Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
With the advent of genetic engineering, the concept of animal telos
was again cast into prominence, for we can certainly in principle change
telos by genetic engineering. One argument against doing this proceeds
as follows: given that emerging social ethics affirms that human use of
animals should respect and not violate animal telos, we therefore should
not
alter
animal telos. Since genetic engineering is precisely the deliber-
ate changing of animal telos, it is ipso facto morally wrong. I suspect
that something like this, at least in part, underlies the knee-jerk antipa-
thy that many people have to genetic engineering.
Seductive though this move may be, I do not believe it will stand up
to rational scrutiny, for I contend that it rests on a logical error. What
the moral imperative about telos says is this: Maxim to Respect Telos:
If an animal has a set of needs and interests that are constitutive of its
nature, then, in our dealings with that animal, we are obliged to not
violate and to attempt to accommodate those interests, for violation of
and failure to accommodate those interests matters to the animal
. It does
not follow from that statement, however, that we cannot change the
telos. The reason we respect telos is that the interests comprising the telos
are plausibly what matters most to the animal. If we alter the telos in
such a way that different things matter to the animal, or in a way that
is irrelevant to the animal, we have not violated the above maxim. In
essence, the maxim says that, given a telos, we should respect the inter-
ests that flow from it. This principle does not logically entail that we
cannot modify the telos and thereby generate different or alternative
interests.
The only way one could deduce an injunction that it is wrong to
change telos from the Maxim to Respect Telos is to make the ancillary
Panglossian assumption that an animal's telos is the best it can possibly
be vis-à-vis the animal's well-being, and that any modification of telos
will inevitably result in an even greater violation of the animal's nature
and consequently lead to greater suffering. This ancillary assumption is
neither a priori nor empirically true, and can indeed readily be seen to
be false.
Consider domestic animals. One can argue that humans have, through
artificial selection, changed (or genetically engineered) the telos of at least
some such animals from their parent stock so that they are more con-
genial to our husbandry. I doubt anyone would argue that, given our
