[4.] Medical Ethics: Emotivism and Banning Conceptions.

 

 

[4.1.] Controversial Conceptions.

 

This chapter discusses a number of different controversial ways in which children have been or might eventually be conceived:

 

·         by people who become parents late in life, e.g.,

• Aleta St. James, who in 2004 gave birth to twins three days before she turned 57[1]; and
• Rosee Swain, a 57-year-old great-grandmother who delivered twins in 2005.[2]

 

·         by people who use infertility treatments

• IVF (in vitro fertilization) [used by both St. James and Swain]. The first child created using IVF was Louise Brown (born 1979). IVF can (but does not have to) involve

·         implantation of multiple embryos

·         use of surrogate mothers

·         using eggs that have been paid for rather than donated

·         embryo selection based on sex [a practice that critics believe is the first step down a slippery slope to “designer babies”]

 

·         by people who use reproductive human cloning [i.e., the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer to create a zygote with all 46 of its chromosomes from one parent (rather than 23 chromosomes from each of two parents); the zygote would then be used to create a child, who would in effect be the identical twin of the DNA donor, just born several years later than the donor; this has not yet happened in humans.]

 

A recent case not mentioned in the textbook:

 

·         by female-to-male transgendered people who still have female sex organs

• Thomas Beatie, the “pregnant man” who gave birth to a daughter in June 2008 and who is currently pregnant with his second child. [3]

 

 

 

 

[4.2.] Leon Kass and “the Yuck Factor.”

 

Leon Kass is an influential conservative American bioethicist. He was the first chairperson of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which George W. Bush created to monitor and make recommendations regarding such research.[4]

 

In 1997, a few months after the creation of Dolly the sheep became public knowledge, The New Republic published Kass’s article “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”[5] This article is a sustained attack on reproductive human cloning.

 

In it, Kass writes:

 

Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted—though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.

                The repugnance at human cloning belongs in this category. We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.[6]

 

Kass’s view seems to be that feelings of repugnance or revulsion (the so-called “yuck factor”) are enough when it comes to judging a new reproductive technology (such as reproductive human cloning) to be immoral.

 

The idea is that no rational arguments are needed to show that such a practice is immoral. Our negative emotional responses are all the “evidence” we need:

 

... generalized horror and revulsion are prima facie evidence of foulness and violation. The burden of moral argument must fall entirely on those who want to declare the widespread repugnances of humankind to be mere timidity or superstition.[7]

 

(Kass does not rest his criticism of reproductive human cloning entirely on the yuck factor... he goes on to give other arguments against the practice.)

 

Pence calls Kass’s position “emotivism,” but this is a non-standard use of that term.

·         “Emotivism” usually refers to a form of ethical subjectivism that was developed in the 1930s and 40s by C. L. Stevenson (we’ll talk about it soon).

·         Recall that ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical theory according to which our moral judgments (judgments like “abortion is immoral,” “charity is obligatory,” etc.) are based only on our feelings and emotions; this implies that there is no such thing as objective morality, and thus no such thing as objective moral truth.

·         But Kass does not appear to be a subjectivist. His view seems to be that our emotional reactions are a reliable guide to morality, but not that morality is based on nothing but our emotions (as subjectivism maintains).

 

Pence’s criticism: to be consistent, Kass would have to “allow rejection of his views by those who feel his views to be repugnant.” (118) In other words, if a negative emotional response towards X is enough to show that X is immoral, or bad, or wrong, or deficient in some way, then someone having a negative emotional response toward Kass’s views would be enough to show that those views are wrong.

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday January 28. For next time, continue reading Pence ch.5 (114-26).