Hopes against Hopeful Monsters

Admixtures of living but unrelated material to make new organisms include conventional (grafts, wide-crosses, hybrids) and unconventional biotechnology (transgenics, chimeras, and mosaics). All of these amalgamations raise the same concern but to varying degrees. Does the combination of otherwise disparate forms of life pose a special ethical problem? If transgenic plants are a simmering controversy, the issue comes to a boil when we consider human-nonhuman interspecifics [HNHIs (pronounced honeys)]. Should these creations be allowed? Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) claim that reasonable opposition is possible because HNHIs introduce moral confusion. Confusion arises, they say, because HNHIs are the embodiment of the clash between the absolute moral status of human beings qua human beings and the conditional moral status of other organisms. Creating HNHIs is like mixing the oil and water of fundamental moral intuitions—a problem aggravated, not assuaged, by the metaphysics of species. If a unique species identity could be claimed for human beings, it would provide a biological basis for drawing moral contrasts between HNHIs and fixed human essences—naturalistic fallacy notwithstanding. But species are not fixed biological essences. Thus no biological doctrine of hu- man essence can backstop a stance on the moral status ofHNHIs. They are ontologically ambiguous and morallyambivalent, so their manufacture should be disallowed.

Are HNHIs ontologically ambiguous? To start with a basic observation, species ranks are controversial because they have been regarded as the most basic evolutionary unit and the lowest classificatory rank. Biologists are flex- ible and use different species concepts as specific conceptual tasks demand, but their commitment to evolution (and interaction with real organisms) requires that some taxa are phylogenetic units. The species taxon will fulfill this function, although as a concept it is notoriously plastic, having at least a dozen plausible candidates. Species- concept pluralism has led one philosopher to the development of species-concept antirealism (Ereshefsky 1998) and subsequently to challenge the Linnaean classification system (Ereshefsky 2001). Yet only global antirealists doubt the reality of taxa described by any taxonomic rank. So it is partly excusable if biologists sometimes lapse into species vernacular—the typological species concept—to describe taxa they take to be uncontroversially real. One must consider the context in which they might give in to temptation. In the media and funding epicycles of science, typological overstatement is science marketing.

No one can think seriously about evolutionary biology with the typological species concept, but it is an operationalizable concept with respect to anthropogenic interspecifics, including HNHIs, which are otherwise orphaned by evolutionary biologists' classification schemes. Biotechnologists have no other option but to name their creations using "typology-without-the-essentialism," or, more succinctly, nominalism. No one balks at "golden rice" or "geep," because these are just names. The taxa are real and they need to be named, just like the HNHIs. Biotechnologists' alchemy with these life forms is an act that permanently dispenses with any last vestiges of species fixity in the life forms, whereas the need for nominalism in biotechnology, and species-concept antirealism more generally, suggests that nothing much trades on the names, either.

If HNHIs are no more ontologically ambiguous than any other living thing, then the literature on the species concept cannot be counted on to dispel great myths about human or HNHI essences. Furthermore, the moral question about HNHIs is not aided by the cannon of species concepts because the arguments using typological thinking surveyed by Robert and Baylis are so weak they can be toppled with pea shooters. Kass's "wisdom of repugnance," perhaps the most pernicious of the lot, puts typological reasoning to poor ends by backstopping claims about the legitimacy of moral intuitions. Having been thankful for Harris's (1997) response to Kass, gratitude is here extended to Robert and Baylis's response to Kass. Typological nativism, the brain behind the "wisdom of repugnance" is no guide to moral reasoning. The presence of homologies suggests why it is naive to group individual things...