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July 12, 2002
Technologica Ethica
When, if ever, should new technologies be illegal?
By Jason Pontin
“I just think it’s wrong, that’s all.” So George W. Bush, explaining why he supports a bill that would permanently ban all reproductive and therapeutic cloning in the United States. Justifying his position last April, President Bush was admirably clear: He opposes the cloning of cells for therapeutic purposes because it would set us on the slippery slope to reproductive cloning—and that, Bush says, is repugnant to “most Americans” because it might hurt the cloned child, and because it would alter our essential human nature. Any cloning at all, Bush says, “would be… a significant step toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications.”
Bush’s thinking in this matter has been influenced by the physician and ethicist Leon Kass, who chairs the President’s council on bioethics. Dr Kass, in common with other conservative intellectuals like Brill Kristol and Francis Fukiyama, has argued for a “repugnance test:” When most people are repelled by a new technology it must be bad, Kass says, because “repugnance is often the emotional bearer of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it.” (Testimony before the National Bioethics Committee, March 1997).
Yet at least one group of Americans is not repulsed by cloning: The physicians and researchers who see in therapeutic cloning the possibility of reversing degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, who liken reproductive cloning to techniques like in vitro fertilization, and who argue that clones will soon seem little more freakish than twins.
As a class, technologists contemplate cloning with more equanimity than our President and “most Americans.” In part, this is because they are skeptical about the feasibility of banning any technology. In the melancholy words of Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel, “Whatever can be done, will be done.” If there were a market for clones, someone, in some black lab, will clone a human being even if there is an international ban. But quite apart from this fatalism, technologists cultivate a blithe optimism about technology: with a few notable exceptions like Sun’s Bill Joy, they think that technology’s effects are mostly benign.
The debate about cloning represents a division between two cultures—social conservatives and technologists—about a broader question: When, if ever, should a technology be illegal? The shrillness of the argument derives from the present state of biotechnology: the stakes seem high because cloning and genetic engineering promise to tamper with human nature.
Setting aside the question of whether any technology could ever be outlawed, what justification might there be for banning its development? A technology might be banned if it were unethical, or if it were profoundly disruptive of society because it radically altered our humanity.
To my mind, a technology should be considered unethical if its use tended to promote suffering. We would fail in our duties if we allowed the development of such a technology. Utility is not a moral consideration, since all technologies have some use. One way to think about whether a technology was malignant would be a version of Kant’s famous “categorical imperative”—which commands that we should act only in those ways that maxims derived from our actions might become universal laws. For instance, not even a liar and a murderer could bear to live on a planet where lies and murder were normal. In thinking about a new technology, we should ask: Do I want to live in a world where a technology is available not only to myself, but every one? In practice, this might be determined by ensuring there was a wide market for the technology, and that the public, sufficiently educated and after sufficient time to digest the novelty of the thing, would vote for its use. The potential for general utility is the best guarantee of a technology’s benignity; a technology that is of use to only a small class, or only to a nation state, is almost bound to be bad.
By these standards, neither therapeutic and reproductive cloning are in themselves unethical. Repugnance is no test: all new technologies seem either magical or repellant in their first applications, and what our parents with a shudder called a test tube baby, we gratefully call Jessica or Dan.
As to whether a technology should be illegal because it altered human nature, I have no objection to a new nature. The late Robert Nozick in his essay The Holocaust asked whether the human nature which administered Auschwitz is worth preserving: “It now would not be a special tragedy if humankind ended,” he writes. “Perhaps what we need do is help produce another, better species.” Francis Fukiyama in the recently published Our Posthuman Future is disturbed by a version of this idea—“species-ization,” as he calls it, or the forking of the race of into two families, one genetically enhanced to be swift, clever, memorious, altruistic, and long-lived, the other… less so. Bring it on. We would not even require Rozick’s radical punishment: Humankind might be preserved in theme parks, as a kind of genetic base-line, and to instruct and entertain our tall children. But give me a new species altogether. It might possibly make up for all our crimes.
I don't disagree with your conclusion on cloning, but I simply don't understand your argument and I think you paint an incomplete picture. On the latter point, the framing of this as an debate between "social conservatives" and "technologists" ignores the tremendous Luddite forces on the left that oppose many types of technological innovation--particularly those that conflict with an idealized view of "nature." Not only is there opposition to cloning from the left, but of course to things like genetically modified foods, etc. Jemery Rifkin isn't a "social conservative." In fact, Francis Fukuyama (correct spelling) has suggested that these elements on the right and left join forces in their opposition to cloning. This is not a left/right issue. The left/right spectrum defines how strenuously one opposes socialism and so isn't all that relevant in some of these cases. Virginia Postrel suggests that the more meaningful spectrum is "stasists" v. "dynamists" and I think that distinction is helpful in the case of cloning.
But a more fundamental problem with your criteria when a technology should be banned is that becomes nonsensical when you think it through. There are many technologies whose "use tend to promote suffering" that we would not ban. Guns for one. You right often about RMA--would you ban development in this area? For use of weapons certainly promote suffering, from a certain perspective. Also, your Kantian "categorical imperative" doesn't work either. You wouldn't want everyone carrying around nuclear weapons, so should the development of nuclear technologies be banned? Certainly controlled in certain ways, but does banned outright? I realize that you probably think that some technologies only government should be able to develop, but surely you can't believe that a technology that is inherently "unethical" is suddenly ethical as long as it is the government that develops and uses it?
The deeper problem with the Kantian approach is that is inherently chooses group interests over individual interests. It is this type of thinking that justifies around the world what we in the West think of as decisively unethical behavior. For example, it is by valuing the interests of the "group" over the individuals that many of the human rights atrocities around the world are justified--more strikingly in fundamentalist Islamic societies. Indeed, the great contribution of the West on the issue of morality and ethics has been respect for the individual.
A “technologica ethica” is a worthwhile thing to develop and a consistent philosophy about when the group has an overriding interest in preventing individuals from developing certain technologies is needed, but please start over.
Let me address your issues one by one:
Your point that lefitist luddites are also uneasy about technoloy is something of a red herring, I am afraid. I wrote "social conservatives"--which in this context could very easily include figures like Rifkin. I meant, as I said very clearly, those who are alarmed by any technology that, in their view, "alters human nature." If you wish to play a semantic game and use Postrel's terms--dynamist and stasist--that's all right by me.
Your more significant objection to my appeal to a Kantian critique of technological development rests on two arguments: a). that we often wish to develop technologies that "promote suffering." b). That a Kantian critique promotes the group over the individual.
Both are misunderstandings of my thesis. In the second case, I mean the exact opposite.
a). If a technology could be UNIVERSALLY banned because its use tended to promote suffering, then I would, indeed, argue for its abolition. Of course, this is not possible in the real world. The only reason to have nuclear weapons and guns (your two examples) is that, on this planet, other people have them. Therefore, a more fully developed version of my thesis would go something like this: develop no technology that tends to promote suffering, except in so far as it might be used as a deterrent to like technologies and therefore limit the total sum of suffering.
Your suggestion that I think a government makes unethical technologies suddenly ethical is misplaced. In fact, I specifically say that a technology that was ONLY used by a government is almost bound to bad. But in practice, since bad technologies must sometimes be used in this world to limit worse things, then, Yes: such technologies should be limited to the agencies and armed forces of a democratically elected government.
b). A Kantian "objective correlative" does the exact opposite of favoring the group over the individual. Indeed, Kant categorically states that every individual must be regarded as an end in himself and not as a means.
My argument was that general utility, demonstrated by market demand and democratic consensus, is the best means, in the real world, of determining the morality of a new technology.
Jason