Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Chapter 2: Aylmer’s Moral Infancy. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Quest for Human Perfection

43 C H A P T E R 2 Aylmer’s Moral Infancy Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Quest for Human Perfection Liberal democracy is enacted as technology. It does not leave the question of the good life open but answers it along technological lines. —Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life It is easy to think of enhancement technology in terms of bold changes to the body that are not yet fully possible: implants to help soldiers see at night; gene therapy to make athletes’ bodies more efficient ; drugs that enable college students to go for days without sleep. Though these bioenhancements move users “beyond species norms,”1 less radical enhancement technologies have existed for years and may be much more indicative of general attitudes toward biotechnology than we recognize. Consider the following scenario. It is May, and two neighbors, good friends, happen to see each other as they are both doing yard work on a sunny morning. The neighbors are women in their early forties, 44 Posthuman Vision each with teenage daughters enrolled as seniors in the same public high school. As they talk, Linda tells her friend that she and her husband are considering a special graduation gift for their daughter, Jen. Linda says, “Well, we just aren’t sure that we should give her this gift, because it is kind of expensive, but we are pretty sure that she would like it. We talked to a friend who is a plastic surgeon, and he told me that breast enhancements are being done so often, and that technology has advanced so much that it is hardly invasive at all, and can be done so quickly. You know, Jen has always been on the small side, and she has such a pretty face. . . . We would really just like to give her every advantage that we can. We have the money, so why shouldn’t we do it?” This scenario represents an increasingly commonplace reality. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, breast enlargement surgery increased by nearly 500 percent between 1998 and 2008 among women eighteen and younger, while the increase among all age levels was 300 percent. Many doctors report that young girls come in with their parents, who are buying the procedure for a gift.2 Aubrie, who was a seventeen year old in suburban Dallas in 2004, planned to use her parents’ gift to increase her 32A cups to a C. “If my mom is offering to pay for it now, why not?,” she said.3 Were a bioethicist to discuss a scenario like Jen’s, she might try to discern the line between therapy and enhancement in order to caution against using what is still major surgery for optional cosmetic purposes. As Leon Kass points out, it is generally assumed that while it is acceptable to use technology to heal disease, it is not necessarily acceptable to use it to “augment or improve . . . native capacities and performances.”4 Few would argue that a mother taking her daughter to have cosmetic surgery to repair damage from an automobile accident, for instance, would be problematic. Since the gift of breast enhancement seems to be motivated only by the desire to become more sexually appealing, surgery could be seen as an unnecessarily risky overcompensation for that. But even with all the risks, young women today are rarely coming to the conclusion that breast enhancement surgery is at all problematic . The safer and cheaper such surgeries become, the more commonplace they will be. Aylmer’s Moral Infancy 45 Part of the reason for this cultural comfort with breast enhancement is that the distinction between therapy and enhancement is notoriously difficult to navigate. As Kass notes, the distinction easily breaks down because the definitions of enhancement and therapy are “bound up with, and absolutely dependent on, the inherently complicated idea of health and the always-controversial idea of normality.” So even if one believes that technology should never be used for enhancement, one does not find a clear break between acceptable and unacceptable uses, but a continuum. What’s worse, the continuum shifts according to fluctuating cultural norms. “Is it therapy to give growth hormone to a genetic dwarf, but not to a short fellow who is just unhappy to be short? And if the short are brought up to the average, the average, now having become short, will have precedent for a claim...