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11 Casuistry and the Moral Continuum: Evaluating Animal Biotechnology Autumn Fiester The science of animal biotechnology is progressing very rapidly, as seen in projects ranging from pet cloning to biopharming to xenotransplantation to the preservation of endangered species. While the science of animal biotechnology advances undeterred, the ethical discussion about the boundaries the public might want to set is at the most nascent stage. While some favor a blanket prohibition of animal biotechnology1 that is unlikely to be imposed on the biotechnology industry, most others view this science as having a continuum of moral permissibility, with some projects seemingly justified and others not. But which of the animal cloning and transgenic projects are ethically permissible, and which ones cross an important moral line? To make these critical ethical decisions, we need a moral framework for conducting an analysis of particular animal biotechnology projects. If we are to assess projects in a way that avoids rejecting or embracing all animal biotechnology, we need an approach that focuses on the individual protocols, ends, and methods of specific projects. This emphasis on the particular is necessary for a field like animal biotechnology where projects are pursued for a myriad of reasons, involving varying degrees of animal suffering, alteration, or modification. With its history of case sensitivity, I advocate the use of bioethical casuistry as the most useful method of moral evaluation. To demonstrate this method of assessing the merits of biotechnology research, I examine two contrasting projects with human-medical implications : the “biopharming” of transgenic goats in order to harvest proteins in the animals’ milk; and the creation of genetically modified pigs for the long-term goal of xenotransplantation. On this casuistical approach, I use the first project as a paradigm case of moral permissibility; I then use the moral insights gleaned from this case to reflect on other current animal biotechnology projects, focusing 182 Chapter 11 specifically on the case of genetically modified pigs. The goal is the description of a moral continuum along which other projects in the animal biotechnology can be located. Casuistical Analysis of Animal Biotechnology First used in the Middle Ages, casuistry was considered a viable approach to moral judgment until the seventeenth century, when it fell out of favor . It has recently been revived in contemporary bioethics because of its reliance on paradigm cases, a strategy akin to the use of legal precedent, which functions well in a field that often advances its thinking based on reflections about particular clinical or research ethics cases. Casuistry, then, is a bioethical approach to ethical analysis in which moral permissibility is determined by analyzing a particular case, mining that case for the ethical considerations relevant to it, and producing moral principles or “rules of thumb” that capture the insights and intuitions discovered there. Theorists Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin first articulated this method for bioethics in their book The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988). Since the use of casuistry is comparatively new in bioethics, debate about which of its versions is most defensible is still ongoing; here I follow the interpretation offered by John Arras (1991). The distinguishing feature of Arras’s casuistry is that “ethical principles are ‘discovered’ in the cases themselves, just as common law legal principles are developed in and through judicial decisions on particular legal cases” (33). Arras considers his version of casuistry to be faithful to the theory articulated by Jonsen and Toulmin, not an alternative to it. I agree that two different strains of casuistry can be found in their work, with two different views of the role and status of moral principles. In the first strain, principles are simply applied to a new case; in the second, principles are actually generated in the cases themselves. Both strains are evident in the work of Jonsen and Toulmin, and I believe that each strategy has an important function in the field of bioethics. For novel problems with very little precedent, the strategy of using the cases to generate guiding principles is most helpful; in areas of bioethics that can be analogized to other well-trod ground, bringing widely accepted principles to bear is more helpful. In my analysis, then, rather than coming to a case with a set of relevant principles already in hand and then applying them, I first reflect on the case and then generate principles that articulate the moral considerations found there. These new “principles” can then be used to reflect on other, similar [3...

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