" perpetrated by the enhanced on the unenhanced and a clear articulation of the point that Annas has utterly discounted the widespread benefits that enhancement could bring, see Elizabeth Fenton and John D. Arras, "Bioethics and Human Rights: Curb Your Enthusiasm," Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics (forthcoming).
46. The hypothesis that mistakes about the moral status of Africans contributed to slavery is compatible with the hypothesis that the practice of slavery-more specifically, the interests it served and generated-helped foster and sustain those very mistakes
47. "Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other.
48. " See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 1777 ed., ed. J. B. Schneewind (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983), Section III, part I, p. 25.
49. A plausible response to the Practical Worry would require two things: an adequate characterization of both the risks of enhancement (including the risk that the enhanced would wrongly treat the unenhanced as inferiors) and the benefits of enhancement, as well as a consideration of how fairly or unfairly the benefits are likely to be distributed.
50. I am grateful to Daniel I. Wikler for pressing me to consider this question in this article.
51. The discussion that follows draws on my reflections in chapter 7 of From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
52. See, for example, Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 84-88.
53. See Daniel I. Wikler, "Paternalism and the Mildly Retarded," Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (1979): 377-92.
54. I am indebted to an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs for this point.
55. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, in Section 12111(9), requires "reasonable accommodation," for example, on the part of employers but limits this requirement by "undue hardship," defined as "an action requiring significant difficulty or expense." See (9) and (10) of Section 12111 at (http://www.ada.gov/pubs/ada.htm). Accessed 27 December 2007.
56. I thank John Arras for this point.
57. Elizabeth Anderson emphasizes this recognitional aspect of equality repeatedly when she argues that egalitarian justice's "proper positive aim is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others."
58. See Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337, at pp. 288-89.
59. Wikler, "Paternalism in the Age of Cognitive Enhancement."
60. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
61. I am indebted to an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs for this important point.