The Clone Wars

Progressives may recoil at neoconservative bioethics - but they haven’t offered an alternative paradigm.

I recently presented an undergraduate class with this quotation: “Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to perpetuate citizens of the wrong type.” Most of the students attributed the quote to Adolf Hitler, and none guessed its actual author, Theodore Roosevelt. Seen through the prism of the Holocaust, “progressive eugenics” seems more like an unimaginable oxymoron, rather than the mainstream science policy of social progress that it was to so many early-twentieth-century reformers. Although Margaret Sanger did not apply her views to specific groups and abhorred Nazism, “planned parenthood” included the opportunity to reduce the transmission of undesirable traits through sterilization; in some cases, mental institutions sterilized retarded and mentally ill patients. And the deep imprint of these policies lives on: Several states have only recently issued formal apologies for all those thousands of lesser types they sterilized. Eugenic public-health practices rival Prohibition as the greatest success-turned-disaster in the history of American progressivism–all the more so because its history has been largely forgotten.

Liberalism is commonly understood as a willingness to throw off tradition and consider reforms that work to the end of advancing human rights. But progressivism connotes a more aggressive commitment to improvement. This impulse lay behind the enthusiasm for eugenics of many science-oriented progressives 100 years ago, amid the rush of excitement about the social implications of Darwinism. Today, there is similar excitement about the promise of biotechnology, with the important difference that there is now vastly greater understanding of underlying mechanisms, a raft of diagnostic capabilities, some capacity to manipulate genetic endowment, and the prospect of much greater control ahead. It is not just a question of who should give birth, but how. Such technologies promise to make great progress against genetic disease and birth defects. But if ensuring the predominance of the “best types” is not the goal, then what is? What is the modern progressive view of biotechnology? Considering their history, this is not a problem for progressives to take lightly.

Set against the progressive conundrum is a flurry of thinking on the right, particularly in neoconservative circles, about the ethical implications of biotechnology. The University of Chicago’s Leon Kass has been writing about the issue for decades–it was he who, in the early 1970s, first began serious inquiry into the ethics of human cloning–and it was little surprise to see him and his compatriots dominate George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics in the early twenty-first century. By and large, however, Kass’s circle has concerned itself with the dark portents of the modern life sciences, so much so that it offers little guidance to those who see at least some progressive potential in biotechnology.

Given the vast gulf between progressive and conservative thinking, then, the time is ripe for a philosopher to take on the issues of biotechnology. And in The Case Against Perfection–a short book that is really one lengthy essay on ethics and genetics followed by a shorter essay on embryonic stem cell research–Harvard’s Michael Sandel does just that, attempting to develop a new position on biotechnology, one that, like Sandel himself, is not easily identified as either left or right. A former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Sandel is uniquely well suited for this task, and to challenge the left to gets its bearings on the brave new biology.

Sandel is perhaps best described as a civic communitarian. His early work received attention as a within-the-liberal-family critique of John Rawls: As against Rawls’ famous “original position,” Sandel emphasizes the intractability of actual historical and social ties that mainstream liberalism often downplays. his political philosophy valorizes a society built around the virtues associated with production, rather than the self-centeredness of consumption. What, then, does his notion of a republican community have to offer a progressive take on biotechnological innovation, and how does it differ from the neoconservative position?

Although conservative, or more precisely neoconservative, thinking is currently held to be in acute disarray, on the issue of bioethics neoconservative writers are vastly more coherent and comprehensive than are progressives themselves. In the lead are think tanks, academics, and, perhaps most visibly, several influential voices on the Council on Bioethics, including Kass.

As opposed to both traditional conservatives, who have little to say about values in science, and religiously oriented conservatives, whose trepidations are familiar to anyone who has seen “Inherit the Wind,” the neoconservative critics of modern biology have a clear and straightforward message, one deeply informed by the experience of the cruelties the previous century wrought as well as by ancient wisdom. In a word, that message is hubris. They fear that while previous episodes of Promethean ambition have had dire but reversible consequences, emerging biotechnologies are so powerful that, by putting the nature of humanity in fallible and perhaps malicious hands, they threaten the very foundations of human dignity. The precise consequences are not always stated–and may not be predictable–but we all know how the road to hell is paved.

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