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2. Self-Satisfaction
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
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u Chapter 2 Self-Satisfaction The 2006 documentary film Wordplay is about people who like to do crossword puzzles. One of them is filmmaker Ken Burns, who explains: “I don’t drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, or need a drink at the end of the day. What I need to do is the New York Times crossword puzzle, in ink, every day.” For puzzle aficionados like Burns, it’s all about figuring out the clues to a difficult puzzle not only quickly but also definitively . Hence, the ink. Many people have no patience with puzzles. They never seem to be able to finish them. They don’t have the time. They find them too much of a struggle. But if they could complete a puzzle with the same zest as Ken Burns, perhaps puzzles would give them enjoyment and satisfaction . If people looked in the mirror and saw prettier faces than a few weeks earlier, they might feel happier and more self-confident. Maybe a weekend jogger could take pleasure in being able to run twice as far. A chorus of critics, however, claims that modifications that come about through the use of biomedical enhancements should not produce such feelings of self-satisfaction. Why do they believe this, and how convincing are their arguments? Many of the reasons asserted by opponents of the use of biomedi- 36 the price of perfection cal enhancement to increase satisfaction are difficult to comprehend. The President’s Council on Bioethics—the largely conservative advisory group headed at the time by Leon Kass—in a 2003 report complained, for example, that an enhanced performance is “utterly opaque to [one’s] direct human experience” and “unintelligible to one’s own self-understanding .”1 At another point, the Council stated that, in contrast to the decision to employ a better training program, the use of steroids to enhance athletic performance “is a calculating act of will to bypass one’s own will and intelligibility altogether.”2 Bill McKibben similarly objects that genetic enhancement would rob a child “of the last possible chance of understanding her life.”3 These arguments sound profound, but they are, at best, obscure. Why can’t the critics articulate them more clearly? One possibility is that they are referring to human dimensions that are so subtle that it is impossible to speak of them with greater clarity. As Carl Elliott explains, “Many of us feel uneasy . . . , without being quite able to say why.”4 The other possibility is these arguments are largely obfuscation. Other criticisms, while more comprehensible, are readily dismissed. One is so weak that it is difficult to take it seriously: that enhancements are “unnatural.” Clearly, the fact of a phenomenon occurring in nature does not make it good or desirable. Many scourges of humanity, from floods and famine to Alzheimer disease and cancer, are naturally occurring phenomena, yet we do not object to measures to combat them like sandbags, humanitarian food aid, Aricept, or chemotherapy. Similarly, that a phenomenon does not occur in nature does not make it bad, or else we would eschew everything from shoes to the wheel. Moreover, many biomedical enhancements such as caffeine, HGH, and EPO do occur in nature. The President’s Council states that a person who is enhanced is “less obviously human than his unaltered counterpart,” but it is not clear why this is so.5 True, some types of biomedical enhancement may change the way the individual appears to others, and in the case of extreme forms of enhancement such as the creation of chimeras, the result may be less human. But this is not true of all enhancements. Many of the changes they produce are modest or subtle, and as we saw earlier, an individual can be enhanced and still remain within the familiar norms of the species . The Council might be using the phrase “less human” simply as a pejorative to mean that the effects of enhancements are invariably evil, but it is hard to accept this as true. Indeed, how often have we heard [54.224.43.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:40 GMT) Self-Satisfaction 37 somebody say that they are “not themselves”—that is, not human—until they have had their morning coffee? Another unpersuasive contention is that an improvement made with the aid of an enhancement is not “real.” The President’s Council on Bioethics states, for example, that “the performance seems less real,” that “we may lose sight of the difference between real and...