The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment

11 Commonsense Morality and the Idea of Nature: What We Can Learn from Thinking about “Therapy”

Our challenge is to understand whether the appeal to nature helps orient judgments and practice in areas such as medicine, biotechnology, and the environment . My point of departure is a distinction between two conceptions of nature. The first is of nature as a whole, as a realm distinguished from others of equal generality. In this spirit, the Greeks distinguished between nature and convention ; Kantians, between nature and freedom; modern scientists, between nature and nurture; and so on. The second conception is finer grained, nature as the “nature of”—the defining characteristics of—particular entities or species. Theconceptualarchitectureoflanguage—includingournormativelanguage— reflects the “nature of” humans as a particular kind of embodied species: rational and passionate, selfish and other-directed, individuated and social, vulnerable and mortal. That is why Kant’s quest for morality binding on “all rational beings as such” is doomed to failure. The concept of health is an example of embodied normative discourse. We can understand it approximately, in rough and ready terms, as the appropriate functioning of the human body and mind. If we were different kinds of beings, our understanding of appropriate functioning would shift accordingly. We cannot rule out the possibility that our species will evolve in ways that alter the content of this concept. But this possibility reinforces the point; our operative conception of health is relative to what we are as a species. chapter Eleven Commonsense Morality and the Idea of Nature What We Can Learn from Thinking about “Therapy” William A. Galston, Ph.D. Commonsense Morality and the Idea of Nature 169 While distinctions at this level of abstraction can be illuminating, they are unlikely to help us make progress toward resolving practical disputes. To get farther , we must employ a method I call commonsense morality. We should focus on examples rather than concepts and definitions. We should move, as Aristotle recommends , from the more known to the less known. We should start with easy cases to establish what John Rawls calls “provisional fixed points”—presumptive judgments—for moral reflection. We should move from these moral particulars to concepts and principles—from the “what” to the “why”—and use them as tests that larger moral hypotheses should meet. While searching for bright-line concepts and principles, we should be satisfied, if necessary, with fuzzier demarcations and family resemblances. And we should acknowledge that the maximal closure that philosophical reflection can achieve is likely to leave an area of permanent indeterminacy that fails to resolve hard cases. Beyond the Therapy/Enhancement Distinction? We can approach the relation between health and nature as “nature of” through the controversy, sparked by developments in pharmacology and genetics, over the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Roughly speaking, therapy is designed to attain or restore normal functioning; enhancement is designed to go beyond the bounds of normal functioning. The President’s Council on Bioethics (2003, p. 13n) argues, “The notion of ‘beyond therapy’ does not seem to us to define the royal road to understanding. For this, one must adopt an outlook not only ‘beyond therapy’ but also ‘beyond the distinction between therapy and enhancement .’ One needs to see the topic less in relation to medicine and its purposes, and more in relation to human beings and their purposes.” This claim is exposed to an obvious objection: the purposes of therapy—health and normal functioning—are human purposes. So the issue is better posed as the place of these goods within the overall moral economy of human life. Yes, terms such as “health” and “normality” are contestable, and sometimes contested. But despite a blurred periphery, they are comparatively unproblematic and retain a commonsense core that offers moral and practical guidance. Besides, it is hard to believe that moving from the therapy/enhancement distinction to a broader discussion of human purposes will narrow the zone of contestation. Rather, deep differences over the sources of meaning, purpose, and value will come to the fore. As Thomas Murray and Eric Juengst have argued, the therapy/enhancement distinction delimits a moral boundary between domains that are guided 170 William A. Galston by different kinds of considerations (Murray, 2007; Juengst, 1998). In keeping with the Aristotelian procedure I am recommending, we should begin within the four corners of the narrower debate, seeking as much clarity and agreement as the subject permits, before moving to more contested terrain. Murray considers four difficulties with the distinction. The first difficulty is that all therapy can be...