Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Nature, Sin, and Society
Lisa Sowle Cahill
The chapters in this volume are attempting to address three questions:
Does genetic engineering require a new understanding of human nature?
Should there be—and can there be—effective limits to genetic manipu-
lation? Here, I would like to consider these concerns from the standpoint
of justice. I shall do this on the foundation of my own discipline of the-
ological ethics, proposing, however, that the Christian ethical commit-
ments and insights I endorse can make an important contribution to
public discourse about the ethics of genetics research and the develop-
ment of genetics-based biotechnology. The basic framework of my analy-
sis will be social ethics, drawing on the Catholic social tradition and the
“Christian realism” of the U.S. Protestant ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. By
emphasizing our social nature and the social reasons for controlling
genetics, I will argue, first, that the most pressing issues of genetic ethics
can be handled on the basis of traditional understandings of human
nature, and second, that the moral requirements of human nature urge
the limitation of genetic manipulation.
The fundamental ethical premise of inherent and natural human
sociality in Western philosophy goes back at least to Aristotle: human
beings are social animals, and political existence is constitutive of human
nature. As the point is put in the
Nicomachean Ethics
, “No one would
choose to have all [other] goods and yet to be alone, since a human being
is political, tending by nature to live together with others.”
1
Both our
happiness and our good depend on the fulfillment of our social nature,
and virtue requires society both for its formation and its expression.
Human nature is not considered by Aristotle as a set of properties
belonging to individuals but as the capacity to live and act politically,
to engage in the practices of “living well and doing well” that bring
