Bioconservatism
Chemical Neurological Bioconservatism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes caution and restraint in the use of biotechnologies, particularly those involving genetic manipulation and human enhancement.
Critics of bioconservatism, such as Steve Clarke and Rebecca Roache, argue that bioconservatives ground their views primarily in intuition, which can be subject to various cognitive biases.
[citation needed] Bioconservatives range in political perspective from right-leaning religious and cultural conservatives to left-leaning environmentalists and technology critics.
[7][8] Bioconservatives seek to counter the arguments made by transhumanists who support the use of human enhancement technologies despite acknowledging the risks they involve.
[9] Transhumanist philosophers such as Nick Bostrom believe that genetic modification will be essential to improving human health in the future.
His article and subsequent book, both titled The Case Against Perfection,[14][15] concern the moral permissibility of genetic engineering or genome editing.
He writes “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition.”[15] Sandel insists that consequentialist arguments overlook the principle issue of whether bioenhancement should be aspired to at all.
He is attributed with the view that human augmentation should be avoided as it expresses an excessive desire to change oneself and 'become masters of our nature.
Similarly, he has argued that the ethical problem with genetic engineering is not that it undermines the child's autonomy, as this claim "wrongly implies that absent a designing parent, children are free to choose their characteristics for themselves.
[14] In short, Sandel argues that the real ethical problems with genetic engineering concern its effects on humility, responsibility and solidarity.
He argues that humility encourages one to 'abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse control,'[18] and therefore, is worth fostering in all aspects of one's life.
[14]Essentially, Sandel believes that in order to be a good parent with the virtue of humility, one needs to accept that their child may not progress exactly according to their expectations.
Moreover, in the paper The Case Against Perfection, Sandel argues: I do not think the main problem with enhancement and genetic engineering is that they undermine effort and erode human agency.
Sandel illustrates this argument through the lens of sports: in athletics, undesirable outcomes are often attributed to extrinsic values such as lack of preparation or lapse in discipline.
Consequently, Sandel mounts a case against the perfection of genetic knowledge because it would end the solidarity arising when people reflect on the non-necessary nature of their fortunes.
As Kass notes, "people who take pills to block out from memory the painful or hateful aspects of new experience will not learn how to deal with suffering or sorrow.
[12] Kass notes that while there are biological interventions that may assist in the pursuit of excellence without cheapening its attainment, "partly because many of life's excellences have nothing to do with competition or adversity," (e.g. "drugs to decrease drowsiness or increase alertness... may actually help people in their natural pursuits of learning or painting or performing their civic duty,"[24]) "the point is less the exertions of good character against hardship, but the manifestation of an alert and self-experiencing agent making his deeds flow intentionally from his willing, knowing, and embodied soul.
"[22] Kass argues that we need to have an "intelligible connection" between means and ends in order to call one's bodies, minds, and transformations genuinely their own.
The case for ageless bodies is that the prevention of decay, decline, and disability, the avoidance of blindness, deafness, and debility, the elimination of feebleness, frailty, and fatigue, are conducive to living fully as a human being at the top of one's powers, and a "good quality of life" from beginning to end.
Habermas rejects genetic human enhancement on two main grounds: the violation of ethical freedom, and the production of asymmetrical relationships.
Habermas points out that a genetic modification produces an external imposition on a person's life that is qualitatively different from any social influence.
Eugenic interventions aiming at enhancement reduce ethical freedom insofar as they tie down the person concerned to rejected, but irreversible intentions of third parties, barring him from the spontaneous self-perception of being the undivided author of his own life.
[29]Habermas suggested that genetic human enhancements would create asymmetric relationships that endanger democracy, which is premised on the idea of moral equality.
This is the fundamental difference between natural traits and human enhancement, and it is what bears decisive weight for Habermas: the child's autonomy as self-determination is violated.
However, Habermas does acknowledge that, for example, making one's son very tall in the hope that they will become a basketball player does not automatically determine that he will choose this path.
The transhumanist Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies criticizes bioconservatism as a form of "human racism" (more commonly known as speciesism), and as being motivated by a "yuck factor" that ignores individual freedoms.
"[31] Earlier in the paper, Bostrom also replies to Leon Kass with the claim that, in his words, "nature's gifts are sometimes poisoned and should not always be accepted."
[31] It can be seen, then, than improved capabilities does not affect moral status, and that we should sustain an inclusive view that recognize our enhanced descendants as possessors of dignity.
Transhumanists reject the notion that there is a significant moral difference between enhancing human lives through technological means compared to other methods.
[31] Bostrom argues that children whose mothers played Mozart to them in the womb would not face psychological anguish upon discovering that their musical talents had been “prenatally programmed by her parents.”[31] However, he finds that bioconservative writers often employ analogous arguments to the contrary demonstrating that technological enhancements, rather than playing Mozart in the womb, could potentially disturb children.
