Human Nature and Biotechnological Enhancement: Some Theological Considerations

Introduction

For several decades now, biotechnology promoters have offered up enticing promises of a future in which biotechnology will make it possible not only to prevent and treat diseases and injuries but to bring about astonishing changes in performances (whether athletic or cognitive), behaviors (including moods and emotions), and physical characteristics (such as longevity and height). Biotechnology, they predict, will make us stronger and smarter, will enable us to control our moods and edit our memories, and will cause us to grow taller and live longer. These changes are commonly referred to as ‘human enhancements’, and they involve a wide array of current and prospective technologies, including pharmacology, genetics, neuro-digital interfaces, and tissue regeneration.

The term ‘enhancement’ suggests an improvement in which biotechnology aims not simply to restore or maintain the normal state of a function or trait by treating or preventing a disease or injury but to bring about a state that takes a function or trait beyond what is normal. In the terms of a well-known report of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, an enhancement aims to go ‘beyond therapy’. But as that report itself acknowledges, the distinction between therapy and enhancement is difficult to draw in a way that is conceptually precise and practically plausible. ¹ Historians and philosophers of biology disagree over the viability of any attempt to determine a normal state of an organism from which diseases and injuries deviate, and which enhancements purportedly surpass. ² To avoid confusion and controversy, we should define biotechnological enhancement as intervention into biological functions or traits for the attainment of desired performances, behaviors and physical characteristics.

One way to evaluate these technologies is to determine whether we would be better or worse off with the abilities and characteristics they would make available to us. Would a vastly longer life, a more upbeat and contented emotional state, control over our memories, and greatly increased capacities of attention and concentration be good or bad for us? An answer to this question in the case of a particular biotechnological enhancement would give us a good reason either to develop it and bring it into use or not. However, it is difficult to answer this question until we actually see what human lives look like in the enhanced conditions. And of course, we can’t do that until we already have considerable experience with the technologies. But we can reflect in advance of the development and use of enhancement technologies on the desires that they express, judging whether they are ordered or disordered. Some of the most important commentaries on biotechnological enhancement undertake this kind of reflection with respect to particular enhancements. ³ Because this kind of inquiry helps us to rightly order our desires before the relevant technologies themselves become available, and thus to be prepared to respond appropriately to them, it is worthwhile and should be encouraged. But it is unclear that many of the technologies that express ordered or disordered desires will ever materialize, or if they do, in what ways they will be used.

Instead of asking whether the abilities and characteristics these technologies bring about or the desires they express are good or bad, most bioethicists ask whether use of these technologies would violate any ethical rules or principles. If they would, then we have reasons to regulate and perhaps even prohibit their use even if we consider the states or capabilities they offer to be goods. So, first of all, we can ask whether these technologies are safe. The biomedical risk model proportions the justifiability of a technology whose risks are unknown to the severity of the condition for which it is used. This model therefore supports a cautious approach to enhancement uses of technology, which by definition do not aim at severe conditions. We can ask in the second place whether the distribution of enhancement technologies is fair. Presumably, at least some of these technologies will end up being highly beneficial for people in their careers, in sports, and even in their social life. But there will be significant cost barriers to them, at least in the beginning, which could be unfair to those who can’t afford them. Finally, if some of these technologies prove to increase the productive capacities of those who use them, we can ask about the potential for violations of autonomy in workplaces where people might be subject to various kinds and degrees of coercion to use them.

Although these issues are usually raised by secular bioethicists, they are crucial to a theological evaluation of biotechnological enhancement. ⁴ However, judgments about whether enhancement technologies are safe, fair, and respectful of autonomy depend on the particular technology and the circumstances of its use. Once again, these judgments cannot be made in advance and indeed may differ widely at different points in the life cycle of the particular technology. It appears, then, that theological ethicists are limited in what they can say about enhancement technologies in advance of their actual development and use. However, one question we can ask in advance of the development and use of particular enhancement technologies has to do with the circumstance that these technologies target human biological nature. Is the fact that biotechnological enhancement aims in one way or another at our biological nature relevant to a theological and ethical evaluation of it? Does our biological nature have some theological or ethical significance that must be considered when we evaluate biotechnological enhancement? These questions are the focus of this article.

Before examining answers to these questions it is worthwhile to consider why they are important. Theologies of human nature routinely reflect the insights of evolutionary biology, from which we know that human biological nature is variable, changing, and indeterminate with respect to its boundaries with other living things. However, these theologies do not yet reflect what biotechnology discloses about human biological nature, namely, that it is not only variable and changing but also malleable, as well as indeterminate with respect to its boundaries not only with other living things but with machines. ⁵ How are we are to account for these features? Does respect for human biological nature as created by God, or protection of the human person whose nature it is, require us to refrain from taking advantage of its malleability and indeterminacy to select or design functions and traits? Or should malleability and indeterminacy instead be welcomed as conditions for human beings to fulfill a vocation to determine their nature or bring it to perfection? And do malleability and indeterminacy render obsolete the notion that we look to our nature to determine what our good is? This article treats these three questions in order.

Human Biological Nature as Off-Limits to Enhancement

One aim of biotechnology is to enable us to select and eventually design biological functions and traits. ⁶ This ambition strikes some people as Promethean or hubristic, an illicit or foolish assertion of human mastery over human nature that usurps a divine prerogative to determine what human nature shall be. ⁷ More plausible than this ‘playing God’ objection is the claim that biotechnological enhancement involves a problematic stance toward creation. Oliver O’Donovan casts suspicion on what he takes to be a technological stance toward nature. Although he does not explicitly mention biotechnological enhancement, his criticism implicates efforts to determine biological functions and traits. He distinguishes between respecting creation as a completed order and approaching it as unformed matter that is available for human fashioning; the latter is a stance he associates with technology. ‘We must understand creation not merely as the raw material out of which the world as we know it is composed, but as the order and coherence in which it is composed’, and the question posed by this understanding is whether we are to regard this order and coherence as real or as merely imposed by the human will and thus available for willful re-ordering by humans. ⁸ Although O’Donovan stops short of identifying particular kinds of action with respecting creation as already ordered, and approaching it as unformed matter waiting for human beings to impose form on it, the distinction clearly puts biotechnological determination of human functions and traits under suspicion. ⁹

Efforts to exclude intentional human action in principle from the determination of biological functions and traits bear the burden of explaining why it is acceptable for these functions and traits to be determined by nonhuman causes and nonintentional human causes but not by intentional human causes. O’Donovan rightly distinguishes the order of creation, which is complete and unchanging, from the created things that are ordered by it; these things exhibit variation and change and pass into and out of existence. And he is aware that the things that are ordered have acquired their characteristics through the operation of creaturely agencies, prominent among which are those that are at work in biological evolution. For him, then, the notion of a created order is compatible with the notion of ordered things acquiring their characteristics in time through creaturely agency. But what then are the grounds for suspicion toward the determination of human biological characteristics by the intentional actions of human beings? If God makes use of unintentional creaturely agencies to give human beings and other created things the characteristics they have, why may God not also make use of intentional creaturely agency, in the form of biotechnology, to accomplish the same thing? It is true that because human agency is willful it imposes order on things in a way that other forms of agency do not. But if the will is not sinful simply as such, there must in principle be justifiable exercises of it, however tainted they may be by sin. It is also true that in contrast with the exceedingly slow pace of biological evolution and even of nonintentional human activity, intentional human action toward biological nature operates at a rapid temporal pace, making it a risky endeavor. But this feature of human action justifies caution in biotechnological enhancement, not a rejection of it.

In short, biotechnological enhancement is not incompatible in principle with respect for creation as a completed order. But perhaps it involves a stance toward our biological nature that is problematic in another way. Communion and Stewardship, a 2004 statement on theological anthropology from the Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission, denies that ‘the person may use the body as a means to an end he himself has chosen’ and goes on to elaborate the point as follows: ‘The uniqueness of each human person, in part constituted by his biogenetic characteristics and developed through nurture and growth, belongs intrinsically to him and cannot be instrumentalised in order to improve some of these characteristics.’ ¹⁰ The statement suggests that the end one has chosen is merely a preference one happens to have and is chosen without regard to the good of one’s nature. In that case, one does indeed instrumentalize one’s nature, treating it as a mere means to one’s preference and thus severing its intrinsic connection to one’s person. One suspects that this sometimes happens when people use concentration-enhancing drugs to maximize short-term cognitive performances at school or work. ¹¹ However, it is plausible to suppose that improvements to our cognitive and other capacities would enable them to perform their natural functions better. Such improvements would be goods of our nature and not mere preferences. If at least some enhanced states of at least some functions or traits would count as goods of our nature in this sense, then the end one proposes in such a case would not be extrinsic to one’s nature (so that one’s nature would be a mere means to it) but would be an improved state of one’s nature. Of course, that state would be brought about through technological action and not ‘through nurture and growth’. But many states that are brought about by technology, including health, do not in principle instrumentalize human nature, and technology is inextricably intertwined with all sorts of human activity, including many of those that are involved in nurture and growth, that do not instrumentalize human nature. In short, enhancing biological characteristics does not necessarily instrumentalize human nature.

The quotation from Communion and Stewardship refers to the intrinsic connection of biological nature to the person. This connection follows from the nature of the person, which Catholic teaching understands as a unity of body and soul. The dignity of the human person, so understood, is central to Catholic teaching, and because the person is a unity of body and soul, dignity extends to the biological nature of the person, which therefore shares the inviolability that applies to the human person. To quote Pope John Paul II, ‘The biological nature of each person is untouchable in the sense that it is constitutive of the personal identity of the individual throughout the whole course of his history … To respect the dignity of man, consequently, amounts to safeguarding this identity of the man “corpore et anima unus”…’. ¹² Untouchability means, among other things, that human bodies cannot be destroyed, assaulted, tortured or mutilated. ¹³ The question posed by biotechnological enhancement is whether it also means that human biological characteristics cannot be determined by biotechnology.

Does the inviolability or untouchability of the biological nature of the person entail the impermissibility of determining her biological characteristics? More specifically, does it rule out genetic enhancement? John Paul II declined to draw this implication, indicating that for him the dignity of the human person is not in principle incompatible with determination of her biological characteristics, and specifically, with genetic enhancement. Communion and Stewardship also stops short of an explicit prohibition of biotechnological enhancement. But it strongly implies that the inviolability of the human person in her biological nature is incompatible with the determination of biological characteristics. According to Communion and Stewardship, when we choose the genes a child will have, we violate her autonomy by endowing her with characteristics she has not chosen. But this argument is questionable. It assumes that a person has a say in the initial determination of her genes that is then denied to her when others determine them. But of course, no one has autonomy with respect to the genes he or she was born with, so no autonomy is violated when those genes are chosen by someone else.

Perhaps the problem is not simply that one has not chosen one’s biological characteristics but that one might fail to identify with the characteristics that have been chosen for one by one’s parents. In this case, one’s biological nature would embody the values of others which turn out not to be one’s own values, and in this sense one’s autonomy would be compromised. But how likely is it that one would fail to endorse the biological characteristics that have been chosen for one? If we consider scenarios in which parents genetically program their child to become a musician or athlete, it is reasonable to assume that she might not endorse the genetic choices of her parents. She might turn out not to value music or sports and to feel that she has been programmed in accordance with the values of others. But the contribution that genes make to musical and athletic ability and to most other things parents desire for their children is a very modest one, leaving little room for the child to fail to endorse her parents’ choices. And in any case, the risk of non-endorsement could be avoided if parents restricted their genetic choices to enhancements that would benefit the child no matter what type of activity she might value.

If to determine the biological characteristics of one’s child is not wrong because it violates the autonomy of the child, is it wrong because it reduces her to an object? O’Donovan famously distinguishes begetting children from making them, drawing on the Nicene Creed’s reference to the Son as ‘begotten not made’ to argue that what we beget is like us and is our equal while what we make is subordinate to us and subject to our purposes for it. ¹⁴ If this distinction is applicable to the determination of a child’s biological characteristics, then the latter is tantamount to treating her as a thing that suits our purposes rather than as our equal. But the distinction between begetting and making children is clearer in principle than it is in application, especially with respect to the relationship of parents to their children. In particular, it would be implausible to simply identify biological interventions (which are presumably suspect in principle) with objectifying the child as a thing, and environmental interventions (which are presumably not suspect in principle) with treating her as an equal. In both cases, the proper standard of parental action is what is good for the child, and in securing the child’s good, parental actions may justifiably exhibit various degrees and forms of control as appropriate to the age and circumstances of the child. In respecting their child as a person, parents ask complex questions about what truly benefits her and how much control to exercise in benefiting her. These questions are the daily stuff of shaping a child’s environment. But if one’s biological nature truly is a constituent of one’s person, then the same questions about how to respect the child as a person should apply with regard to her biological nature. Would this enhancement truly benefit her? Does it involve too much control? To invoke the distinction between begetting and making too quickly or too rigidly by simply declaring the child’s biological nature off-limits at the outset is to exempt it from these questions, which are central to the kind of respect parents have for their child precisely as a person.

In sum, the argument that human biological functions and traits should be kept off-limits to biotechnological enhancement, on the grounds that the latter fails to respect creation as a completed order, instrumentalizes one’s biological nature, violates the untouchability of the person, or treats persons as things to be made, is not a viable one. However, the charges of instrumentalization by Communion and Stewardship and objectification by O’Donovan are not entirely misdirected. Although one’s biological nature or one’s child are not in principle instrumentalized or objectified simply by virtue of the determination of biological characteristics by intentional human action, in practice biotechnology as a mode of action subjects biological functions and traits, and the persons whose functions and traits they are, to norms of measurability, efficiency and predictability. ¹⁵ These norms instantiate societal values that prize manageability and productivity, values that may affect our perceptions and judgments of the good of our biological nature or that of our children. To the extent that these values do govern choices of biological characteristics, one’s biological nature is treated as a means to an extrinsic end after all, and the biological nature of one’s child resembles an object that is made according to specifications that instantiate society’s values. It is unclear to what extent this in fact happens, but it is a persistent threat that justifies ongoing attention to the charges of instrumentalization and objectification.

Enhancement and the Vocation to Determine or Perfect Human Nature

For some proponents of biotechnological enhancement, the susceptibility of our biological nature to intentional intervention is not a circumstance that calls for protecting it by declaring it off-limits to enhancement but a condition for the exercise of a distinctively human vocation of freedom or a God-given vocation to perfect it. A Scriptural basis for this position can be found in the intimations of creaturely agency in the divine work of creation in Gen. 1:11, 20, 24, and 2:15, and some proponents of this position appeal to Irenaeus’s depiction of the human creature as unfinished and brought to completion through a temporal process. ¹⁶ In Catholic theology this position was articulated in an influential essay by Karl Rahner, and among Protestants its most prominent proponents are Philip Hefner and James Peterson. ¹⁷ For these theologians, characteristics of human nature that biotechnology has brought to light, such as indeterminacy and malleability, are precisely the characteristics we would expect it to have if, as they hold, the determination or perfection of human nature is the distinctive vocation of human beings.

For Hefner and Peterson, technology is authorised not only to mitigate the effects of the Fall by healing and eliminating diseases but also to approximate the eschatological destiny of creation by perfecting biological functions and traits. This claim is plausible only if we make two assumptions. One assumption is that we know, at least roughly, what states or conditions of our biological nature approximate its eschatological perfection; the other is that biotechnology is capable of bringing about those states or conditions. The first assumption does not hold, as we know little of what specific characteristics our glorified bodies will possess. And even if we could identify these characteristics, whether biotechnology is capable of bringing them about is a further question. In light of these difficulties, it is not surprising that Hefner substitutes a notion of the continuous, cumulative improvement of biological nature for its eschatological perfection. What is significant about the indeterminacy and malleability of our biological nature is that these qualities make its continuous improvement possible. However, continuous, cumulative improvement is a poor substitute for a determinate vision of eschatological perfection. Because Hefner is committed to improvement but has no end in view that determines what counts as improvement, he defaults to whatever biotechnology becomes capable of doing. But continuous, cumulative improvement without any telos is a better description of techno-capitalist progress than of eschatological perfection.

For Rahner, indeterminacy and open-endedness are valued as conditions for the freedom of humans to determine what they will be rather than as conditions for approximating perfection. On this view, as Rahner implied in a subsequent essay, anything that makes our nature determinate or blocks its open-endedness violates our vocation of freedom. ¹⁸ But if our nature must always remain indeterminate and open-ended, it can never legitimately come to rest in a state of perfection. Once again, it appears that continuous improvement, or at least continuous change, is substituted for a perfection of which human beings this side of the eschaton lack a determinate concept.

Both of these versions of the second position have difficulty accounting for the goodness of our biological nature as a constituent of the goodness of creation. The goodness of our biological nature as it is realized at any moment consists in its capacity to be other than it now is in its endless improvement. Our creaturely goodness is therefore identifiable with the general features of indeterminacy, open-endedness and malleability, as it is these features that make continuous improvement possible, but it cannot be identified with any of the specific features that characterize us as the kind of thing we now are. Humans and their kind (like all things and their kinds) are at best a stage in an ongoing process of improvement, or at least transformation, and their creaturely goodness is not instantiated in their human characteristics as such but only in the general characteristics of indeterminacy, open-endedness and malleability. But if our creaturely goodness is not identifiable with any of our specifically human characteristics, then there is no creaturely ground for respect for human beings in their distinctively human nature. That is a conclusion that a theological approach to biotechnological enhancement should not accept. ¹⁹

In spite of these problems, this position makes a vital contribution. Its emphasis on the indeterminacy, open-endedness and malleability of human nature radically undermines the racism, sexism and ableism that thrive on conceptions of human nature as fixed, unchanging and intact. And in contrast to the first position, it not only accommodates but positively affirms the ongoing creaturely agency of both nonhumans and humans that is partly responsible for the biological characteristics of human nature in its present state and would of course be involved in the intentional biotechnological determinations of human functions and traits.

Enhancement and Nature-Grounded Goods

Thus far, I have questioned both appeals to human nature that attempt to block biotechnological enhancement and appeals that offer biotechnological enhancement a plenary endorsement. These are the two best-represented alternatives among theological approaches to biotechnological enhancement. A third alternative shows how one influential notion of the normative significance of human nature offers a possible justification in principle for moderate and incremental enhancement. In a broadly Aristotelian sense, the nature of a living thing consists in the characteristics or processes that make it what it is (its essence), while its good consists in activities, capabilities, states or conditions in which it thrives as the kind of thing it is. From a theological perspective, this grounding of human goods in human nature supports the Scriptural claim that creation is good (our nature as created by God is ordered to our flourishing and is not indifferent or hostile to it) and provides an intelligible ground for human goods (which are not merely preferences we happen to have but are related to our nature as created by God). On this view, then, by looking to our nature we can determine, at least in a general way, what is and is not genuinely good for us.

Biotechnology introduces two complications into this Christian version of Aristote-lianism. First, the indeterminacy and malleability of human nature pose challenges to essentialist concepts of human nature that are also posed by evolutionary biology. The Aristotelian view seems to presuppose a timeless essence of human nature that conflicts not only with the change and variation that result from biological evolution but also with the indeterminacy and malleability that biotechnology reveals. Although this issue is beyond the scope of this article, there are compelling neo-Aristotelian arguments for the compatibility of Aristotelian formal causes with evolutionary change and variation which can also be applied to biotechnological indeterminacy and malleability. ²⁰ The second complication directly concerns this article; it involves the claim that insofar as our good is what fulfills us as the kind of being we are, we look to our nature to determine what our good is. So long as we have no ability to alter our biological nature, we have reason to look to our nature in its current state to determine what counts as our good even if enhancements such as new cognitive and perceptual capabilities, a different range of emotions, and a vastly extended lifespan appeal to us. But what if we achieve the ability to intentionally alter our biological nature? In that case, it may no longer be necessary to look to our nature to determine what counts as genuinely good for us. We may instead have the option of remaking our nature in accordance with enhancements, such as those just mentioned, that we consider to be good but that are unavailable to us in our unaltered nature. Should we look to our nature to determine what our good is? Or should we look to what we take to be our good to determine what our nature will be? On the first alternative, we must concede that there are attainable goods for which our nature is not adequate. On the second alternative, we must deny that human nature is the intelligible ground of human goods. Each alternative therefore seems to call into question the claim that our nature and our good are ordered to one another.

Secular bioethicists are divided over this question. Leon Kass opts for the first alternative, asking what grounds we have apart from our nature for judging whether an enhancement is good or not. ‘If … we can no longer look to our previously unalterable human nature for a standard or norm of what is good or better’, he asks, ‘how will anyone know what constitutes an improvement?’ ²¹ Most bioethicists, however, opt for the second alternative, arguing that recognition of a state as good gives us a reason for choosing it that the recognition of something as natural does not. As Jonathan Glover argues, ‘What is worth preserving is what is valuable, and the connection between the two [that is, between what is valuable and what is natural] is not obvious’. ²² But must we choose between these alternatives? To claim that our nature in its current form is not adequate to what we recognize as good is not to claim that our nature is not the standard of what we recognize as good. We may come to recognize as good certain capabilities and states for which our nature in its present form is not adequate by extrapolating from goods which fulfill our nature in its present form. Capabilities and states involving cognition, perception, emotion, strength and agility, and longevity are susceptible to quantitative and qualitative variation: we can imagine greater degrees (such as measurable increases in memory, concentration or agility) and other versions (such as night vision or a different configuration of emotion) of them than those that are currently available to us. On the basis of this imaginative extrapolation we may form the intention to alter our nature to make these greater degrees and other versions of goods available to us. But insofar as we identify these goods by extrapolating from goods that fulfill us as the kind of being we are, we still look to our nature to determine what our good is. The goods we identify are greater degrees and different versions of goods that fulfill us as the kind of being we are, and we proceed to alter our biological characteristics to make these goods available to us.

Of course, we may be mistaken in taking these enhanced capacities and states to be genuinely good (just as we are sometimes mistaken in our recognition of goods that are currently available to us), and the dialectic of extrapolation and alteration may eventually reach the point where we will have become a different kind of being. But if biotechnological enhancement proceeds in this incremental, dialectical way, enhancement of our biological functions and traits is not in principle inconsistent with a commitment to the notion that our good is grounded in our nature in such a way that we look to our nature to determine what our good is.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I return to the three questions posed at the outset. Does respect for human biological nature as created by God or protection of the human person whose nature it is require us to refrain from taking advantage of the malleability and indeterminacy of human biological nature to select or design functions and traits? We have seen that it does not, but that worries about instrumentalization and objectification are appropriate in light of certain characteristics of biotechnological action. Should malleability and indeterminacy be welcomed as conditions for human beings to fulfill a vocation to determine their nature or bring it to perfection? We have found reasons to doubt that biotechnological progress tracks eschatological perfection and to reject the implication that our present biological characteristics are inadequate and must be surpassed, even as we accept the recognition of human agency in the determination of biological characteristics. Finally, do malleability and indeterminacy render obsolete the notion that we look to our nature to determine what our good is? We have seen that a dialectical and incremental approach to enhancement can in principle preserve the claim that we are to look to our nature for our good. These three questions are crucial to a theological approach to biotechnological enhancement, and I trust that my answers have done justice to them.