Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Obama and Stem Cells, Continued

I say it's moral. So do two thinkers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, Daniel Callahan, a cofounder of the center, points out that supporters of stem-cell research have been wrong

to conflate opposition to stem cell research and a variety of other actions by the Bush administration. That administration was guilty of manipulating, or suppressing, scientific information on a wide range of issues, including global warming and sex education. I call that behavior patently anti-science as well as a misuse of government power. But its stem cell opposition did not encompass any distortion of the science of such research. That is not how it argued its case.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Yuval Levin, a former executive director of Bush's bioethics council, argues that

science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. ... To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities—economic, political and ethical—in making decisions is the very definition of policymakers' duty.

One reason I like these two guys is that they're clear-eyed critics of spin and self-delusion, even when the spin and delusion are coming from their own allies. On the relationship between science and politics, I particularly recommend Levin's new book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. He's right that Obama's decision doesn't moot or end the debate about using embryos. So let's honor that debate by continuing it.

Levin quotes President Kennedy, who said that many modern problems require

very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past. Now they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men.

Against this "technocratic temptation," Levin argues for democratic oversight. In principle, I agree. But the comments I've received from readers about Obama's stem-cell decision worry me. Many people on both sides seem ill-informed or self-deluded about basic scientific questions. Liberals are denying the simple fact that human embryos are the beginnings of people. Conservatives are pretending that adult stem cells are more powerful than embryonic ones. If ordinary people want to govern science policy, they need to educate themselves so they can govern well.

(By the way: To all of you who protested that torture is different from stem-cell harvesting: Of course it is. That's the nature of comparisons: The things being compared differ in many respects. The similarity in this case is that on both issues, moral objections are being dismissed as interference in a purely technical question of saving lives. That, not the merits of stem-cell research, was the point of the article.)

Second, Levin writes that in announcing his decision on Monday, Obama "argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is to ignore and reject the promise of science as such." The president "pledged that his administration would ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,'" and his executive order "omits any mention of ethical debate."

I think what happened Monday is more complicated than that. Based on the spin that came out of the administration over the weekend, I expected Obama to make exactly the argument Levin describes. But he didn't. Among other things, Obama said:

Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view. But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans ... have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research. That the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.

And:

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.

Levin is right about Obama invoking facts over ideology. But that was in the context of Obama's memorandum on scientific issues generally.

It looks to me as though the administration hasn't resolved how it's going to treat these issues. The mentality Levin describes—burying moral objections and portraying embryo research as just another case of Bush's "war on science"—pervades most of the spin coming out of the White House and its feeder institution, the Center for American Progress. That's why the White House paired the stem-cell order with the announcement on restoring scientific integrity. But for some reason, Obama himself isn't entirely playing along. His remarks on Monday sounded a lot like what he has said about abortion and other social issues: acknowledging moral disagreement while striving for consensus or at least compromise. I think the administration is unresolved, and we should encourage it to acknowledge and grapple with the moral questions.

Third, Levin describes the moral question this way:

If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems.

I cringe at this interpretation of the Declaration. Levin believes that equality means a 5-day-old embryo has the same right to life as a 5-year-old girl. I just can't buy that. I'm a gradualist. I value the 5-day-old embryo because it's on its way to becoming the 5-year-old girl. But it's not there yet. It hasn't acquired the sentience and cognition that characterize a full-fledged human being.

The Declaration says we're created with an unalienable right to liberty as well as life. But that hasn't stopped us from regulating liberties in proportion to maturity, as we do, for example, with curfews and driving. Why can't we exercise the same discretion with respect to life? Yes, life is a more basic right. But maybe that just means that instead of drawing lines after birth, as we do with liberty, we should confine our line-drawing about life to the period before birth.

Slippery slopes run both ways. Let's call that Human Nature's second law. If we don't draw moral lines against the exploitation of embryos, we may end up obliterating respect for human life generally. But if we're so afraid of that prospect that we refuse to draw lines permitting the use of any embryos under any conditions, we may end up obliterating the moral difference between embryos and full-grown people. Liberals should think seriously about the first scenario. Conservatives should think just as seriously about the second.

Race, Genes, and Sports

In case you missed it, here's an excerpt from Friday's piece:

I've had my share of arguments with people who deny that race is biologically meaningful. Many of them are dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal, not just in the sense of moral worth or treating each person on his merits, but literally, in the sense that no genetically based difference can be admitted in average ability between populations. That kind of egalitarian literalism—I call it liberal creationism—becomes harder and harder to sustain in the face of evidence such as the data on ACTN3.

More here.

The Paradox of Discrimination

Look who's flirting with animal rights.

In recent days, the New York Times has published two in-house commentaries on Spain's move to legislate rights for apes. "We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines between humans and animals," Donald McNeil, Jr., wrote Sunday. "But we're kidding ourselves." Yesterday, Adam Cohen added that "showing respect for apes would elevate humans."

I agree with my human colleagues. But that agreement is the beginning of a huge mess.

The mess starts when we abandon an old religious idea. "Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking," McNeil recalls. He remembers the words his guide spoke at the time: "A gorilla is still meat. It has no soul." This, McNeil notes, is the position of Spain's Catholic bishops: Humans have souls; animals don't.

Secular humanists reject this dogma. We understand that there's something wonderful and uniquely worthy of respect in the power, richness, and subtlety of the human mind. But to us, the soul doesn't explain these wonders. It describes them. That's one reason why the destruction of human embryos doesn't torment us the way it torments pro-lifers. We don't believe in ensoulment at conception. We believe in the gradual development of mental capacities.

This puts us in an awkward position. We call ourselves egalitarians, yet we deny the equality of conceived humans. We believe that a woman deserves more respect than a fetus. A 26-week fetus deserves more respect than a 12-week fetus. A 12-week fetus deserves more consideration than a zygote. We discriminate according to ability.

This is also why ape rights appeals to us. It's not a claim of equality among all animals. It's a claim that apes resemble us in ways that insects don't. It's a kind of discrimination. Cohen observes that Peter Singer, the philosopher behind the ape rights movement, believes that "species should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis." And McNeil reports:

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the Great Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture -- rather than, say, rights to education or medical care.

This multi-tiered approach to species and rights isn't just Singer's position. It's your government's position. As Cohen points out, chimps get special protection under the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act. McNeil adds:

Even animal cruelty laws have a bias toward big mammals like us. For example, in a slaughterhouse, chickens are sent alive and squawking into the throat-slitting machine and the scalding bath. But under the federal Humane Slaughter Act, a cow must be knocked senseless as painlessly as possible before the first cut can be made.

In other words, as the pigs of Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others. And if that principle applies to other animals -- discriminating among them based on humanlike capacities -- does it also apply to us? Are some humans more equal than others?

We've already established that you accept this principle if, like me, you discriminate among preborn humans based on degree of development. And if you accept that humans and apes gradually evolved from common ancestors, then you'd also probably discriminate among born humans based on degree of evolution. As McNeil observes, the archaeological record of human bones "suggests that some of our ancestors exited this world as stew." Were the ancestors who gnawed those bones truly human?

We don't like to face such questions. Like creationists, we ridicule anyone who lumps us together with other primates. Cohen says animal rights activists "come off as loopy" when they say things like, "I am an ape." But according to the U.S. government, that statement isn't loopy. It's fact. All of us are great apes.

If preborn and prehistoric humans are less worthy of respect, what about born, living humans who seem functionally subhuman? McNeil says we're kidding ourselves when we imagine that "certain ‘human' rights are unalienable." He mentions a terrorist who beheaded a reporter. Is it possible, he asks, to forfeit your human rights for subhuman behavior?

On the other hand, if we deem some people less human than others, does it lead us back to the bad old days of racism? McNeil raises this question in the context of his African guide's comment about the butchered gorilla: that it was just "meat" because it had "no soul." The comment, he writes,

was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother? Whether or not Africans had souls -- whether they were human in God's eyes, capable of salvation -- underlay much of the colonial debate about slavery.

To say the least, that's a controversial analogy. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made a similar comparison three years ago and was charged with racism. "They're comparing chickens to black people?" an NAACP spokesman protested at the time. Cohen offers the same objection, faulting PETA for "boneheaded moves, like the ad it ran juxtaposing photos of penned-up animals with starving Jews in concentration camps." He doesn't mention his own paper's juxtaposition of gorillas with Africans a day earlier.

Not that I should be throwing stones. I've got my own contradictions to sort out: that it's wrong to eat animals but not meat; that it's wrong to compare mistreatment of blacks to mistreatment of animals; that it's wrong to "predict the criminal propensity of unborn children based on the color of their skin"; that we should "prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true"; and that it's pernicious "to group people by race and compare averages."

I'm still working my way through the puzzle of equality as we learn more about human and animal biology. So are McNeil, Cohen, and others. It's a communal dialogue between morals and science. Where it will lead, I can't say. But what strikes me at this point in the conversation is that equality and discrimination are intricately related. What we often call equality -- sorting creatures into biological groups and treating each group member as identical to the others, but different from members of other groups -- is also discriminatory. That's the paradox of "human rights."

Each of us mixes the two in our own way. Spain extends its "community of equals" to gorillas but not gibbons. Catholic bishops demand rights for zygotes but not chimps. PETA equates racial with interspecies equality. The NAACP discriminates between discriminations.

For my part, I've come to suspect that the first problem to deal with isn't inequality. It's indiscriminateness. Discrimination in the best sense means seeing each individual as she is. It takes effort. You have to look past the surface of things. It's easier to assign individuals to groups and judge them that way. But it's also, to the same extent, unfair. The unfairness arises not from inequality, but from how we organize it. Inequality, at the biological level, is mostly nature's fault. Indiscriminateness is ours.