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10 Hubris
- Indiana University Press
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Hubris 10 The prospect of powerful genetic enhancement technologies available only to the well-to-do renders the future of society exceedingly bleak. Great rewards will go to those who can afford the most extensive enhancements, rather than to those who earn by determination and hard work. Under relentless pressure from employers and peers, anyone who can afford to become enhanced will have no choice but to do so, and wealthy parents will invariably enhance their children to give them success in life. The genetically enhanced will use their exceptional skills to take advantage of the unenhanced. Equality of opportunity will be replaced by the rule of the genobility. Democracy will die. Even the technical problems of making sure that enhancement is safe and effective may be resolved only at a significant social cost. After all, who will serve as the guinea pigs? Not the rich and famous, but the poor and vulnerable, who will be suckered into participating in dangerous experiments in return for the elusive prospect of enhancement advantages. Currently there are all sorts 122 Wondergenes of legal mechanisms designed to prevent this. Human experiments in most cases must be approved by government agencies and by review boards at the institutions that carry them out. Government regulations preclude offering subjects large sums of money in return for participating in clinical trials, or promising big breaks to prisoners. These restrictions were established in the wake of the abuses of the Nazis and of the Tuskegee experiments in the American South, in which uneducated, poor blacks suffering from syphilis were denied treatment in order to observe the progression of the disease. But the regulations could be repealed or ignored. One can imagine the argument: Enrolling poor people in genetic enhancement experiments will give them the only chance they’ll ever have to obtain access to these amazing “wondergenes.” Still, we have not yet identified the gravest threat that genetic enhancement poses to the future of society. In the foregoing scenarios , human society persists, albeit in a grim and tyrannical state. People have experienced something resembling these conditions before, even if they provoke fear and despair. But the ultimate expression of genetic enhancement could go far beyond anything we have known before. What if instead of just increasing height by several inches, genetic enhancement increased it by several feet? If someone could lift, not just a few hundred additional pounds, but a few thousand? If instead of being boosted by a score of IQ points, brainpower exceeded the capabilities of the fastest computers? As a result of the combination of cracking the genetic code and developing the technical means to modify it, technologies that will be perfected to prevent genetic disease and then extended to alter human traits give rise to the possibility that we will produce creatures with characteristics and abilities that transcend the bounds of homo sapiens. In short, what if we produce creatures that are no longer human? This and other potential consequences from genetic engineering motivate many persons to object to what they regard as “playing God.” Jeremy Rifkin, head of the Foundation for Economic Trends and a long-time critic of genetic manipulation, warns that the “perspective [of scientists] is too narrow. . . .They don’t think contextually; they’re basic mechanics. We (the public) have to make [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:42 GMT) 123 Hubris sure that the technology is used intelligently. We attempt to play God, for good intentions. And then we get into trouble.”1 Richard Land, executive director of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, similarly observes, “I think we’re on the threshold of mind-bending debates about the nature of human life. We see altering life forms, creating new life forms, as a revolt against the sovereignty of God and an attempt to be God.”2 Michael Fox, a bioethicist from the Humane Society of the United States, states, “We are very clever little simians , aren’t we? Manipulating the bases of life and thinking we’re little gods.” Genetic research, in his opinion, violates “the sanctity of life and may be regarded as an act of violence.” “[T]he only acceptable application of genetic engineering,” he says, “is to develop a genetically engineered form of birth control for our own species.”3 But the results of genetic enhancement, it might be objected, could be extremely useful. They could go far beyond the rescuers in the Introduction. They could be...