Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
major violation, of our given nature as embodied, gendered and engen-
dering beings—and of the social relations built on this natural ground.”
The upshot is that critical interpreters cede the ground too readily to
those who want to move full steam ahead when, in fact, it should work
the other way around. “The burden of moral argument,” observes Kass,
“must fall entirely on those who want to declare the widespread repug-
nances of humankind to be mere timidity or superstition.”
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Too many
theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics have become reticent
about defending insights drawn from the riches of the Western tradition.
As a result, Kass argues, we do the following things: we enter a world
in which unethical experiments “upon the resulting child-to-be” are con-
ducted; we deprive a cloned entity of a “distinctive identity not only
because he will be in genotype and appearance identical to another
human being, but, in this case, because he may also be twin to the person
who is his 'father' or 'mother'—if one can still call them that”; we delib-
erately plan situations that we know—the empirical evidence is incon-
trovertible—are not optimal arenas for the rearing of children—namely,
family fragments that deny relationality or shrink it; and we “enshrine
and aggravate a profound and mischievous misunderstanding of the
meaning of having children and of the parent-child relationship. ...The
child is given a genotype that has already lived. . . . Cloning is inherently
despotic, for it seeks to make one's children ...after one's own image
. . . and their future according to one's will.”
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The many warnings
embedded in the Western tradition, from its antique forms (pre-
Christian) to Judaism and Christianity, seem now to lack the power to
stay the hand of a “scientized” anthropocentrism that distorts the
meaning of human freedom.
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Within the Hebrew and Christian traditions, a burden borne by human
beings after the fall lies in discerning what is natural or given, presum-
ing that what is encoded into the very nature of things affords a stan-
dard, accessible to human reason, by which we can assess critically the
claims and forces at work in our cultural time and place. (This isn't the
only available standard, of course, but it was long believed an important
feature of a whole complex of views.) The great moral teachers, until
relatively recently, believed that “nature” and “the natural” served as
standards. Within Christian theological anthropology, human beings are
corporeal beings—ensouled bodies—made in the image of their Creator.
