DARWINIAN LIBERAL EDUCATION
Kass’s richer “more natural science” of his early writings supports a
richer public bioethics as part of a Darwinian liberal education that unifies
all intellectual disciplines—the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the
humanities—within the unifying framework of Darwinian evolutionary
science. The aim of liberal education is
to probe all the fields of intellectual inquiry to understand how the complex
interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual
choices shapes the course of human experience within the cosmic order of
nature. Darwinian science provides a
general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the
scientific study of the evolution of life within the evolution of the universe
(Arnhart 2006).
Kass’s primary
contribution to this Darwinian liberal education has been in developing what he
has called “a richer bioethics, one that recognizes and tries to do justice to
the deep issues of our humanity raised by the age of biotechnology” (Kass
2005:221). Kass agrees with the argument
of John Evans that the public bioethical debate has become too “thin,” and that
it needs to become “thicker” (Evans 2002).
Kass’s “richer” bioethics is what Evans would call a “thicker”
bioethics. For bioethics to become
richer or thicker, it must become part of a Darwinian liberal education, which
became clear in the work of the President’s Council as led by Kass (Briggle
2010).
Evans uses the metaphor
of thick and thin to distinguish the substantive rationality of the
bioethical debate from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and the formal rationality
that came to dominate bioethics beginning in the late 1970s. In the earlier period, the substantive rationality
of the debates over biotechnology required that people argue about whether some
technology such as human genetic engineering was consistent with ultimate
values or ends, which required that people argue about those ultimate
ends. So, for example, a scientist
promoting human genetic engineering might argue that this was the best means
for achieving the ultimate end of human control of nature and human nature, so
that human beings could engineer the perfection of their species by eliminating
genetic defects and pursuing genetic enhancements. But then a theologian might argue that this
was “playing God,” in that man was trying to become his own self-creator and
thus take the place of God the Creator, in violation of God’s ends. There would then be a debate over which
ultimate end should be higher—striving for a human God-like power over nature
for human self-perfection or a humble and reverent acceptance of a God-given
human nature with all its imperfections.
Since many conflicting ends could be considered in such debates,
reaching agreement on which end should predominate was difficult if not
impossible, so that the debates could become endless. In this way, the substantive rationality of
these debates was thick.
By contrast, beginning
in the late 1970s, bioethics became dominated by professional
bioethicists—typically, academic philosophers and lawyers—who developed
bioethics as a specialized field of study promoting an argumentation of formal
rationality. According to this view, any
biotechnological means that maximized ends was ethical; and the ends were
predetermined by consensus of the experts to be limited in number. The ends were eventually reduced to four
principles: personal autonomy (informed consent), beneficence (benefits greater
than costs), nonmaleficence (avoiding harm), and justice (fair distribution of
benefits, costs, and risks) (Beauchamp and Childress 2001). It was assumed that these were universal ends
to which all human beings could agree.
All other ends for which there was no universal agreement were excluded
from the bioethical debates. Once they had
agreed to their four ends, bioethicists would only debate about calculating the
best means to these four ends; and they saw no need to debate about ends other
than these four. In this way, the formal
rationality of their debates was thin.
Kass’s thicker or
richer bioethics accepts the four principles adopted by the professional
bioethicists—autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. But in his writings and in his work with the
President’s Council, Kass has shown that a deep deliberation about bioethical
issues must consider many important moral ends beyond these four principles;
and because these many moral ends often conflict with one another, different
people will come to different conclusions about how to weigh these ends. The moral deliberation about these ends will
often not reach consensus.
For example, consider
the debate over whether parents should be free to use stimulant drugs—such as
Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Adderall (amphetamine)—to modify the behavior of
children who are inattentive, impulsive, or hyperactive. For thin bioethics, there might be only two
principles for this debate—autonomy and nonmaleficence. Are parents exercising their autonomy in
giving these drugs to their children?
Are these drugs safe for the children?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then we should allow parents to
use these psychotropic drugs in helping them to rear their children.
But for the thick
bioethics of the Beyond Therapy report, some important moral
considerations have been passed over in silence. For example, one crucial part of parental
rearing of children is the moral education of children through shaping their
moral character so that they are capable of self-control and behaving
appropriately in society. Will
behavior-modifying drugs interfere with this moral education? Will this teach children that good behavior
is caused by chemistry, and that the responsibility for their conduct belongs
not to themselves but to their pills?
Will this diminish their sense of moral agency? (President’s Council
2003a:87-92). The thin bioethics of the
professional bioethicists does not ask such questions.
Furthermore, while thin
bioethics requires only a narrowly specialized training—learning the four moral
ends and how biotechnological means can maximize those ends—thick bioethics
requires a broadly interdisciplinary liberal education that integrates the
natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in seeking wisdom
about the conditions for a flourishing human life and how biotechnology might
impede or promote that human flourishing.
That liberal education is best pursued, Kass believes, through reading
and discussing the Great Books of the Western intellectual tradition. One can see that in the anthology of 92
selected texts published by the President’s Council—Being Human: Readings
from the President’s Council on Bioethics.
The authors of the texts include scientists (such as Edward O. Wilson,
Richard Feynman, and James Watson), physicians (such as Hippocrates and Richard
Selzer), philosophers (such as Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Thomas Hobbes),
poets (such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman), and novelists (such as
Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Willa Cather) (President’s Council 2003b).
In its devotion to a
bioethics rooted in liberal education, the President’s Council was different
from the other five general federal bioethics commissions preceding it. Those other commissions were concerned mostly
with developing specific public policy proposals. By contrast, the Kass Council made few policy
proposals. Kass has admitted that the
Council has had “no demonstrable effect” on “specific policy issues.” He conducted the Council’s meetings and
supervised the Council’s reports to promote seminar-like discussions that
allowed open debate about the moral and intellectual questions raised by
bioethical disputes without ever reaching consensus. He said that Beyond Therapy was “a
purely educational work, with no policy recommendations.” He explained that his primary goal was
educational: he hoped that the published discussions and reports of the Council
would be adopted as readings for college seminar courses on bioethics or for
groups of ordinary citizens who wanted to discuss deep questions about the
implications of biotechnology for human life (Kass 2005:229, 240-41, 244-47).
We can see here that
Kass’s educational goal is to revive the tradition of liberal education as a
unification of all knowledge in the quest for wisdom about the meaning of our
humanity, of our human nature within the natural order of the whole. That unity of knowledge requires a unifying
framework of thought. There is today
only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is
Darwinian evolutionary science.
Although Kass does not
explicitly affirm this idea of a Darwinian liberal education, he does at least
implicitly suggest it in some of his early writings and in some of the reports
of the President’s Council. For example,
as we have seen, the Council’s report Beyond Therapy is organized around
natural human desires—“desires for longer life, stronger bodies, sharper minds,
better performance, happier souls, better children” (Kass 2005:235). These natural desires are the “essential
sources of concern” that set the standards for any moral assessment of
biotechnology. They constitute “what is
naturally human,” “what is naturally and dignifiedly human.” They are “naturally given” to us as inherent
in our human nature. If we seek the
source of this gift, we find that our natural desires are “wondrous products of
evolutionary selection,” because “the human body and mind” are “highly complex
and delicately balanced as a result of eons of gradual and exacting evolution”
(President’s Council 2003a:286-87).
This unification of
knowledge founded on evolutionary science suggests something like what Edward
O. Wilson called “consilience” (Wilson 1998).
Wilson argued that the natural human desire to understand the world as
an orderly whole was a quest for the fundamental unity of all knowledge. This longing for a comprehensive knowledge of
the whole began with ancient philosophers such as Thales and Aristotle. It was renewed by the Enlightenment of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Now, Wilson claimed, the progress in modern science has created the
realistic prospect for satisfying this ancient longing by developing a web of
causal explanations that would combine all the intellectual disciplines. Crucial to this unification of knowledge is
its foundation in evolutionary biology as explaining the nature of human beings
and their place in the natural whole, including the evolution of the universe
from the Big Bang to the present, which some historians now call Big History
(Christian 2004; Christian, Brown, and Benjamin 2014). Darwinian liberal education must encompass
all of this.
THE NATURAL LIMITS OF BIOTECHNOLOGY
One objection to this pursuit of a Darwinian liberal education that
studies an evolved human nature is that this assumes the stability of that
human nature, even though we know now that biotechnology is giving us the power
to change and even abolish that human nature.
After all, isn’t Kass’s bioethics driven by his fear that biotechnology
can lead to what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man”?
The problem with this
objection, however, is that it shows how the power of biotechnology for
changing human nature has been exaggerated (Arnhart 2003). The most fervent advocates of biotechnology
welcome the prospect of using it to transform our nature to make us
superhuman. The most fervent critics of
biotechnology warn us that its power for transforming our nature will seduce us
into a Faustian bargain that will dehumanize us. Both sides agree that biotechnology is
leading us to a “posthuman future” (Fukuyama 2002).
This is a mistake. It ignores how evolution has shaped the
adaptive complexity of our human nature—our bodies, our brains, and our
desires—in ways that resist technological manipulation. A Darwinian view of human nature—one truer to
the facts of human biology and human experience—reveals the limits of
biotechnology, so that we can reject both the redemptive hopes of its optimistic
advocates and the apocalyptic fears of its pessimistic critics.
Biotechnology will be
limited both in its technical means and in its moral ends. It will be limited in its technical means
because complex behavioral traits are rooted in the intricate interplay of many
genes, which interact with developmental contingencies and unique life
histories to form brains that respond flexibly to changing circumstances. Consequently, precise technological
manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding
undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible. Biotechnology will also be limited in its
moral ends because the motivation for biotechnological manipulations will come
from the same natural desires that have always characterized human nature.
In Beyond Therapy,
Kass and his Council recognized both these natural limits on
biotechnology. For example, they noted
the technical limits to any attempt to use genetic engineering to design
“better children”: “Growing recognition of the complexity of gene interactions,
the importance of epigenetic and other environmental influences on gene
expression, and the impact of stochastic events is producing a strong challenge
to strict genetic determinism.
Straightforward genetic engineering of better children may prove
impossible, not only in practice but even in principle.” Consequently, “genetically engineered
‘designer babies’ are not in the offing” (President’s Council 2003a:38, 276). They also recognized that biotechnology would
be limited in its moral ends as set by the natural desires of evolved human
nature, including those desires around which the whole discussion in Beyond
Therapy is organized.
CONCLUSION
I have identified three problems in Leon Kass’s “richer
bioethics.” He contradicts himself when
he shifts back and forth between his appeal to natural reason and his appeal to
supernatural revelation—Athens and Jerusalem.
His attempt to develop a biblical bioethics fails because he Bible lacks
the moral authority, the moral clarity, and the moral reliability required for
settling debates over biotechnology. In
claiming that all modern science is blinded by a crudely reductionistic,
mechanistic, and antiteleological understanding of nature, he fails to
recognize how modern science sees the emergent complexity and teleological
structure of life.
Kass could avoid these
problems by renewing his project for a “more natural science” in his early
writings. This expansive conception of
modern science would support a Darwinian liberal education that could help us
to think deeply and act morally in our modern world as shaped by modern science
and technology.
More broadly, Darwinian
liberal education can help us understand our human place in nature. We are neither mindless machines nor
disembodied spirits. We are
animals. As animals, we display the
animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness. We move to satisfy our desires in the light
of our awareness of the world. We are a
unique kind of animal, but our distinctively human traits—such as symbolic
speech, practical deliberation, and conceptual thought—are emergent
elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals. Our powers for habituation and learning allow
us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are emergent extensions
of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals. So even if the natural world was not made for
us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it. We have not been thrown into nature from some
place far away. We come from nature. It is our home.
REFERENCES
Arnhart, Larry. 2003. “Human Nature Is Here to Stay.” The New
Atlantis, Number 2 (Summer): 65-78.
Arnhart, Larry. 2006. “Darwinian Liberal Education.” Academic Questions 19 (Fall):6-18.
Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2001. Principles of
Bioethics. 5th edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Christian, David. 2004. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big
History. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press.
Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. 2014. Big
History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Evans, John H. 2002. Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the
Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Briggle, Adam. 2010. A Rich Bioethics: Public Policy,
Biotechnology, and the Kass Council. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Kass, Leon. 2005. “Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the
Trenches.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15:221-50.
President’s Council on Bioethics. 2003a. Beyond Therapy:
Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, DC: President’s
Council on Bioethics.
President’s Council on Bioethics. 2003b. Being Human: Readings from
the President’s Council on Bioethics. Washington, DC: President’s Council
on Bioethics.
Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf.
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