I’m with James in opposing, on moral grounds, the creation of human-chimpanzee hybrids, but I’m not sure that I see the force of his specific objection to it:
… human ethics requires above all and before anything else a respect for the human that considers human beings, in general and in particular, as biologically inviolable creations. … Using human ingenuity to make humans less human is about as unethical a waste of time as I can possibly conceive.
Unethical? Check. Waste of time? Doublecheck. But how, exactly, does creating a humanzee “make humans less human”? The folks doing the research remain fully human and biologically intact, as do the rest of us, and so – leaving aside the artificially inseminated chimps, of course, whose offspring will only turn out more human than usual – it seems that the only beings involved who will end up biologically violated and with sub-human natures will be ones who weren’t around at the start. (Similarly: what if humanzees turn out to have fully human – or even superhuman! – intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capabilities, only with handy-dandy tails and a heightened capacity for tree-swinging? Will they be less human than the rest of us, or just differently so?) If there’s an “ethical principle behind keeping the human species pure”, it doesn’t seem that this can be it.
More interesting to me, though, is the question of why there should have to be such a principle in the first place. Here’s the quotation that James begins with:
Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the creation of humanzees.
“Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past,” he said.
“If it turns out in the future there was fertilisation between a human animal and a non-human animal, it’s an idea that is troublesome, but in terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it’s not clear to me.
“I share their squeamishness and unease, but I’m not sure that unease can be expressed in terms of an ethical principle [emphasis mine - JLS].”
And this is supposed to be a problem for the anti-humanzee crowd because … well, why exactly? Prof. McLachlan strikes me as exactly the sort of person Aristotle had in mind in the third chapter of the first book of his Ethics:
Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.
And cf. John McDowell’s famous gloss on this passage in his paper “Virtue and Reason”:
Presented with an identification of virtue with knowledge, it is natural to ask for a formulation of the knowledge that virtue is. We tend to assume that the knowledge must have a stateable propositional content (perhaps not capable of immediate expression by the knower). …
… But to an unprejudiced eye it should seem quite implausible that any reasonably adult moral outlook admits of such codification. As Aristotle consistently says, the best generalizations about how one should behave hold only for the most part. If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong–and not necessarily because one had changed ones mind; rather, one’s mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula.
A deep-rooted prejudice about rationality blocks acceptance of this. A moral outlook is a specific determination of one’s practical rationality: it shapes one’s views about what reasons one has for acting. Rationality requires consistency; a specific conception of rationality in a particular area imposes a specific form on the abstract requirement of consistency–a specific view of what counts as going on doing the same thing here. The prejudice is the idea that acting in the light of a specific conception of rationality must be explicable in terms of being guided by a formulable universal principle.
It needn’t be, though, and where Prof. McLachlan goes wrong is exactly in his insistence that it must. The idea that mere “squeamishness and unease” can’t provide sufficient justification for an ethical objection – as opposed, say, to the much more reasonable claim that we ought to be careful, and sufficiently self-critical, when we ground our ethics in this sort of way – is spectacularly implausible, and it’s a paradigmatic instance of the kind of hyper-rationalistic thinking that we – philosophers, scientists, politicians, everyone – need to work to get beyond. Jim Manzi’s defense of “moral axioms”, which I discussed at length here, is also relevant to this issue, as – yet again – is Prof. Dupré’s book:
Most [Enlightenment] moralists agreed that human nature constitutes the ground of moralituy. They also admitted that this nature forms part of an all-comprehensive order. But the concept of natural law, through which that order had formerly been thought to rule morality, received a different meaning. What previously had been considered to be grounded in a divinely established order now came to defend exclusively on human reason. Kant eliminated the last remnants of any pre-given element in the moral law when he claimed that good and evil do not exist before the law of reason–they are constituted in and through that law. Nor can we ever appeal to any higher authority than that of reason.
What is lost, in other words, is a recognition of the possibility of a kind of moral perception, the idea that the moral order exists independently of us and we might be able – in the appropriate circumstances – simply to see what is the right or wrong thing to do in a given situation. I do not need to provide any sort of “principle” to justify my belief in the physical character of the world around me; why should its moral characteristics be treated any differently?
Again, it’s of course important to be careful when we approach ethical matters in this way: for one thing, there is a tendency toward disagreement about the fine and the just that simply isn’t there in our non-normative discourse about middle-sized dry goods, and it’s essential that we respond to disagreement with attempts at persuasion rather than mere foot-stomping. And while I don’t mean to minimize the seriousness of the problems that arise when disagreement is present, the fact is that in this particular situation there’s just about no one, except for the scientists who stand to profit from it and of course the libertarians, who actually thinks that the creation of humanzees would be a good thing. But moreover, and more crucially, it’s a mistake to think that the right way to mitigate these problems is to turn to a philosopher, as opposed to a person or group of persons with an ordinary, uncorrupted moral sensibility, to determine whether the course of action in question is right or wrong. Even where “principles” are lacking, sufficiently self-critical moral unease can do just fine.
Filed under: morality, philosophy, science/tech
To speculate as you do about the type of person that I am and what my views on ethics are the basis of a few quoted remarks is risky.
Moral perceptions are fine in relation to one’s own behaviour. However, if you intend to make an action a crime and you intend to punish other people for performing the action, one’s own perceptions and feelings of squeamishness are no sufficient. A specified reason is required in my view. All this, and much else, was said to the journalist but not quoted in the article. For instance, I suggested that the case given against inter-species reproduction sounded very similar to what was said in South Africa and in the Southern States of America about the alleged dangerous consequences of sexual intercourse between black and white people. Some people were very squeamish (perhaps they still are) about the thought of so-called mixed race babies. However, then and now moral unease alone will not ‘do just fine’ when the unease and squeamishness impinges on the freedom of other people.
For a fuller account of my ethical positions, see: From the Womb to the Tomb: Issues in Medical Ethics, Humming Earth, Glasgow, 2007. http://www.hummingearth.com/biblio/1846220114.htm