Can We Humanize Our Brave New World?
The elimination of suffering will not produce joy.
Is it ethical to alter the genetic makeup of children?
Should we create children with three parents?
What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers?
Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?
These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state.
Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”
All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.
Technological Dystopia
The explosion of new technologies and applications is truly exciting, but with this exciting potential comes the responsibility to reflect on its meaning for the human community. We must refrain from rushing down an unexamined path. Medicine in general, and reproductive medicine in particular, are coming to be defined not as the restoration of human health, but as the optimization of human well-being. No longer are the goals of medicine strictly “medical.” Researchers pursue drugs for cognitive and physical enhancements that not only improve our functioning on the bell curve but seek to redefine the curve entirely.
As we continue to expand the umbrella of medicine, we are slowly but surely redefining what it means to be human. We have reached an era in which we cannot afford the naiveté of believing that science and medicine are value-neutral; they will always be tools subject to the values of those who wield them. We can no longer afford to leave the morality of new technologies and procedures to the discernment of those fascinated by their possibility or to those who may reap economic or therapeutic benefits from them. These procedures increasingly shape not only the individuals who employ them, but future generations of humanity.
The New(est) Eugenics
Along with a postmodern decline in reverence for God has come a lost sense of the sanctity and dignity of the human person. How can that which is merely matter be sacred? How can we speak of “violating” the purely mechanical? As C. S. Lewis so presciently grasped, the attempt to wield ultimate control over the material aspects of nature has given us the impression that we both can and ought to control all aspects of our own nature: “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.” The more we use technologies that give us access to control over who we are and what kinds of children we bear, the more we will exercise that control. It seems we can’t help ourselves.
What’s left after we decide to employ these technologies is to decide how.
AMDG,
Samantha
