Political Theory and Bioethics

Bioethics is big business, not just with academics looking for a niche market to practice their trade, but also for government-sponsored think tanks, the most prominent of which is the President’s Council on Bioethics, chaired by Leon Kass. With the promised ‘genetic revolution’ still waiting in the awnings, it is somewhat surprising that bioethics, an unremarkable field a decade ago, has gained such astonishing popularity. At base, the simple explanation for this phenomenon is that bioethical thinking has evolved as a sophisticated and more or less formalized expression of Luddite anxiety. Because genetic enhancements and their applications to human beings promise to alter the very nature of the self, bioethics has become a shield of natural, god-given integrity, even if many of its practitioners disavow an explicitly theological commitment. The question asked of any new genetic technology devolves to the impossibly abstract and uninformative query, “Is this technique good or bad, and will it promote this value in the future?”

I am not sure what can be learned from this type of inquiry, but it certainly eclipses the far more interesting and timely political questions that underlie the mass introduction of biotechnological capacities. Most obviously, genetic therapies that permit increases in height, intelligence, or longevity, will have to be paid for, either by the state or private individuals. The regime of justice expounded by political theorists, for one, will have to be expanded to cover instances in which the costs of genetic enhancements might be shouldered by the state to offset economic or social inequalities. In time, we’ll be speaking of genetic redistribution along with other forms of distributive justice. Similarly, we should be cognizant of how genetic changes alter the way in which citizens think of themselves as free and equal. For political theory, this is by far the most important consequence of the genomic age—liberalism, especially, is founded on the idea that persons enter a society through an unmediated birth. Thus, Rawls’s difference principle is intended to compensate those that hold a remedial share of natural and social talents. Its normative fruitfulness as an equalizer would be marred, if not incapacitated, if parents of differing status where able to affect the outcomes of social entry.

Professor Kass, in an interview published today, suggests that the real challenge of biotech has to do with the ability to transform human nature to such an extent that it might undermine the structure of our freedom. Hubris and caution, he says, should be the mainstays of ethical reflection in this instance. Otherwise, the danger seems to be that we will forget what it means to be a human being. But this is nothing new. Simply because the site of technological change will eventually shift to the human body, does not mean that the dynamics of this extensively studied process will follow suit. With the invention of the printing press, for example, our powers of communication and collective memory where forever altered, just as the introduction of mass transport has seemingly shrunk the planet to a ‘global village.’ These, and countless other technological innovations, have changed the nature of what it means to be human, though generally without the ethical fear that has accompanied biotech.

My point, simply, is that there is nothing particularly momentous, at least ethically speaking, about coming advances in the life sciences. What is relevant, however, is what these advances can and will mean for the conduct of every politics, and the normative descriptions of the political process furnished by theorists. In this light, the freedom and equality of the democratic citizen are suddenly subject to acute challenge—our theories will have to be revised.

For an excellent book on this topic, see Buchanan et al.