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tonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that
102 CHAPTER FI VE
speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the
souls that have forgotten how to shudder.40
Kass is not arguing that repugnance is the end of the matter but
instead that it is a beginning. Those philosophies that see in such reac-
tions only the churnings of irrational emotion misunderstand the na-
ture of human emotions. Our emotional reactions are complex, laced
through and through with thought. The point is to bring forward such
reactions and submit them to reflection.
Would we really want to live in a world in which the sight of piles of
anonymous corpses elicited no strong revulsion, or a world in which
the sight of a human being s body pierced through in dozens of places
and riddled with pieces of metal was something we simply took for
granted? The reaction to the first clearly gestures toward powerful con-
demnation of those responsible for creating those mountains of
corpses, and anguish and pity for the tortured and murdered and their
families. In the case of the metal-pierced-body, we may decide it is a
matter of little import and yet ask ourselves why mutilation of the body
that goes much beyond the decorative is now so popular? Does this tell
us anything about how we think about our bodies?41 And so on.
The technical, liberal, and meliorist approaches all ignore the
deeper anthropological, social, and, indeed, ontological meanings of
bringing forth new life, asserts Kass. To this more fitting and pro-
found point of view, cloning shows itself to be a major alteration, in-
deed, a major violation, of our given nature as embodied, gendered and
engendering beings and of the social relations built on this natural
ground. 42 The upshot is that critical interpreters cede the ground too
readily to those who want to move full steam ahead when in fact it
should work the other way around. The burden of moral argument
must fall entirely on those who want to declare the widespread repug-
nances of humankind to be mere timidity or superstition. 43 Too many
theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics have become reticent
about defending insights drawn from the riches of the Western
tradition.
As a result, Kass argues, we do the following things: We enter a
world in which unethical experiments upon the resulting child-to-be
Biotechnology and the Quest for Control 103
are conducted; we deprive a cloned entity of a distinctive identity not
only because he will be in genotype and appearance to another human
being, but, in this case, because he may also be twin to the person who
is his father or mother if one can still call them that ; we deliber-
ately plan situations that we know the empirical evidence is incontro-
vertible are not optimal arenas for the rearing of children, namely,
family fragments that deny relationality or shrink it. Finally, he suggests:
[We] enshrine and aggravate a profound and mischievous misunder-
standing of the meaning of having children and of the parent child
relationship. . . . The child is given a genotype that has already lived. . . .
Cloning is inherently despotic, for it seeks to make one s children . . .
after one s own image . . . and their future according to one s will.44
The many warnings embedded in the Western tradition, from its an-
tique (pre-Christian) forms through Judaism and Christianity, seem
now to lack the power to stay the hand of a scientized anthropocen-
trism that distorts the meaning of human freedom.45
Understanding the Natural :
A Christian Anthropology
Within the Jewish and Christian traditions, a burden borne by human
beings after the Fall lies in discerning what is natural or given, presum-
ing that what is encoded into the very nature of things affords a stan-
dard, accessible to human reason, by which we can assess critically the
claims and forces at work in our cultural time and place. (This is not the
only available standard, of course, but it was long believed an important
feature of a whole complex of views.) The great moral teachers, until
relatively recently, believed that nature and the natural could serve
as a standard. Within Christian theological anthropology, human be-
ings are corporeal beings ensouled bodies made in the image of
their Creator.
104 CHAPTER FI VE
John Paul II
According to the late Pope John Paul II, this account of our natures,
including the ontological equality of male and female as corporeal be-
ings, is free from any trace whatsoever of subjectivism. As he ex-
plains, it contains only the objective facts and defines the objective [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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