Nature and Human Nature - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 77

Anything human beings may do—to get a haircut, for instance, much
less an education—grossly infringes on the injunction to follow nature's
course. All moral behavior may oppose, conflict with, or alter human
nature, or why do we socialize children? Why should the genes be
off-limits to manipulation when the mind, equally “given” but equally
manipulable, is not off-limits to education?
The Medical Humanities and the Naturalness of Medicine
Many philosophers, theologians, and others have searched for ways to
show that the manipulation of the genome by novel methods, even if it
does not surpass older technologies in the extent of its effects on the
natural world, differs from these technologies along important moral
dimensions. Within the medical humanities, philosophers and other
analysts—Leon Kass is one example—have argued that by engaging in
genetic manipulation, doctors at least incrementally will commodify
life. 23 Technologists may treat the embryo, say, more as a resource than
as an end in itself, the form of which is to be accepted and respected. 24
This concern reflects a centuries-old debate over the role of medicine as
either (1) working with nature and within its limits, or (2) overcoming
or conquering nature to better serve human desires.
The first view, which holds that the physician must work with nature,
draws from a tradition in medicine associated with Plato and
Hippocrates that regards the physician as helping, but at the same time
constrained by the natural processes by which the body can heal and
restore itself. 25 This tradition regards medical science as nature's help-
meet. Guided by a sympathetic understanding of or an intuitive feel for
nature's own processes, medicine instructs people how to live healthy
lives. It facilitates the body's own ability to restore disturbed balances,
heal injuries, and adapt to altered circumstances. In this tradition, the
natural is considered normative.
Among the recent studies in the medical humanities that embrace this
tradition are those by Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science , and
Daniel Callahan, Setting Limits and What Kind of Life? 26 These authors,
among others, appeal to the importance of the concept of the natural in
dealing with decisions about aging and death. They reject what they
believe is a kind of technological hubris that denies that there is any