All the scientific studies and reasoned arguments about positive pornography’s harmlessness (or even benefits), however, do not amount to a hill of Viagra beans if your partner finds it offensive, or feels repulsed or replaced instead of aroused. Here is another place to apply the ask first principle. Because sex is such a personal matter, and because there is so much variation in what individuals find sexually stimulating, asking your partner first is the simplest and surest way to find out what constitutes acceptable pornography.
Provisional Morality and Abortion
There has been, arguably, no more contentious moral issue of the past half century than abortion, where morality, politics, and science are confoundedly conflated. Moral issues are personal. Political issues are social. Scientific issues are factual. Herein lies confusion. Pro-choicers believe that whether a woman decides to abort a fetus or not is a personal moral issue in which the rights of the mother take precedence over the rights of the fetus.19 Pro-lifers want to make it a political moral issue in which the rights of the fetus take precedence over the rights of the mother so that society determines what a woman can or cannot do with her body and her fetus.20 Can science help settle this dispute?
When pro-lifers and pro-choicers square off to debate, they are oftentimes talking at cross-purposes. Pro-lifers speak of the “murder” of innocent fetuses and attack their debate opponents on the grounds that murder is wrong, as if pro-choicers accept murder as moral. In fact, pro-lifers and pro-choicers all agree that murder is immoral. What they disagree about is whether aborting a fetus constitutes murder. This apparent moral question is actually a factual question, because abortion can only be considered murder if it means taking the life of a human being, and when a fetus becomes a human is a question that is difficult to resolve, as Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun noted in his decision in the 7—2 majority ruling in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case: “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”21
The problem is more one of logic than of knowledge. Moral and political decisions are grounded in binary logic in which unambiguous yeses and noes determine Truth. Science is grounded in fuzzy logic in which ambiguous probabilities determine provisional truths. In provisional ethics, moral choices correspond to scientific facts in being provisionally right or wrong, where moral or immoral means confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer provisional assent. It remains provisional because, as in science, the evidence might change. Here is how provisional ethics may inform a decision in the abortion debate: most pro-lifers believe that human life begins at conception—before conception not-life, after conception, life. Binary logic. Binary life. With fuzzy logic we can assign a probability to human life—before conception o, the moment of conception .1, multicellular blastocyst .2, one-month-old embryo .3, two-month-old fetus .4, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 human life-form. Fuzzy logic. Fuzzy life.
The process does not sound very romantic, but from a scientific perspective, life is a continuum from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to newborn infant.22 Neither egg nor sperm is a human individual, nor is the zygote or blastocyst because they might split to become twins or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort.23 The eight-week-old fetus has recognizable human features such as face, hands, and feet, but neuronal synaptic connections are still being made, so thinking is not possible. Only after eight weeks do embryos begin to show primitive response movements, but between eight and twenty-four weeks (six months) the fetus could not exist on its own because such critical organs as the lungs and kidneys do not mature before that time. For example, air sac development sufficient for gas exchange does not occur until at least twenty-three weeks after gestation, and often later.24
Not until twenty-eight weeks, at 77 percent of full-term development, does the fetus acquire sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities typically found in newborns. Fetus EEG recordings with the characteristics of an adult EEG appear at approximately thirty weeks, or 83 percent of full-term development.25 In other words, the capacity for human thought does not exist until just weeks before birth. Of all the characteristics used to define what it means to be human, the capacity to think is provisionally agreed upon by most scientists to be the most important.26 By this criterion, since virtually no abortions are performed after the second trimester, and before then there is no scientific evidence that the fetus is a thinking human individual, it is reasonable for us to provisionally agree that abortion is not murder and to offer our provisional assent that abortions within the first two trimesters are not immoral because the evidence confirms that during this time the fetus is not a fully functioning human being. Therefore, although one may oppose abortion on a personal level, there is no scientific justification to shift the abortion issue from a personal and moral one to a social and political one.
One objection to this line of reasoning is that science and technology have so fuzzified the boundaries between what were once reasonably discrete categories (even in my fuzzy analysis) that it becomes difficult to justify precisely where to draw the line. Unborn babies are now being treated as patients, with complex surgeries being performed in the womb for such maladies as spina bifida (an opening in the spine through which the spinal cord dangerously emerges), congenital diaphragmatic hernia (the fetus’s abdominal organs merge into the chest), and congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation (cysts in the fetus’s lungs). Fetuses that would have been aborted before are now being saved, and they are treated medically as little people.27 On the other end of the spectrum, there are adults whose cognitive capacities are so severely retarded through brain damage that they cannot think at all. They may even lie comatose, completely brain-dead, and yet still retain rights as humans.
The response to this argument is that most fetal surgery is done well into the third trimester, when abortions are rarely performed anyway. And brain-damaged adults already retain rights as humans, so their rights cannot be taken away. We retain hope that they may come out of the coma and regain their thinking ability, so we might think of them as potential humans, in the same sense as it is sometimes argued that a fetus is a potential human. Is a potential human, however, a full rights-bearing person? That depends on how we define personhood. Pro-lifers argue that the genome is entirely in place shortly after conception when the two half-genomes from both parents combine. From that moment on the little clump of cells is a prospective human, a pending member of our species. That is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Human eggs and sperm are potential humans, but no one would consider monthly menstruation or male masturbation to be murder. The counter to this is that the uniting of egg and sperm is a dramatically significant step. Agreed, but a lot of things have to happen during the nine-month gestation period for the potential human to become an actual human and, unfortunately, there are a lot of things that go wrong that lead to natural abortions, another normal process that no one moralizes about. Potentiality does not equal actuality, and moral rules and principles must be applied first and foremost to actual persons, not potential persons. Given the choice between granting rights to an actual person or a potential person, it is more tenable to choose the former. Herein we find another important distinction to make in the abortion debate, and that is the difference between a human and a person.
Figure 23. Drawing the Line
The law requires distinct categories—black or white, life or death, right or wrong—whereas science traffics in shades of gray and fuzzy fractions. When does life begin? The law demands that we pick an arbitrary point. Science assigns a fuzzy probability to life—before conception o, the moment of conception .1, multicellular blastocyst .2, one-month-old embryo .3, two-month-old fetus .4, and so on until birth. Not until twenty-eight weeks—betwe
en these two images of a fetus at twenty-three weeks (left) and thirty-two weeks (right)—does the fetus acquire sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities found in newborns. (Courtesy of GE Medical Systems)
A human is a member of the species Homo sapiens. A person is a member of a social group or society with legal rights and responsibilities and with moral value. Even if one could justify a fetus as being a human (even if only a potential human), that still does not make it a person. What makes it a person is the granting of legal rights and responsibilities and moral value by the rules governing that society. Pro-lifers are encouraged by changes in the law in many states that grant personhood rights to the unborn, in cases where a pregnant woman has been murdered and the fetus dies as well. No less than twenty-eight states now criminalize harm to a fetus, and many more are moving to pass the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which in 2003 was renamed Laci and Connor’s Law after victims of a notorious murder allegedly committed by Scott Peterson, who was charged with double homicide in the killing of both his wife and unborn child.28 Legally, if killing a mother and her fetus is double murder, then killing a fetus by itself is single murder. This would make abortion a crime of murder.
Here again, we face moral inconsistencies of deep significance. Where do we draw the line? If our society were to grant personhood rights to the unborn, then it would be logical to do so for nonhuman persons as well, such as our closely related primate cousins, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Since, as I shall argue at the end of this chapter, this is a scientifically justifiable thing to do, then why not grant them to the unborn? After all, we grant rights to adult humans who are so low functioning as to be less “human” than both an eight-month-old fetus and a chimpanzee.
This is a very knotty problem to unravel. We cannot first ask a fetus if it would like to be aborted or not; we can, however, run that thought experiment by imagining ourselves in the position of an unborn potential human who would be granted personhood rights and dignity value upon birth. Presumably, most of us would choose life. By the ask first principle, we would have to conclude that abortion is immoral. However, although asking the unborn can never be more than a thought experiment, there is someone we can ask first, and that is the pregnant woman, who is both a human and a person who already has all the rights, privileges, and moral dignity values bestowed upon her by society. Given the choice between asking the fetus in a thought experiment and actually asking the woman what she thinks should be done, it is logical to give the moral nod to the woman. Given the choice between the potential rights of the fetus and the actual rights of the woman, it makes more sense to go with what already exists in fact over what might exist in potential.
Finally, we can turn to the liberty principle and consider the historical treatment of women. The trend over the past several centuries has been to grant greater freedom, autonomy, and self-determination to minorities, children, and women. Modern civilizations have systematically outlawed slavery, freed children from the burden of excessive labor, and granted women the same rights and privileges as those given to men. We have done so under the principle of liberty: expanding freedom and autonomy to as many members of our species as possible. One of the most important sources of freedom and autonomy for women has been control over their bodies, especially in relation to reproduction. Social and political advances, coupled with scientific and technological discoveries and inventions, have increasingly provided women with greater amounts of reproductive autonomy and control, which, in turn, leads to the overall increase of liberty for women in general. To take away an important source of reproductive control from women by outlawing abortion would be a significant step backward in the historical trajectory of liberty. Thus, given the choice between increasing the liberty of an adult person and the liberty of an unborn fetus, it makes more sense—historically, legally, logically, and morally—to grant that liberty to the adult person, the woman.
This is not to claim that abortion is moral, only that it is not immoral. This brings us back to where we began in making a distinction between individual morality and political morality. If abortion is not murder, then it is not immoral, from a social/political point of view. Or, if a woman decides that even though having a child may burden her physically and financially it is still more important to her to grant life and liberty to her unborn child, that is her choice to make, not the state’s. In the end, abortion remains a personal moral choice.
Provisional Morality and Cloning and Genetic Engineering
On December 27, 2002, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, the scientific director of Clonaid—an organization associated with the Raelians, who believe that life was seeded on Earth by aliens and that cloning is the next step toward immortality—announced at a press conference that a thirty-one-year-old American woman had given birth to the world’s first clone, whom they nicknamed, appropriately, “Eve.”29 The story was a bust, although the media feeding frenzy over it generated millions of dollars worth of free publicity for a hitherto obscure fringe cult.
My skepticism is not directed toward the Raelians, however, because whether they succeed or not is superfluous since it will soon become apparent whether cloning is possible or if medical complications will make it impractical as another form of fertility enhancement. That is, the current moral dilemma may be displaced by a scientific factual matter of whether cloning works or does not work. If cloning works as a viable reproductive technology and generator of usable stem cells, then it will be used somewhere by someone regardless of legislative restrictions. If cloning does not work—that is, if it generates genetic monstrosities and nonviable stem cells—it will most likely fall into disuse from lack of interest. Reproductive physicians and their patients will choose other, more viable, technologies, stem-cell researchers and genetic engineers will apply more reliable means to achieve their scientific goals, and madmen will not want to reproduce themselves if they think that their genetic doppelgänger will join Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrosity in the Arctic hinterlands.
Given the current scientific limitations on cloning, how can science inform this moral debate? By debunking three fundamental myths about cloning: the Identical Personhood Myth, the Playing God Myth, and the Human Rights and Dignity Myth.
The Identical Personhood Myth is well represented by Jeremy Rifkin, the king of genetic Luddites: “It’s a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone. You’re putting a human into a genetic straitjacket. For the first time, we’ve taken the principles of industrial design—quality control, predictability—and applied them to a human being.”30 The argument is heard in religious circles as well. The Catholic theologian Albert Moraczewski (echoing the pope’s 1987 Donum Vitae) proclaimed that cloning would “jeopardize the personal and unique identity of the clone (or clones) as well as the person whose genome was thus duplicated.” What about twins? Don’t they jeopardize each other’s unique identity? No, Moraczewski explained, since they are not the “source or maker of the other,” meaning only God can do that.31
Baloney. These cloning critics have the argument bass ackwards. Because they tend to be environmental determinists, they should be arguing: “Clone all you like, you’ll never produce another you because environment matters as much as heredity.” Even proponents of the position that behavior has a significant genetic component to it argue not for genetic determinism, but for gene-environment interactionism. This interactionism starts when genes code for proteins, which generate biochemical reactions, which regulate physiological changes, which govern biological systems, which impact neurological actions, which induce psychological states, which cause behaviors; these behaviors, in turn, interact with the environment, which changes the behaviors, which influence psychological states, which alter neurological actions, which transform biological systems, which modify physiological changes, which transfigure biochemical reactions. This all happens in a complex interactive feedback loop between genes and environment throughout development and into adulthood. The b
est scientific evidence to date indicates that roughly half the variance between us is accounted for by genetics, the rest by environment. Because it is impossible to duplicate the near-infinite number of environmental permutations that go into producing an individual human being, cloning is no threat to unique personhood. Psychologist and twins expert Nancy Segal cautions that “Genetic influence does not mean that behaviors are fixed, but the ease, immediacy and magnitude of behavioral change vary from trait to trait, and from person to person.” It is from that variance that unique personhood, even between identical twins, emerges.32
The Playing God Myth has numerous promoters, the latest being Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University, who responded to the news that the Raelians had achieved human cloning with this unequivocal denouncement: “The very attempt to clone a human being is evil. The assumption that we must do what we can do is fueled by the Promethean desire to be our own creators.”33 In support of this myth he is not alone. A 1997 Time/CNN poll, conducted after Dolly the cloned sheep was revealed to the world, found that 74 percent of Americans answered yes to the question, “Is it against God’s will to clone human beings?”34 President Clinton, not the most religious president we have ever had, nevertheless threw his spiritual hat into the fear-of-cloning ring with this statement: “Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry, it is a matter of morality and spirituality as well.” Even before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission—established by Clinton to present to him all the ethical considerations surrounding cloning—submitted its report to the White House, Clinton instituted a ban on federal funding related to research on the cloning of humans and asked that the private sector do the same. Shortly thereafter, Clinton held another press conference urging Congress to ban human cloning altogether (not just research funds): “Personally, I believe that human cloning raises deep concerns, given our cherished concepts of faith and humanity.”35 Most religions are against cloning on similar argumentative grounds. The Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, on March 6, 1997, passed a resolution that called on Congress to “make human cloning unlawful” and for “all nations of the world to make efforts to prevent the cloning of any human being.” Similarly, Fred Rosner, a Jewish bioethicist, wrote that cloning can be considered as “encroaching on the Creator’s domain.”36
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