Khushi's Blog

 Biotechnological Ethics

Biotechnology can be defined as the technical manipulation of living organisms or parts of those organisms to provide products and services to satisfy human desires. If it is defined in this broad way, one can see that biotechnology has been employed throughout human history.

The history of biotechnology can be divided into three periods: ancient, modern, and contemporary. Ancient biotechnology began more than 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia. Modern biotechnology began in the nineteenth century with the development of industrial microbiology. Contemporary biotechnology began in the 1970s with new techniques for genetic engineering. In each period one can see the power humans have acquired to manipulate nature. But one also can see the natural limits of this power, which is constrained by the natural potentialities available in wild plants and animals and the natural complexities of behavioral traits in the living world.

Contemporary biotechnology has developed hundreds of products with agricultural, environmental, and medical benefits. Agricultural biotechnology uses reliable techniques for genetic manipulation to produce new kinds of plants and animals to provide food that is cheaper and more nutritious. Environmental biotechnology is used to design genetically modified organisms that can clean up environmental pollution by consuming toxic materials. Medical biotechnology is used to devise new drugs and vaccines and therapeutic techniques that relieve or prevent suffering, cure disease, and enhance physical and mental well-being.

Ethical Issues

Despite its many benefits, biotechnology has provoked ethical controversy in six areas of moral concern: safety, liberty, justice, environmental nature, human nature, and religious beliefs.

SAFETY. Safety is a moral concern for opponents of biotechnology who worry that its power disrupts the complex balance in living nature in ways that are likely to be harmful. Individuals such as Jeremy Rifkin (1977) and groups such as Greenpeace have warned that genetically modified crops and foods could endanger human health as well as the health of the environment. Critics of medical biotechnology fear that biotechnology medicine alters the human body and mind in radical ways that could produce harmful consequences—perhaps far into the future—in ways that are hard to foresee.

LIBERTY. Liberty is a moral concern for those who fear that biotechnology will give some people tyrannical power over others. The history of eugenics, in which governments used coercion to eliminate those judged to be biologically "unfit," illustrates the danger of encroachments on liberty. Libertarian proponents of biotechnology such as Fumento and Virginia Postrel (1998) insist that there should be no threat to liberty as long as biotechnology is chosen freely by individuals in a free market economy. But conservatives such as Leon Kass (2002) worry that people could be coerced informally by social pressure, employers, and insurance companies so that they will feel compelled to adopt biotechnology products and procedures. Moreover, Kass and others suggest that biotech can give parents the power to control the nature and behavior of their children in ways that threaten the liberty of the children.

JUSTICE. Justice is a moral concern for people who anticipate that biotechnology will be so expensive that only the richest individuals will benefit from it so that the rich will have an unjust advantage over the poor. Even proponents of biotechnology such as Lee Silver (1998) worry that reproductive biotechnology eventually could divide humanity into two separate species based on the wealth or poverty of their ancestors: the "genrich" who would be genetically designed to be superior and the "genpoor" who would be left behind as biologically inferior beings. 

ENVIRONMENTAL NATURE. Environmental nature is a moral concern for environmentalists such as Rifkin and Bill McKibben (2003). Those environmentalists predict that biotechnology will promote the replacement of the natural environment with a purely artificial world and that this will deprive human beings of healthy contact with wild nature. They also fear that introducing genetically modified organisms into the environment will produce monstrous forms of life that will threaten human beings and the natural world.

HUMAN NATURE. Human nature is a moral concern for anyone who fears that biotechnology could change or even abolish human nature. Both environmentalists such as Rifkin and McKibben and conservatives such as Kass and Francis Fukuyama (2002) worry that the biotechnological transformation of human nature will produce a "posthuman" world with no place for human dignity rooted in human nature. On the other side of this debate Nick Bolstrom (2003) and others in the World Transhumanist Association welcome the prospect of using biotechnology to move toward a "transhuman" condition. More moderate proponents of biotechnology dismiss both positions for being based on exaggerated views of the power of biotechnology.

RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. To appreciate life as a gift that should elicit a feeling of humility rather than mastery is a religious emotion. Some of the moral concerns about biotechnology express the religious attitude that life is sacred and therefore the biotechnological manipulation of life shows a lack of reverence for the divinely ordained cosmic order. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) suggests that the human lust for technical power over the world provokes divine punishment. In 1977 the environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book attacking biotechnology with the title Who Should Play God?: The Artificial Creation of Life and What It Means for the Future of the Human Race. The title conveys the direction of his argument. The "creation of life" is proper only for God. For human beings to create life "artificially" is a blasphemous transgression of God's law that will bring punishment upon the human race. Rifkin often uses the imagery of the Frankenstein story. Like Doctor Frankenstein, biotech scientists are trying to take God's place in creating life, and the result can only be the creation of monsters. When people such as Rifkin use the phrase "playing God," they evoke a religious sense that nature is a sacred expression of God's will and therefore should not be changed by human intervention. Rifkin has said that "the resacralization of nature stands before us as the great mission of the coming age". 

Putting It Together

This framework for ethics does not offer an easy or automatic solution to ethical dilemmas. That is not its goal. The framework helps identify what ethics requires of us: to consider benefits and burdens, rights and justice, virtues and the common good. Each of these approaches gives us key information about ethical options in a given situation. In the end, each of us brings our moral judgment to bear in carefully considering the facts of the matter and what is right-making and wrong-making about our options for acting. When we do this reasoning together, through public discourse, we have a chance to develop a healthcare vision for our society. Such a vision would provide the necessary—and currently absent—criteria for determining which research trajectories to follow and which to ignore.

As we deliberate, we have a further obligation. Because biotech innovations may eventually involve germ-line manipulation, the actions we take today may affect every future generation of human beings, making the coming generations stakeholders in our ethical analysis. Consideration of transgenerational consequences may impose limits on what we do now in the interest of those who come after us. Minimally, we should not knowingly inflict harm. Many indigenous peoples speak of responsibilities that extend to the next seven generations. There is moral wisdom for us in that approach. As we approach cutting-edge issues in biotechnology, this very ancient moral wisdom can serve us well.