Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
however, granting it ontological supremacy. Such a reconfiguration of the
human condition, he concludes, must begin with the recognition of our
essential historicity, and thus of those limitations placed on our power
by the inherent indeterminacy and hence elusiveness of beings encoun-
tered in time—including that most baffling entity of all, the human body
itself.
Mark Sagoff's “Nature and Human Nature” suggests that neither
nature nor history is any longer sufficient as a moral force to restrain us
from pursuing the technological transformation of our genetic constitu-
tion. Such restraint, Sagoff argues, has depended on maintaining a fun-
damental difference between the natural and the artifactual—a difference
placed in question by modern technology. The impact of this fact on the
question of human nature becomes most apparent in the area of biotech-
nology, where the line between the human as a product of nature and
the human as a fabrication of technology is already becoming blurred.
Sagoff makes a strong case for the view that whatever moral limits we
might wish to impose on genetic engineering have been, at least tradi-
tionally, rooted in the natural as a nonhuman sphere to which we must
ultimately submit. Theologians such as Paul Ramsey, for example, have
appealed to this sphere not only to put the breaks on “man's limitless
self-modification” but to salvage the very concept of human nature itself.
Sagoff, then, wisely points us toward the nexus of nature and human
nature, and the revolution brought about by the prospects of genetic
therapy and enhancement in how we are to understand this relationship.
Already, he maintains, biology has opened the door to these prospects
by demonstrating that humanity no longer resides near the trunk of the
tree of life but rather occupies an “undistinguished spot at the periph-
ery of evolution,” thus making us genomically indistinguishable from,
say, yeast. Sagoff is therefore concerned with those kinds of arguments
(which he takes quite seriously) against genetic engineering that rely on
a demonstrable connection between the human genome and a natural
and ecological order moral in its import.
To his credit, the chapter explores fairly and openly the various facets
of such arguments. Sagoff begins by noting that genetic inheritance in
particular lies at the heart of the moral dimension of nature since what
is passed down in our genes binds us to our natural heritage as a limit
to what we might become. To fool with this inheritance is to play with
