Let me preface this by saying that I’m not being critical of Rawls. I’m just using Rawlsians to clarify why sophisticated people think about being personal these days:
One scenario is that genetic enhancement might be regarded as no different from the way we now view elective cosmetic surgery–expensive and not covered by health insurance. The result might be the emergence of a “genobility” based on the obsolescence of the empirical foundation of democratic equality. The aristocrats of old thought of themselves as different kinds of beings from most human beings, but they deluded themselves. The new aristocrats might come to think of themselves as radically better because they are. They will have the power to get themselves the genetic right to rule.
As Alexis de Tocqueville points out in Democracy in America, however, we modern democratic persons refuse to defer to the privileged claims of aristocrats even or especially when they’re deserved. So Fukuyama concludes that “it seems highly unlikely that people in modern democratic societies will sit around complacently if they see elites embedding their advantages genetically in their children.” If all the significant social positions were occupied by children whose parents could afford expensive genetic treatment, and most people’s children had no significant chance for success no matter hard how they worked, then we might finally have the revolution that comes when most people think they have nothing left to lose. The Marxian prediction of the emergence of inexorable division of labor that reduced great mass of people to, relatively speaking, nothing would finally become true. But it’s highly unlikely that things will ever go that far.
Much more likely, of course, is the emergence of government programs aimed at making the current level of enhancement available to every particular person. “If banning biomedical enhancements would be foolhardy and if restricting their use to socially desirable ends would require a repressive police state,” Mehlman sensibly concludes in The Price of Perfection, “the only alternative is to make sure that enhancements are available, not only to the well-off but to everyone.” We now agree that “basic education” has become a right, because without it success is almost impossible. Why would at least “basic enhancement,” so to speak, be any different? In deciding what enhancements to make generally available, it make sense to say, Mehlman goes on, that “The government decision-maker might look to John Rawls’ notion of ‘primary goods’—those that every rational person should want.”
Maybe it will be easy enough to limit the universal genetic entitlement to what genuinely contributes to health, security, and autonomy on which rational agency depends. Because biomedical enhancement would spare many from the ravages of particular diseases and other physical disabilities, it can’t really be compared to cosmetic surgery. It should be covered, it seems, by any health care plan as easily the most effective kind of preventive medicine. And our children and our children’s children can be presumed to have consented to our species permanent, germline enhancement, if that becomes possible. Nobody can argue that any person would be better off with worse health or a shorter lifespan or fewer or weaker capabilities. We can, from a Rawlsian view, presume that consent from all future generations; persons will always be for changes to nature that make them more free, responsible, and rational. It would surely be personal exploitation to choose for dependence, debility, and every early death for persons whom we could allow to escape those indignities.
People still take unreasonable pride in their natural gifts, and the members of any meritocracy—even or especially a natural meritocracy–can’t help but often have an unreasonable sense of entitlement. Enhancement will serve justice both by equalizing those gifts and making it clearer than ever that being who we are depends on the conscious intention of other persons. Justice is served by eroding the sense of entitlement that the gifted now have to genes better than most. Maybe we can actually make ourselves better Rawlsians, as Rawls himself expects. The conscious pursuit of genetic justice will bolster the otherwise languishing social and dutiful dimension of personal or individual consciousness. The belief that our liberties and capabilities are the gift of a personal God has faded almost into insignificance, but now we have a new foundation—in a way both natural and socially constructed–for personal responsibility to other persons.
There is, however, another way of thinking about enhancement. Today, we don’t blame people all that much for being less productive than others. We know there are natural differences, and so we know that even if everyone were virtuous enough to be all that he or she can be outcomes would remain unequal. Our general, Hobbesian tendency to equate dignity with productivity—or personal power–can’t help but be moderated some by compassion or pity. It is also moderated some by our dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal, meaning that all persons are of infinite and irreducible worth. The equal significance of persons, only the most heartless libertarian denies, should be some limit on meritocratic inequality. It’s true enough, though, that we can already feel our productive meritocracy eroding our pity, and that’s why we’re more anxious than ever about personal productivity.
Today, we already see ambitious and loving parents using the available enhancements, most of all, to give their kids an edge in the competitive race that is life. Parents of very short kids use growth hormones to make their kids more fit for production and even reproduction. The mainstreaming of the ADD drug Adderall is all about keeping kids focused on personal success. Not only does it help them pay attention in mind-numbing classes, studies show it keeps the kids’ heads in the game that is the boring standardized test.
More generally, we see that the use of cosmetic neurology and cosmetic surgery so far is mostly about making oneself look younger and smarter, feel more positive, be more engaged and engaging, think more clearly, and remember more precisely. We can see that enhancement is mostly about enhancing the personal productivity that contributes to personal security. Personal safety requires a lot more than being healthy and avoiding diseases. Designing parents aren’t really, as some claim, trying to instrumentalize or commodify their kids in their own eyes. It’s because they love them as particular persons that they’re so paranoid about securing their contingent personal existence in an increasingly hostile environment.
If our genetic endowments were biotechnologically equalized, the race of life would become much tougher and more judgmental. Personal failure would be connected more clearly to one’s own lack of industry and dedication. And nobody would be smart enough to soar above others without trying very hard. The result might well be less pity for those who fall behind, and perhaps a greater sense of ownership of one’s success. “Nature or God didn’t give me my edge, I did” would actually make more sense than ever; people would have more reason than ever to take proper pride in what they’ve accomplished.
If everyone becomes pretty equally gifted, then gifts no longer make the difference. A person with an enhanced memory and powers of concentration still has to study. And if our physical capabilities we’re equalized, we’d still have to train to excel. How hard and smart a person studied or trained would make all the different (abstracting, for the moment, from environment).
In The Case Against Perfection, Michael Sandel writes, in (despite himself) a kind of Rawlsian spirit, that “if our genetic endowments are gifts, rather than accomplishments for which we can take credit, it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty they reap in a market economy.” We been given advantages that we did nothing to deserve, and they’re a chief cause of our productivity. “We therefore,” Sandel goes on, “have an obligation to share this bounty with those, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts.” Because a particular person doesn’t really earn all of his bounty, he must give share some of it with the unfortunately ungifted.
The engineering of genetic justice, of course, blows that sharing argument out of the water. Now that our gifts are comparable, why do we owe each other anything at all? John Harris in Enhancing Evolution gives us the good news that “enhancement provides more to redistribute”—overall there’s much more bounty because people are much more capable—“and less need for redistribution,” because there’s less need to act socially or politically (as opposed to biomedically/technologically) to correct the inegalitarian injustice of nature.
June 29th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
Alternatively, controlling the variable of genetic endowments might more clearly demonstrate how personal failure and success is heavily dependent upon structural features of society, and the tilt of the “playing field” created thereby.
Even if we can alter the natural lottery so that every future person has exactly comparable native endowments, this wouldn’t undermine the reciprocity based arguments for Rawls’ two principles of justice. Moreover, there will also be the requirement to maintain “background justice” over time.
June 29th, 2010 | 9:23 pm
Thanks for your comments about my neglecting “nurture,” which I will acknowledge in the next post.
June 30th, 2010 | 12:34 am
[...] pode parecer absurdo, mas há “intelectuais” e académicos que já prevêem este admirável mundo novo. Mas será que essa gente não vê que se todos fôssemos génios, deixariam de existir [...]
June 30th, 2010 | 1:08 am
Nice work! I’ve written a good bit about the legal implications of genetic enhancement, but I’ve never thought about it from a political theory standpoint.
Indeed, in a Rawlsian society, it is hard to fathom how the difference principle would allow for anything but equal access to GE in the long term.
June 30th, 2010 | 3:56 pm
So “nurture” (and all the structures that go with it that Janice apparently wants “us” to pull-apart and try to sew together again according to the Theory) is neglected here.
But so is something Tocqueville thought was a pretty key feature of human nature, namely, the SOCIAL “desire” for ever-increasing equality, which at the actual-desire INDIVIDUAL level, is the operation of myriads of little offenses being taken against others being deemed better than the particular individual who makes the particular complaint. If Tocqueville is right, the danger is that the long-term operation of this dynamic, which we can call society’s “desire” for ever-more equality, is that it will continually increase equality and, what is horrifying, THIS INCREASE WILL CONTINUALLY EXASCERBATE THE DESIRE FOR EQUALITY. The more equal we really become, the more pissed off we will become about the remaining inequalities. “Never enough,” as a new book’s title puts it, but way, way beyond spending or big government, and into every structure social, genetic, and perhaps even mental.
This is why I think there is reason to worry that Peter is wrong when he says, “If our genetic endowments were biotechnologically equalized, the race of life would become much tougher and more judgmental. Personal failure would be connected more clearly to one’s own lack of industry and dedication. And nobody would be smart enough to soar above others without trying very hard. The result might well be less pity for those who fall behind, and perhaps a greater sense of ownership of one’s success. …people would have more reason than ever to take proper pride in what they’ve accomplished.”
What Peter has not calculated into this mix is the hatred of inequality, or what Tocqueville calls the “depraved taste” (there is a non-depraved one he speaks of) for equality. The people who wind up with less success would only take this “tougher” world for so long. They will find their theoreticians, i.e., thier Janices and Rawlses, who along with their social technicians can plausibly indicate which structures must be and presumably can be reworked so as to keep the productivity “winners” from crowing so much and from winning so often. Worse, there will always be those who want to win democratic honor via equality championship, a la Rawls but in a more spirited vien, who take it upon themselves to speak for and the misery of the “losers” and to fight against the structures that allow it. The way life might become more judgmental, is that your fellow clone “citizens” might be constantly on the critical (and internet-enabled) lookout for any evidence that you “think you’re better” than them.
In other words, Peter, (yours, actually) the “reality” of the democratic political dynamics which will govern genetic enhancement over the long term remains statist. And no statism is creepier than the sort which might be approved of (or worse, administered) in ways that meet certain procedural tests for what is “democratic.”
Which is why I’m for some testy political dynamics of another kind–contra Melhman, I don’t at all see why “banning biomedical enhancements would be foolhardy.” So a few arbitrary choices, such as come with all laws and democratic votes, would be incorporated into such a ban. Boo-hoo. So, worse case, we might have to preemptively attack a China-like despot state which might begin developing banned enhancements to its military advantage, and thereby attracting some of our own scientific geniuses and moral munchins (like Tom Friedman) to their shores. Anyone may call me a Wilsonian neo-con fundamentalist all they want. I stand for political liberty, and for the natural inequalities that go with it. That also happens to be the consistently environmental (which worries about natural human systems/dynamics, not just ecological ones) and Porcher position as well.
July 1st, 2010 | 8:46 am
As usual, I learned a lot from Carl’s long and smart comment. But because I agree with him that the deep thought of Rawlsian personalism is pro-life, it’s clear to me we’re not going to ban anything with pro-life–beginning with MY life–implications. He, in fact, added an issue I’m ignoring for now–military necessity (with all its pro-life implications). Military necessity alone makes the Porcher anti-tech position (say, on the Space Program) untenable. It would be interesting, of course, to see if the Porchers agree with Carl on the need to take the Chinese out before it’s took late. They have 60+% of all the nanotech patents, after all. Nanotech progress has all sorts of creepy implications that are beyond my imagination and above my pay grade.
July 1st, 2010 | 12:51 pm
I wonder if you could say more about what you mean by this, and why you believe it. Does your position here depend upon the assumption that human fetuses and embryos are to be accorded the same “free and equal” status as everyone else? Or, is that not an assumption, but rather a conclusion you believe can be secured on grounds that we can reasonably expect everyone to accept?
July 2nd, 2010 | 8:06 am
Janice, My short answer is yes to both questions. A foetus–anyone can see on an ultrasound–is a very little baby. The embryo question, to nuance a bit, is trickier and I’m not sure we’ll ever end up agreeing that an embryo is ontologically equivalent to a teenager. And the implantation that promises to make enhancement easy probably may well continue to depend on disposing of surplus embryos. But I heard even the prochoice SLATE genius Saletan say that within a generation we’ll regard surgical abortion as the atrocity of today. I’ll explain on a later post that today’s prochoice positon is untenable from a genuinely personal, prolife view. My own view is that within a generation surgical abortion will be illegal, “the right to choose” won’t extend beyond three months, and the default understanding of the fetus etc. will be prolife. You Rawlsians would be more interesting to me if you’d face up to these facts. The right to choose in general, as I will explain, will wither away in the face of prolife imperatives.
July 2nd, 2010 | 6:45 pm
Don’t bother. Today’s prochoice position is probably untenable from any prolife view. The point is to argue for the prolife view.
But why is “ontological equivalence” (whatever this means) even the issue? Is a toddler “ontologically equivalent” to a teenager?
July 2nd, 2010 | 7:33 pm
Because a particular person doesn’t really earn all of his bounty, he must give share some of it with the unfortunately ungifted.
Biomedical enhancement IS the ONLY effective way to share one’s “gifts” with the less gifted.
overall there’s much more bounty because people are much more capable—“and less need for redistribution,” because there’s less need to act socially or politically (as opposed to biomedically/technologically) to correct the inegalitarian injustice of nature.
Thats because social or political action are not true substantive actions. Biomedical and technological enhancement is the only substantive method of “redistributing” ability to the less-able, in that you are actually giving more to those who have less. This is actually very Reaganesque – the way to cure poverty is not by distribution of ever smaller shares of a fixed pie, but by making the pie bigger and creating more opportunity for everyone.
Biotechnology is the only positive-sum solution to the arbitrary distribution and limits of human ability. Positive-sum solutions are always superior to zero-sum solutions.
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