Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
possibilities; whereas its denial can only result in our incapacity to effect
change within the boundaries of our situation.
Clearly, Elshtain sees a threat to our humanness in the notion that
“creation itself must be put right.” Remove the idea that nature is a given
and you destroy the time-honored belief that moral norms and standards
exist outside of cultural prejudice and power plays. Eliminate the fact of
a natural order, with all its imperfection and disappointment, and you
erode what tolerance we have left for difference and unpredictability.
Elshtain singles out the technology of cloning as indicative of our desire
for control and sameness, and hence of our fear of the Other. As a sig-
nificant part of the eugenics project to exert full authority over human
reproductive material, cloning represents an anthropocentrism anti-
thetical to natural diversity and, even more disturbing, to the Judeo-
Christian ontology of creation that underpins our conviction that nature
is good regardless of whether it serves our needs or not. As Genesis
shows, such an ontology provides us with a story of our origins, a story
that roots human freedom in the body and human will in the creation.
An unbounded will is thus a will that respects neither life nor the given-
ness of our humanity. The will toward the unnatural, Elshtain argues, is
in the end what connects genetic engineering and cloning to euthanasia,
abortion, physician-assisted suicide, capital punishment, and even
slavery, torture, and deportations. Needed, then, in our “world of
rootless wills” is a Christian theological anthropology that can at once
revivify the categories of nature and human finitude, and debunk the
constructs of a culture that denies that naturalness in the name of onto-
logical sameness and the prideful idea of human perfectibility.
Richard Zaner's “Visions and Re-visions: Life and the Accident of
Birth” also explores the potential impact of genetic engineering and
cloning on our understanding of the human body, particularly the body's
role in the constitution of self-identity. Echoing Elshtain, Zaner reminds
us that even today, most of the world remains a given and not a con-
struction of modern technology or social theorists. Moreover, he cau-
tions that many technological deeds, especially in the area of biomedical
research, have gone awry, confounding the best of intentions. Zaner thus
points to the thorny problems of chance and control as well as to the
questionableness of culturally constructed notions of normalcy and
illness as keys to an understanding of the underlying difficulties genetic
