On the Sanctity of Nature

Abstract

Concerns about sacred--common in everyday moral thinking--have crept into bioethics in various forms. Further, given a certain view of metaphysics of morals that is now widely endorsed in Western philosophy, there is in principle no reason that judgments about sacred cannot be part of careful and reasoned moral deliberation. In philosophically trained circles, it is a bit gauche to describe something as To speak seriously of sanctity of life; of humans, nature, or natural order as being sacred or of why we ought not to play God, is to risk appearing muddleheaded and conservative. Also, one will likely be viewed as doing uniquely religious ethics, and so as offering only a sidelight that must somehow be translated into another language if it is to have any general impact. The risk is perhaps even worse in bioethics, which at least until recently has favored moral requirements whose enforcement is as straightforward and uncontestable as possible. To respect a person's wishes, maximize happiness, or ensure kind of equality among people, we can often look to what a person has actually said about his or her wishes, what people are in general known to like, what goods others have, and so on. Of course we still run into various troubles, but we have an easier time of it than we would if we were arguing about how to respect autonomy in way Kant had in mind. And we fare much better than we would if we were maundering on about sacred. The usual philosophical attitude to sacred comes out nicely in President's Commission's patient but ultimately dismissive analysis of belief that genetic engineering might amount to playing God. In 1982 report Splicing Life, commission asked what objection really means, identified a handful of interpretations, and easily dispensed with each. If objection is simply to interfering with nature, for example, we are quickly caught in a dilemma. In one sense, all human activity interferes with nature, indeed medicine is nothing but organized interference in nature. In another sense, though, no human activity can interfere with nature; medicine adheres to laws of physics, after all. Plainly, then, objection must seek to make distinctions among interventions--some are laudable, worrisome. The commission considered making a distinction by appealing to God's plan or purposes as revealed in nature, but found appeal too raw: some reason must be given for this judgment.[1] Finding no reason at hand, commission set objection aside. Years later commission's executive director, Alexander M. Capron, wrote that one of work's signal achievements was its ability to debunk playing God objection: By carefully dissecting complaint that gene therapy amounted to `playing God,' report was able to differentiate important concerns about means and consequences from rhetorical claims.[2] The idea that genetic engineering threatens sacred still resonates in less philosophically astute crowds, however. When President Clinton asked National Bioethics Advisory Commission to comment on creation of a part-cow, part-human embryo, he wrote that he was deeply troubled by development, not that he was worried somebody might get hurt. There was a lurking anxiety about very idea of chimerical embryos. Thus he asked commission to consider the implications of such research, not just its possible consequences, although he went on to note implicitly that truly wonderful consequences might legitimately encourage us to create and study cow-human embryos anyway. Worries about how humans relate to their world are also involved in Jeremy Rifkin's broad assault on biotechnology. Rifkin's explicit objections underline possible horrific outcomes, but his description of biotechnology as algeny, as an effort to change essence of living things analogous to alchemists' attempt to change essence of physical things, needs no mention of consequences to work as an objection. …