Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the opposite of the Catholic social tradition: “In principle, the Christian
faith holds that human nature contains both self-regarding and social
impulses and that the former is stronger than the latter. This assumption
is the basis of Christian realism.”
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But like the Catholic tradition,
Niebuhr saw human moral and political action as responsible to an
objective moral order, illuminated most clearly by faith, but certainly not
limited in either scope or intelligibility to any particular cultural or reli-
gious community. As he put it,
Reason . . . inevitably places the stamp of its approval upon those impulses which
affirm life in its most inclusive terms. Practically every moral theory, whether
utilitarian or intuitional, insists on the goodness of benevolence, justice, kind-
ness and unselfishness. Even when economic self-seeking is approved, as in the
political morality of Adam Smith, the criterion of judgment is the good of the
whole.
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What leads to fundamentally irrational behavior against the good of
the whole is described decisively by Niebuhr as sin. Expounded most elo-
quently in
The Nature and Destiny of Man
, his 1939 Gifford Lectures,
Niebuhr's psychological explanation of sin locates it both against a
transcendent horizon of human meaning and at the center of the evil
pervading human institutions. For Niebuhr, the human propensity to
wickedness results from the uneasy dialectic between human freedom
and human finitude. Unable to realize that the reconciliation of these two
sides of human nature rests only in trust in a divine, transcendent source
of meaning, humans either deny finitude in the sin of pride or flee from
freedom in the sin of “sensuality” (a term that for Niebuhr means immer-
sion in any of the tasks, pleasures, accomplishments, or distractions of
life that allow us to avoid our other or higher responsibilities).
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It is through his depiction and explanation of the social manifestations
of sin that Niebuhr provides a compelling diagnosis of the transgressions
of genetic engineering against human nature. The social side of sin most
developed by Niebuhr and applied to politics is “tribalism” or “collec-
tive egotism,” expressions of the sin of pride. Niebuhr believed that
although individuals have some potential to overcome selfishness and
the drive to dominate others by embracing the ideals of mutuality and
love, social groups find it virtually impossible. “The sinfulness of man
makes it inevitable that a dominant class, group, and sex should seek to
define a relationship, which guarantees its dominance, as permanently
