Tools from and for Democratic Deliberations

Abstract

Democracy, according to Nietzsche, is boring. Always settling for the lowest common denominator, it flattens souls. Its citizens are soft. They lack heroic certainty. I have heard a related complaint made about the NBAC report: it settles for a consensus built on the boring and only temporarily persuasive grounds of safety. Its authors couldn't mount the heroic argument and forge the hard consensus that once and for all could keep us from--or get us to--cloning humans. But for those who prefer democracy to the alternatives, and who accept that real deliberation takes time and care and a willingness to question what one thinks is certain, the NBAC report should be appreciated as a significant achievement. Not only did the panel build a consensus on a volatile question in ninety days, but more importantly and impressively, it provided the rest of us with the tools we need to carry on a national conversation about human beings. Specifically, it provides a clear account of how Wilmut's technique is distinct from and similar to related techniques, and it provides an overview of the fundamental ethical questions raised by that technique. Getting clear about what Wilmut did is the first step in getting clear about why it matters morally. The need for such clarification is obvious if one looks at President Clinton's letter, in which he asked the NBAC to explore the ethical implications of Wilmut's experiment. The president wrote: this technological advance could offer potential benefits in such areas as medical research and agriculture, it also raises serious ethical questions, particularly with respect to the possible use of this technology to clone human embryos (emphasis added). But, with one caveat to be mentioned below, Wilmut's technological advance does not raise new questions about human embryos. I put in scare quotes because the term is so imprecise. It can refer to a wildly heterogeneous class of techniques: from making copies of single molecules, to making grafts of plants, to twinning animal embryos, to taking the nucleus of a cell of a human adult and producing a (nearly identical) genetic copy. What Wilmut did is the latter, a technique the commission designated somatic cell nuclear transfer. The commissioners specify three ways that such cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) from an adult organism is novel: First, and probably least importantly, Wilmut's technique makes it possible to many genetically identical offspring (p. 2). While embryo cloning (by blastomere separation or blastocyst splitting) could produce only a limited number of identical copies, Wilmut's technique could presumably create a nearly unlimited number. But the second and third novel features of Wilmut's technique are of much greater ethical significance. The second novel feature of SCNT is that it replaces sexual procreation with asexual replication of an existing set of genes. Rather than leaving the creation of children to the chance recombinant events of meisois and fertilization, as, say, in the old-fashioned and more-fun technique, SCNT replicates a genome associated with an already known phenotype. In the old fashioned way--and even in the not-so-old-fashioned way of in vitro fertilization one gives oneself over to chance. In Wilmut's way, one doesn't. The third (and intimately related to the second) novel feature of Wilmut's technique is that it makes it possible to predetermine the genes of a child. That is, Wilmut's technique makes it possible for prospective parents to know in advance a very great deal about their offsprings' characteristics. It is the combination of features two and three, this tremendously increased power to control the shape of our offspring, that makes SCNT so new and raises such fundamental ethical questions. Before moving to NBAC's overview of those ethical questions, we should first notice two crucially important qualifications that the commissioners make in the context of their claim that SCNT has novel features that raise fundamental questions. …