Sometime in the next week, a judge is scheduled to rule on the
legality of Proposition 71, passed in 2004 to allot $3 billion to
stem cell research in California. The ruling will not only affect
the future of human health, but the future of students intent on
finding medical and bio-research jobs in California.
The proposition has been held up in court by organizations
ethically and religiously opposed to stem cell research. Objections
to stem cell research are generally a spin-off of anti-abortion and
anti-euthanasia arguments. They claim to protect the sanctity of
human life by taking the responsibility for life out of human
hands, instead relegating it to a higher power. It is this line of
reasoning that leads certain men to preemptive wars without any
feeling of culpability, convinced that larger, holier purposes
justify the human sacrifice.
But the reality is that life and death are our responsibility.
It is dangerously naive to pretend we play no part in the giving or
taking of life ““ we have always had that potential. When we
send soldiers off to war, whether the war is just, we are
responsible. When we take lives in payment for crimes, no matter
how just the punishment, the blood is on our hands. Moral arguments
may help guide our behavior, but they do not free us of the
responsibility for our actions. There is no higher justification.
The buck stops with us.
Instead of shying away from the complexities of the human
condition, some organizations take on human suffering full force.
Transhumanists, a worldwide group dedicated to advancements in
biotechnology, place the responsibility for human health and
happiness entirely in human hands. Through political and economic
pathways, transhumanists support technologies that ease the
biological limitations of humans. This stance is not without
controversy. Most controversial, perhaps, is their goal of creating
a new type of human, a post-human not bound by current biological
limitations.
Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher and author of “Our
Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution,” sees the creation of a post-human species as a
serious threat to social equality. Fukuyama warned in the September
2004 issue of “Foreign Policy” that the transhumanist
movement posed one of the most serious threats to liberal
democracy, since liberal democracy relies on the notion that all
humans possess a similar “essence that dwarfs manifest
differences in skin color, beauty and even intelligence,” and
that transhumanist ideals will erode that equality.
“If we start transforming ourselves into something
superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what
rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?”
Fukyuama asked.
Many agree that taking responsibility for the human condition by
manipulating our biology will open up a whole Pandora’s box
of social injustice. But it doesn’t take altering the human
species to stir up inequality. The Holocaust and the current
situation in Sudan prove we don’t need a perverse post-human
species for others to be labeled subhuman. In the United States,
there is a distinction between those treated as human and those
treated as subhuman. A lack of universal health care means those
who can’t afford treatment walk around untreated with
crippled bodies. Medical advances proposed by transhumanists would
only shine light on inequalities that already exist.
The issue is not about overstepping our bounds, but undervaluing
our responsibility. Advancing medical technologies only mean we
will have more responsibilities. But pretending our battle with
human pain and suffering is not our own battle to fight is
cowardly. We are responsible, whether our actions are right or
wrong.
E-mail Macdonald at jmacdonald@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.