In search of a post-genomic bioethics

Failed hybridization and sterile arguments

‘Bioliberals’, as bioethicists who support the use of genetic modification and similar technologies are sometimes called, often take issue with species-based, geneticized claims about human dignity and rights. To give two examples of this type of claim: George Annas and colleagues, writing on ‘the endangered human’ (Annas et al., 2002), link human rights directly to membership in the human species. This they treat as a fundamentally genetic concept, asserting that genetic technologies will ‘alter the essence of humanity itself’ (ibid.: 153). On this basis, they dub ‘species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist’ (ibid.: 162). Likewise, Fukuyama’s account of the mysterious ‘Factor X’ as the ‘essential human quality’ that is the foundation of human dignity, ‘something unique about the human race that entitles every member of the species to a higher moral status than the rest of the natural world’ (Fukuyama, 2002: 160), seems firmly rooted in human biology and genetics as the essential moral foundation of human nature.

The failing of such arguments is that they present as unproblematically scientific what are inextricably social and politicized concepts. In referring to the human genome as giving rise to dignity or as common heritage, they may be alluding to the ‘political genome’ rather than the scientific one, but this is never made explicit; species is presented as a biological fact even as it is used to draw moral boundaries.

The standard bioliberal response to these objections is to critique their attempts to translate scientific facts into moral truths. Of course if the genome is what gives us dignity or what makes us the bearers of rights, any interference with the genome is an assault on dignity and human rights; but why (asks the critic) should the genome be endowed with this moral property? (Chan, 2008; Chan and Harris, 2006, 2012). The hallmarks of this type of response include a commitment to abstraction, seen in the treatment of concepts like species-neutral, non-genetic personhood (see for example Harris, 1985; Singer, 1993; Tooley, 1972), and an analytical frame that poses questions such as why human rights should be unique to or common to all human beings (Harris, 2011). Absent any proper explanation of what is meant by invoking supposedly scientific objects such as ‘the human genome’ and ‘the human species’, these are treated as mere biological properties and accidental ones at that, incapable of grounding moral properties such as rights or dignity (‘useless concept’ as it may be; see Macklin, 2003). In short, such analyses attempt to disentangle moral philosophy from biology, but without an awareness of the related entanglement of politics with biology on one hand, and politics with moral philosophy on the other. The result is usually a stalemate that does not conduce further productive discourse.

Both sides are hence at fault here: critiques of these bioconservative arguments have not engaged sufficiently with the political biology that underlies these objections, but this is not to say that the objections themselves are valid: they too are insufficiently cognizant of their political biology roots. This may explain why at times the different camps appear to be talking at cross-purposes: how is the geneticist working on the molecular basis of human disease to react to accusations of bioterrorism, when as far as she is concerned, her goals are the pursuit of ‘pure’ knowledge and the ‘betterment’ of human welfare?

Our political heritage

What these objections and their criticisms fail fully to acknowledge is that the significance of genetics turns precisely on its social construction as an object of politico-biological importance. Such arguments over genetic technologies are clearly a product of the political history of genetic science, particularly what Meloni calls the third era, ‘the Story Part 2’.

Worries about changing human nature via the medium of genetic engineering subscribe to a form of genetic essentialism over what it is to be human. Nobody seems to regard changing the environment as an impermissible tampering with human nature; in this geneticized view of humanness, nature (in the form of genetics) is essential, nurture and environment incidental. Such a position is further entrenched by the post-war politics of genetic science: if biology is regarded ‘as a solid basis for universal positive traits and…the profound dictates of human nature’ (Meloni, 2016: 156) then of course any interference with human biology becomes a potential attack upon the solidarity of the human race and universalizing values.

With this, the moral panic over germline modification, renewed in response to new genome editing technologies (Baltimore et al., 2015; Chan et al., 2015; Lanphier et al., 2015; Mathews et al., 2015), is understandable, if still not justified. Ethical attitudes to genetic modification must be read in the context of an evolving historical account of the germline and its significance, but that does not mean this significance should meekly be accepted. The moral mysticism attached to the germline and our intuitions about its inviolability can be traced back to early ideas about heredity and the purity or essence of the germline as representing, for example, ‘an uncontaminated bridge to the next generation’ (Meloni, 2016: 51). In this worldview, the ‘Weismann barrier’ is perceived as an actual barrier and therefore a moral boundary, ignoring the extent to which this doctrine (dare we say dogma) was itself a product of how scientific theory came to be occupied and co-opted by politics and ideology.

It might be seen as ironic that the staunchest defenders of the sanctity of the human germline invoke concerns about eugenics, when the ‘hard heredity’ that sanctified the germline, so to speak, itself coalesced in response to existing trends towards eugenic thinking; Meloni makes a persuasive case for the role of hard heredity as an ‘ideological catalyst’ for eugenics. Alternatively perhaps it is understandable: as science was invoked to construct heredity and its substance as an object of political action, it became impossible to dissociate the science and its potential applications from the ideology that shaped and was shaped by it. It is no coincidence that fears over ‘designer babies’ often invoke the Aryan stereotype as the epitome of designed desirability (Miller and Wilsdon, 2006).

Becoming post-political: History cannot be denied

How, then, are we to overcome the weight of this historical baggage when evaluating the uses of genetic technology in the present day from a moral standpoint? The emergence of bioethics has, as Meloni notes, been characterized as a response to the Nazi atrocities committed under the banner of eugenics. The question is: can we transcend these reactionary roots of our discipline? Should we be aiming to do so?

Some insist that to forget history is to abandon necessary caution: even if, in the abstract, genetic technologies may be morally neutral, history proves that they will be pressed into service as shackles upon freedom. Here, though, Meloni exposes the supposed inevitability of genetic science being co-opted by rightist political movements as a myth bequeathed to us by happenstance. The problem, however, is that most attempts to address the issues of genetic modification in a neutral manner do not actually neutralize but instead ignore the weight of political history behind these concerns. Simply to acknowledge the historical associations of eugenic thinking with coercive social policies and disclaim these via distinguishing the ‘facts’ of the present, as some scholars have done (Agar, 2004; Buchanan et al., 2000), is not enough to overcome the political entanglement of the scientific ideas themselves.

In either case, as new technologies for manipulating cells and their development problematize the ontology of the germline and therefore its political and moral significance, the need for a new orientation and critical perspective that integrates the insights of political biology into bioethical discussion is increasingly evident.

Consider the role given to epigenetics in more recent debates. That decisions we make today can affect future generations without any direct genetic interference is obvious: for example, how we act with respect to the environment will have drastic effects on future people. Why, then, are heritable changes to the genome seen as necessitating special moral sanction? As noted, this exceptionalism derives directly from ideas entrenched in early 20th century political biology, of the essential and inviolable character of the germline – scientific ideas that are now being re-thought in light of new understandings, including of epigenetics. Once it is recognized that we can also produce heritable changes via epigenetic responses to the environment, does or should ‘germline modification’ of the DNA sequence lose some of its unique ‘moral’ significance? (Harris, 2015)

This, however, is the wrong question: we are still scientizing. Relying on epigenetics to realign our moral ideas about the significance of heritability is merely to subscribe to the next wave of science; instead, we need to confront its political underpinnings to understand the moral intuitions thus far produced, and prepare for its future post-genomic effects.

From palaeo-bioethics to the post-genomic

That science-led intuitions about the moral significance of genetics should so strongly shape bioethical discourse is perhaps understandable, given that almost all of what we regard as ‘modern’ bioethics has taken place during the genomic era, post the Modern Synthesis. Many of the concepts that have become central to the discourse have arisen in response to the fossilized ideologies laid down within the strata of the political history of genetics. Read in the light of Meloni’s analysis, bioethical perspectives on the significance of genetics, and certainly many of the common objections that arise with respect to genetic technologies, appear stuck in the early 20th century; we are engaging in a sort of ‘palaeo-bioethics’ in continuing to contend with these ideas.

Moreover, our willingness to allow dated scientific framings to structure our moral thinking, to accept them as objective rather than regard them critically as products of political history, is not limited to genetic technologies. To give another example, Mayr’s historiography of pre-Darwinian ‘typological thinking’ and ‘essentialism’ giving way to ‘population thinking’ via the Modern Synthesis has been widely recognized as a form of mythologizing for its own time (Meloni, 2016: 179–81; see also, for example, Powers, 2013; Sloan, 2013; Wilkins, 2009). Nonetheless, the normative role often attributed to ‘species-typical function’ in distinguishing between therapy and enhancement has more than an echo of essentialism about it. Likewise, the last few decades have seen an increasing body of work in animal ethics, biology and cognitive ethology that opposes human exceptionalism; the turn towards culture to defend human exceptionalism in response (see for example Tallis, 2011) is a direct descendant of post-war evolutionary anthropology and its focus on culture as the determinant of human uniqueness.

The challenge for bioethics, then, is how to navigate the ‘terra incognita’ of the post-genomic age. Meloni notes that post-genomic political biology will demand reconceptualization of ‘social inequalities…health and disease…race, class and gender’ (Meloni, 2016: 31); a post-genomic bioethics must add to this list concepts such as rights, identity and personhood. Disentangling these from the political biology roots of genetics and their present-day post-genomic incarnations will require more than simply denying any such link.

Making use (and sense) of political biology

In some cases, political biology, while still implicit, has had more fruitful effects on the discussion, where ‘the genetic’ has been used as a vehicle to import the political and social into moral philosophy discourse. Thus we confront the question of how, for example, in a bioethics still largely dominated by ‘hard heredity’, moral and political philosophers could respond to the ‘genetic lottery’ by casting it as a form of ‘brute bad luck’ and invoking justice as a solution to biology (Buchanan et al., 2000).

Concepts such as genetic equity (Harris and Sulston, 2004) and genetic privacy (Laurie, 2002), which draw on the socio-political dimensions of genetics to guide its ethical treatment, provide us with another way of bridging the empirical and the conceptual, abstract and actual. Genetic equity is a consequence, not a cause, of human dignity, an appropriate response to neoliberal post-genomics; the nature and importance of genetic information reconfigures the ethical and political concept of privacy. Genetics, in these accounts, serves simultaneously as science and politics. Heeney references this multipleness as ‘the virtual’, exemplified by the gene with its ‘openness or indeterminacy’: ‘neither totally abstract nor fully deployed or “actual”, and it can and does exert an influence, which is entirely real’ (Heeney, 2016: 3). Thinking ‘the virtual’ requires us to transform our understanding of the gene as simultaneously a DNA sequence, a scientific object, a disease (and a health) object, a social and political object. The ethical space surrounding the gene changes depending on how it is constructed; accepting and understanding this fluidity is a necessary precursor to reconnecting the social and the biological in our bioethical analyses. In so doing, we are called upon to construct new concepts that can carry both the moral and the politico-biological in a consistent way.

We might conceive, for example, of ‘genetic integrity’ ¹ rather than ‘identity’ as a potential way of trying to capture the ‘thickness’ of genetics and its significance, and hence the effect of genetic modification, not solely in terms of biology but its social and political dimensions. Genetics is an intensely social object; it permeates the stories that we are told, and that we tell ourselves, about who we are. Via the socio-political history of genetic science, we have become strongly wedded to geneticized notions of identity, whether these make sense or no. While philosophers may argue over identity, non-identity and their relationship to genetics, popular concerns (as raised, for example, with respect to mitochondrial replacement therapies: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2012) tell us that the thick concept of ‘genetics’, not just the sequence of DNA in our cells but the social and political object with all its history, does have an influence, if not on ‘who we are’, then on who we perceive ourselves and others to be.

Could a notion of ‘genetic integrity’, rather than ‘identity’, describe the sense of what some might feel to be ‘violated’ by genetic modifications, even those that improve health and wellbeing? On this account, the putative harm of being genetically modified is social and political, not biological; but then, it might be argued, so are all harms to some extent; for example, the harms of disability are due as much to how we organize and understand ourselves around our biological natures as to those natures themselves.

One aim of our critique should therefore be to shift the socio-political frame which gives rise to these harms, rather than denying that it exists. This does not mean we can’t also engineer biology: genetic modification in the context of current attitudes to genetics may pose some kind of harm to the socio-political notion of genetic integrity, but this can still be vastly outweighed by the harm of otherwise suffering from genetic disease, in the context of current expectations and situational constraints regarding what kind of lives can be ‘good lives’. What we cannot usefully do, however, is maintain that ‘genetics doesn’t matter’: we mean to say that we think it shouldn’t matter, but the fact is, it does.

Concluding thoughts

The message I took from Political Biology is that bioethics has often been too willing to accept the narratives of science on their own terms, notably with respect to what genetics is and does; we have limited ourselves mainly to arguing about how genetics should then be used given those ‘facts’, without tackling how the facts themselves are heavily constructed.

One might say that sceptics of genetic technologies very much acknowledge the political underpinnings of genetic science through their expressed concern for human rights, dignity and equality; however, they do not do so explicitly. Political arguments should not be couched in scientific terms: enshrining apparent scientific facts such as ‘biological species’ as the foundation of moral rights, or scientific objects such as ‘the human genome’ as the repository of human dignity, obscures the political dimensions of science.

Eugenics in its heyday, as Meloni tells us, was ‘a “modern” way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms’ (Meloni, 2016: 75) – but that was a century ago and we need now to stop biologizing. Bioethics is still suffering from the previous century’s ‘flattening’ of the human into the biological, of humanity and the social into the scientific; from the ‘unlimited empowerment of scientific experts’ and the view of ‘the sciences as…. morally neutral’ with respect to ethical discourse. We cannot deny or ignore the political history of genetics but neither should we submit to its legacy; we must accept that there is no such thing as ‘apolitical bioethics’ – the science that we work with, its concepts and the constructs they represent, are inherently political. Re-making our arguments to acknowledge and build on that fact is the task of post-genomic bioethics.