Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment

Introduction: Moral Machines and Political Animals

1 Introduction: Moral Machines and Political Animals . . . life is the ferocious force that keeps propelling us, at the same time, you can just pierce it and it dies. — k i k i s m i t h , 1991 With advances in technoscience, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish nature from culture, the grown from the made. Geneticists can enhance the DNA of almost any living creature, including human beings. Cloning is a reality, no longer just the stuff of science fiction. New genetic engineering and organ transplantation technologies raise legal questions about the ownership of one’s own DNA and one’s own body. Who has the right to reproduce certain DNA, particularly if some DNA (disease resistant ) is more desirable than other DNA (disease prone)? In laboratories, we can reproduce most things living and dead. Technologies of reproduction of everything from genes and organs to YouTube videos and the complete works of Shakespeare are at the forefront of our contemporary world. Technology is changing what we mean by reproduction itself. Virtually every facet of our lives is mediated by technology, from conception and birth— which can involve drug treatments, high-tech fertility treatments, and 2 Introduction planned C-sections—to old-age and death—which usually involve medical and pharmaceutical interventions, if not also pacemakers and other artificial body parts. Of course, along with these new technologies come new ethical and political concerns, issues that affect fundamental questions of life and death. In this book, I examine some of the ways that technology, from cloning to capital punishment, raises ethical and political questions at the extremes of life, namely, at birth and death. Technological advances give the impression that we are finally about to unlock the secrets of life and death. We feel on the verge of decrypting and decoding the “program” that is life itself. The seeming miracles of modern science give us the sense that eventually we will know with certainty the answers to all of our questions about our own bodies, our place in evolution, and our genetic futures. Some scientists and bioethicists believe that in the very near future we will be able to master our own destinies, perhaps even double, or more than double, our lifespans. Here, I analyze and challenge this will to mastery as it appears in discourses of birth and death. In some sense, birth and death are the most certain parts of our lives: we are all born and we all die. But, given advances in assisted reproductive technologies and cloning, can we be certain that we know what it is to be born? And even technological advances have not assured us that we know what it is to die. Birth and death are two experiences—if they are experiences—we never witness for ourselves. In a significant sense, we are not present at our own births. And we have yet to hear the testimony of anyone who has reported back from death—near-death perhaps, but not death as such. These are two inevitabilities for every human being, and yet we are still far from unlocking their secrets, from decoding their codes, deciphering their ciphers, or decrypting their crypts. There is always something that escapes us, something in excess of our theories or religions, something that remains inaccessible . And new developments in technology that purport to shed light on reproduction or birth and promise a pain-free death at the same time make all the more vivid how little we know about the beginnings or ends of life. It is as if we are in the dark, trying to invent scopic technologies that enhance our vision so that we can subject birth and death to scientific examination; but, inevitably, regardless of advances in technology, what we see is that there is always more that we cannot see, more to be seen, another dimension , a smaller particle, another galaxy, a new element heretofore unknown. From a philosophical perspective, even as we “find” new particles, galaxies, Moral Machines and Political Animals 3 and elements, these “facts” tell us very little about the meaning of life or of death. Furthermore, we might ask, how does technology change what we mean by birth or by death? In philosophy, debates over genetic engineering, cloning, and assisted reproduction, along with discussions of technologies that promise to provide painless humane death, particularly in the context of capital punishment , are dominated...