David L. Perry, Ph.D.

(An invited paper presented at a conference sponsored by the Counterbalance Foundation on Science and Suffering: Genetics and the Problem of Evil, Seattle Pacific U., 17 October 1998.)

In response to John Medina's paper, I'll identify some standard theological criticisms of human genetic engineering, indicate what I see to be their strengths and weaknesses, and offer some reflections on God and the problem of evil.

1) Genetic engineering is often judged as "unnatural" or said to "violate natural law":

Genetic engineers are clearly messing with nature in ways never before possible. But there are many problems inherent in moral argument that appeal to natural law. Frequently they involve a fallacious form of reasoning from the descriptive directly to the normative, from "is" to "ought." In other words, certain patterns in nature are described, and then simply asserted to be normative standards for human action. E.g., from the empirical claim that human beings reproduce sexually, the conclusion is invalidly drawn that the only moral sexual activity is that which is procreative. (Of course, if someone succeeds in cloning a human being, then it will cease being comprehensively true of us that we reproduce sexually.)

Thinking strictly in descriptive or empirical terms, the claim that genetic engineering is "unnatural" is very strange, since if it truly violated natural law it would not be possible for us to do. In this sense, it would truly be "unnatural" for human beings to defy the law of gravity--unnatural because impossible--but it is quite "natural" for human beings to manipulate genes, just as it is natural for us to alter natural processes by favoring certain plant strains over others to produce food, or by controlling the breeding of dogs, cows, pigs and sheep over thousands of years to produce characteristics we value.

Now, I don't mean to imply that any and all genetic manipulations are ethical: rather, that whatever is in our power to do is in an important sense natural to us. I think we would be more likely to achieve moral clarity if we largely left terms like "natural" or "natural law" out of our ethical deliberations. E.g., compassion and a sense of injustice are natural to human beings, but then so are cruelty and xenophobia (De Waal); yet that in no way proves that those disparate inclinations are morally equivalent. We must distinguish what is natural from what is ethical.

2) Genetic engineering is condemned as "violating the dignity of human life":

I am not convinced that genetic engineering necessarily represents a violation of human dignity. Imagine that a married couple want to have children but know that they're carriers of a devastating genetic disease like Huntington's or Tay-Sachs; imagine further that they then ask a geneticist to disable those genes in early embryos of theirs to be created in vitro. I see this form of germ-line genetic therapy as morally acceptable, even praiseworthy.

Some have argued that this use of genetic engineering will lead us to devalue persons who are born with genetic diseases or disabilities. But I'm not convinced that that is inevitable. There is always the risk of reducing persons to their diseases or disabilities; but I don't think that concern is sufficient reason to prohibit germ-line genetic therapy.

Let's turn to the idea of manipulating the human genetic code to intentionally create human beings that will never develop brains. Initially this is likely to strike us as a morbid and disturbing prospect, especially since we naturally associate the human body with a human person. But then, the thought of harvesting organs from the dead used to be repugnant to most people; today, although we still have a shortage of people willing to donate their organs after death, most recognize that doing so can save the lives of others in desperate need of organs, and that it need not show a lack of respect for the person now dead.

I'm persuaded by a number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., Cranford, Gervais, Rachels, Singer, Steinbock) that a capacity for consciousness is a necessary condition for being a person and having interests, rights and dignity. From this perspective, once an individual completely loses the capacity for consciousness, as in permanent coma and persistent vegetative state as well as in brain death, then there is no longer a person present, and so neither withdrawing a ventilator or feeding tube nor giving a lethal injection would represent the killing of a person. By extension, in the early stage of pregnancy when the embryonic or fetal brain has not developed sufficiently to make consciousness possible, then abortion at that stage would not be equivalent to killing a person, either. Genetic "knockout" research creates the possibility of dramatically increasing the supply of human organs and tissue, which could save the lives of many persons (mainly infants); more importantly, since the human beings created not to have brains will never be conscious persons, harvesting their organs need not represent a violation of human dignity. (Admittedly, it would take a much more involved ethical analysis to determine whether doing so would be morally justifiable.)

3) Genetic engineering is often criticized as "playing God":

The claim that human beings usurp God's authority or sovereignty over life and death has been employed by Christians and others since ancient times. It is probably most familiar in condemnations of suicide and mercy killing, though by extension it would also apply to capital punishment and killing in war. One problem with this kind of argument was identified over 200 years ago by the philosopher David Hume. Hume pointed out that if we violate God's sovereignty whenever we intentionally take human life, then logically we must also violate God's sovereignty whenever we prolong human life beyond its "natural" length. In other words, this argument would not only rule out all intentional killing, but many if not all medical interventions, including innoculations against infectious disease. Hume's point suggests that if proponents of the argument from God's sovereignty are unwilling to accept its absurd implications, they should abandon the reasoning that produces them.

But there is another, more fundamental problem with the appeal to God's sovereignty. In my view, even God does not "play God": in other words, I think it's a mistake to believe that God intervenes in nature or human events in any way. On strictly scientific grounds, claims of divine intervention are meaningless; miracle claims, e.g., can always in principle be explained in non-supernatural terms, although we sometimes lack the sort of evidence needed to explain exactly what happened. Science has relentlessly displaced religious explanations of the way the universe works.

But even if we bracket science for a moment, the belief in discrete interventions by God in nature or human affairs is also objectionable on moral grounds. If it is claimed that God has intervened in the past to promote good, limit suffering, prevent evil or establish justice, then the question arises as to why that God manifestly does not intervene in all such cases. E.g., if God was able and willing to rescue the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, why did God permit millions of Jews to be annihilated by the Nazis? Or if God was able and willing to raise Jesus from the dead, why has God permitted Christians to be tortured and killed?

If the response to this is that God permits sinful humanity to act freely, then to be consistent we must then deny all claims about God's activity that have limited or could limit human freedom. If the response is rather that suffering and evil are part of God's mysterious plan, then this seems not only to deny human freedom but to be morally outrageous. A God who required radical evil and enormous suffering in order to achieve even the noblest conceivable goal might be a God worthy of our fear, but certainly not one worthy of our love or devotion. (Cf. Ivan's monologue, "Rebellion," in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.)

I think that if we are to believe that God is wholly and consistently compassionate, we must therefore abandon our belief in divine intervention and omnipotence. The implications of this are profound: it suggests not only that every witness of divine intervention has been mistaken; it also implies that God cannot intervene in response to prayer, no matter how worthy the request nor how sincere the supplicant.

Perhaps the following example will clarify my point. Imagine that you are composing a prayer to God, asking not for something trivial or self-centered, but something serious and other-regarding, e.g., that someone with cancer might be healed or at least spared unbearable suffering. Then imagine that you are confronted with the ghost of someone who died under the torture of disease or human cruelty, and whose legitimate request to God to be spared such agony was not fulfilled. (I don't believe in ghosts, by the way, but I find this a useful thought experiment.) How would you explain to this ghost that God might grant your prayer, even though God did not grant his prayer? I don't think you could without in effect portraying God as arbitrary. And that sort of God, I contend, is not worthy of worship.

Many people who have reflected seriously on the problem of evil have concluded from it that God does not exist. I disagree with that conclusion, but I think that at the very least the problem of evil forces us to give up many cherished beliefs about God's providence. Even if God exists and is wholly good, we are in an important sense on our own. Thus the ethical questions concerning genetic engineering become all the more acute.

One way in which genetic engineering could go wrong has to do with the tremendous complexity of the human genome itself. We are not omniscient as to the full consequences for subsequent generations of even small changes we might make in the human germ line. It is possible that even with the best of intentions we might unwittingly produce a genetic vulnerability much worse than the one we tried to prevent. I don't think that this concern is sufficient to warrant prohibiting human germ-line therapies entirely: some genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs are so bad that almost any unforseen genetic problem we might introduce in its place would be an improvement. But our lack of omniscience ought to give geneticists the sort of caution that they thusfar have largely exercised.

Recommended Readings

Dan Brock, Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics (Cambridge 1993).

Ronald Cranford and David Smith, "Consciousness: The Most Critical Moral (Constitutional) Standard for Human Personhood," American Journal of Law & Medicine 13/2-3 (1987), pp. 233-248.

Frans De Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Harvard 1996).

Daniel Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases (U of Illinois 1997).

Karen Gervais, Redefining Death (Yale 1986).

David Hume, "Of Suicide" (1777), in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and the Posthumous Essays, Richard Popkin, ed. (Hackett 1980).

Philip Kitcher, The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (Simon & Schuster 1996).

Ronald Munson and Lawrence Davis, "Germ-Line Gene Therapy and the Medical Imperative," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2/2 (June 1992), pp. 137-158.

Gregory Pence, Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? (Rowman & Littlefield 1998).

Michael Peterson, ed., The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings (Notre Dame 1992).

James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (Oxford 1986).

John Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton 1994).

Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death (St. Martin's 1994).

Bonnie Steinbock, Life before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses (Oxford 1992).

LeRoy Walters and Julie Gage Palmer, The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy (Oxford 1997).

David Perry was Lecturer in Philosophy at Seattle University from 1993 to 1999.  He is now Lecturer in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Santa Clara University.