The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment

Preface

Preface A wide swath of contemporary social debates features what might be called “appeals to nature”—claims that nature or a natural state of affairs possesses some special value that should be weighed in moral decision-making and perhaps protected in public policy. These appeals are of a variety of kinds and involve many different understandings of what “nature” means. While none of them fit easily into the classical accounts of moral values in Western moral philosophy, they have enduring power in everyday moral discussion and, recently, somewhat wider acceptance in the scholarly literature, giving them significant clout in a range of contemporary social debates. Perhaps the most prominent of these debates is over what humans may do to themselves and to others—from the kinds of relationships they may form with each other to the biotechnological interventions by means of which they can actually change their own or their children’s bodies. Concerns about which human relationships are “natural” have a long history rooted chiefly in religiously oriented natural law traditions; however, a range of commentators have recently developed concerns in a more expressly secular fashion about how biotechnology might change the very categories of nature, including the category of human nature . The President’s Council on Bioethics, formed by President Bush in August 2001 to address the ethical and policy ramifications of biomedical innovation, argued against a variety of biotechnological alterations of human bodies and human practices on grounds that the changes would be “dehumanizing” (President ’s Council on Bioethics, 2003). From a very different political perspective, the environmentalist Bill McKibben followed up his book The End of Nature with Enough, which lamented that human genetic engineering and other technologies will bring about “the end of human nature” (McKibben, 2003). The communitarian political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the “deeper danger” in using gene transfer technologies to enhance ourselves or our children is that doing so represents “a Promethean impulse” to remake nature, including human nature, that inappropriately elevates human willfulness and mastery (Sandel, 2007, x Preface pp. 89ff.). It is widely (though certainly not universally) held that athletes should not be permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs. And people of a variety of viewpoints hold that we should die natural deaths, not planned ones carried out with a doctor’s assistance, and not ones indefinitely postponed by means of tomorrow’s “antiaging” technologies. Another category of high-profile social debates that feature appeals to nature concerns other species. This category includes debates about agricultural biotechnology and what might be called “pet biotechnology”—such as the development of a fish, originally created for industrial purposes but now marketed as a pet, that glows red or green in the dark. These appeals to nature are frequently subordinated to other moral concerns, that agricultural biotechnology will have bad environmental consequences or bad consequences for human health and well-being, for instance. Much of the argument against genetically modified corn, for example, focuses on whether it might kill off monarch butterflies. The language in these debates, however—coining terms such as “Frankenfood” and “Monsatan” (playing on the name of the company, Monsanto, a leading producer of genetically modified seeds)—suggests that those opposed to biotechnology think the problem is something ungodly, something reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein . At times the appeal to nature emerges openly. Some European philosophers have argued, for example, that genetically modifying chickens to become insentient egg producers would unacceptably violate their “species integrity,” even though it would benefit humans and possibly even chickens (Bovenkerk, Brom, and van den Bergh, 2002). When the California Fish and Game Commission decided to ban the “Glo-fish,” one commissioner told a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, “At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. What’s next? A pig with wings? . . . Welcome to the future. Here we are, playing with the genetic bases of life” (Martin, 2003). In recent years, some argue, the tools and information available for genetically modifying organisms have progressed to the point that the goals have grown much more ambitious and the very identity of the field has changed. Instead of making just a few genetic modifications to existing organisms, and doing so in a largely trial-and-error fashion, we can aim to synthesize entire genomes, then to design basic, simplified genomes and an assortment of genetic “parts,” as it were, that code for particular biological functions and that could be...