Dignity and Our Biotechnological Future

So I just finished writing an essay defending the Bush/Kass “dignified moral conflict” approach to bioethics from the coming Obama “expert consensus” approach. Here’s an excerpt:

Scientific experts are surely right that if our moods are merely random collections of chemicals—and so give us no real access to the truth about who we are—then it makes no sense to say we have a right to them. That means, of course, that evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker is wrong to think that taking dignity seriously is the primary threat to our freedom these days. Our effective exercise of our liberty depends on having a real standard of dignity higher than mere productivity. It really is Socratic to wonder, as Kass does, about the scientific self-denial that causes our scientists to deny what they can see with their own eyes about their own dignity. The truth is that members of our species alone are called to live well with what they can’t but know about the purposes and limitations they’ve been given. They’ve been born to be happy, as nature intends. But, as Solzhenitsyn added, they haven’t been born only to be happy, because they’ve been born to die.

Members of our species alone know they have inescapable and ennobling personal destinies, and they’ve been born with the responsibilities that accompany that purposeful freedom. The dolphin, to be sure, are cute and smart and social, but they are ontologically quite different from us. They lack both our greatness and our misery, and so, by comparison, it’s exceedingly easy for them to live well. They lack the personal dignity our presidents, princes, poets, philosophers, physicists, priests, and even or especially parents daily display, and the line between good and evil isn’t found in the dolphin’s heart.

The dignity found in our greatness and misery, for Kass, is a matter of scientific or empirical fact, and we shouldn’t (and, finally, can’t) be deceived by the comprehensive claims of any theory that denies it. We are, thank nature or God or both, required to live morally demanding lives, and we will never be able to bring human nature or human self-consciousness fully under our scientific or rational control. This Socratic line of thought, it seems to me, is what should give us confidence that there’s no biotechnological Brave New World around some corner. Our task, instead, will be to live well or with inescapably personal dignity with the coming biotechnological displays of our real but always fundamentally limited freedom to impose ourselves on nature. And the first part of that task, of course, is always to tell the truth to ourselves about who are.