A reply - Biotechnology: A House Divided

THESE were deeply searching, very thoughtful, very well-considered comments. I regard these remarks from the four of you as an enormous gift to our enterprise.

One way to join comments made by Diana Schaub, Charles Murray, and Bill Galston is to raise a question. Bill Galston raised it very nicely when he asked whether we are dealing in a moral realm of prudence or in one of absolutes and categorical imperatives. Are we in a realm without inflexible "Thou shalt nots" or are we in one where there really are abominations like slavery? If we are dealing with moral abominations, then to say "on the one hand, on the other" is, as Jody Bottum suggests, to lend countenance and cover to genuine evil. The report's ambiguity on this question is not solely due to the chairman's uncertainty but is I think a genuine perplexity. Is cloning human embryos for research really like slavery?

The people who have argued against abortion have also drawn an analogy to slavery, the difference being that the youngest amongst us don't look enough like us to gain our empathy. Without lawyers and unable to speak for themselves, unborn children do not gain our support, and the evil perpetrated against them is too easily overlooked. In this view, there can be no compromise with a deep violation of principle, no matter how noble the end. On the other hand, if we really are in the situation of choosing between competing goods, as Bill Galston suggests, then it is a question of calculation, presumably in the name of not just safety and efficacy but larger things. This is the realm of prudence, not principle.

I go back and forth on this. It does seem to me that the moral life has to be lived somehow as a combination of principle and prudence. There must be some boundary conditions of "Thou shalt nots." And only thanks to the fact that there are certain firm and nonnegotiable limits do we have a safe moral realm in which prudence can govern.

I am inclined to say that creating nascent life for the sole purpose of exploitation and research involving its necessary destruction would transgress a moral boundary of that indispensable sort. However, though I am sympathetic to the arguments of Jody Bottum and Diana Schaub, and despite the fact that I regard the embryo as somehow mysterious, I don't believe that it is fully "one of us" (here I speak for myself, not for the council as a whole). The challenge that James Q. Wilson posed is a good one. We do not treat the demise of the five-day-old embryo as we do the death of a child, and we don't react with the same kind of horror--though maybe we should--at the dismemberment of 100 cells for the sake of saving lives as we would if we killed a two-year-old child to remove his kidneys so another child might be saved.

YET it may very well be that such moral sentiments are a poor guide here. So let me shift to that question and take it up directly. I think repugnance is not an absolutely firm guide in these matters, but it is a warning. The deepest things especially are very hard to capture in precise and rational speech. We cannot rationally articulate the horror that is father-daughter incest. If we tried to make the argument, we would imperil our conviction that this is an abomination. I don't think we can fully make an argument as to what is wrong with rape or murder or cannibalism. Our revulsion at these things is a guide that we are defending something that runs very deep. Argument can come to our aid, especially in a culture where the endless chatter of self-styled "rationalists" tends to undermine our intuitions about these things.

And if one lives in an age without a shared sense of what is seemly and what is abominable, and everything is up for grabs, perhaps nothing is left but to get Jody Bottum out on the political stump. But public discourse cannot, I think, conduct itself on the 'basis of Jody's unique rhetorical and prophetic brilliance.

So where are we? There is no denying that the questions about cloning-for-biomedical-research are in a way bound up with the abortion controversy. Jody Bottum argues that it is far worse to create nascent human life to destroy it for the use of the living than it is to start down the road of baby manufacture and working our will on living children. I am not sure about that. It seems to me that death and destruction- horrible though they be-are old matters. What is really new is not the immorality of the means that we use to gain our new powers but the things that these new powers make possible. In the future, we will be able to work our will upon untold future generations to turn them into creatures after our own image. That I think is really something novel and worth arguing about, independent of the question of the destruction of nascent life.

On the other hand, though I cannot believe that destroying an embryo is tantamount to murder, I am always impressed with the people who bear witness on this subject--even if they are going to lose in the end. They have a deep reverence for what our humanity is in its earliest form and have risen to defend it. I can't persuade myself that they are not right.

BUT to respond briefly to Diana Schaub, nor can I persuade myself that cloning is akin to slavery. Yes, new lives would be created, and on a mass scale, purely to serve other people's purposes. And, yes, such innocent, nascent lives would be willfully exploited and destroyed. And I even agree with Diana Schaub that the path to biomedical despotism and degradation can be guided by the words "progress, compassion, and choice." But I am not sufficiently confident about the ontological or moral status of a five-day-old embryo to speak in such abolitionist terms. At the same time, however, I am inclined to give the embryo the benefit of the doubt, refusing to corrupt myself into thinking that we can use with impunity the seeds of the next generation to save our own. Otherwise we will have hardened our hearts, becoming incapable of resisting when the compassionate healers want the boundary of permissible exploitation moved from five days to five weeks or even five months.

In the view of Charles Murray, the council's enterprise is futile. But my interest in the subject of cloning goes beyond whether or not we should engage in it. My interest is also in whether human beings through their political institutions can exercise at least some control over where biotechnology is taking us. Cloning is an occasion to see whether the community can exercise the will and discipline to make its moral voice heard, and to be a teacher of what can and can't be allowed.

Cloning-for-biomedical-research has, alas, confounded the question, for it is really a small piece of embryo research in general. We should be arguing about cloning-for-biomedical-research in the context of all embryo research. Certainly, it would be no victory for the pro-life movement to ban the creation of cloned embryos for research, while allowing the creation of embryos for research by in vitro fertilization in the private sector to continue without any limits.

So let's just talk about cloning for baby-making. This is an opportunity to shift the burden of proof from the opponents to the proponents of cloning, to those who would challenge what makes us human. Let's say to the people who want to produce cloned children, "Show us why this is a necessity." The proponents have the obligation to explain why this is not just a whim but something society should countenance. A legislative ban in this country would shift the burden of proof, even if, in fact, there are renegade scientists elsewhere in the world who would practice it.

Charles Murray may be right that an opportunity to engage the scientific community was missed. Perhaps we should follow the British model and directly involve the biotech companies and their scientists, and design some kind of regulatory scheme. We could set a boundary of seven or ten days beyond which embryo research would not be allowed. We would let the scientists do some things that may make us uncomfortable in the hope that the worst disasters could be prevented.

YET such prudential boundary lines will always be moveable. Today, the focus is on stem cells. Five years from now we may discover that by putting these little embryos into a pig uterus and growing them to two months, their kidneys and primordial livers are even more valuable than the stem cells. We will find that the line we have drawn around stem cells will not hold, and we will live to regret our earlier desire to be "reasonable" and "prudent" when crossing important moral boundaries.

I am not quite so nihilistic as Charles Murray about the possibility of effective intervention. True, there is little precedent for the control of scientific progress. On the other hand, we have refused to allow the buying and selling of organs for transplant, even though markets in organs would yield more organs. This is a proscription that might not last, but it has managed to hold, at least for the time being.

Many nations have enacted bans on all cloning, and, in fact, there is a convention under deliberation in the United Nations right now on whether to ban cloning. The French and the Germans want to restrict the international ban to cloning-to-produce-children only because they already have embryo laws in place in their own nations. The United States is leading a coalition to produce the kind of ban that President Bush favors. I don't see any reason why we should shrink from this effort. Certainly, much of biotechnology is wonderful, but the scientific community should understand (and it is in its best interest to do so) that progress must proceed within moral boundaries set by the norms of the international community.

Moreover, it is simply not true that this research can't progress within certain moral boundaries, providing that the boundaries are not too severe. And it seems to me that the United States should be a leader in determining what should and should not be done, rather than playing catch-up, as we have been to this point.

THE United States is unlikely, unless we step forward in matter, to remain the center of ethical biotechnology. Yes, the Chinese might be less restrictive, but because we are Americans, because we believe in progress, and that if something can be done, it will be done, because we believe in the freedom of entrepreneurs, of scientists, of users, because we believe in compassionate humanitarianism--for all of these reasons, we will have a very difficult time being the moral teacher of the world in these matters. The fact is that the moral principles that govern us--life; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--are not sufficient to defend human dignity from biotechnology's onslaught.

LEON R. KASS is the Roger and Susan Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.

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