Will genetic engineering produce a master race and a servile multitude?

Spectator, The, Mar 6, 1999 by Johnson, Paul

We are entering the third millennium in a fine ethical mess. Science is advancing at such a rate, especially in biotechnology, that the labs are ahead of the professional bodies, let alone the legislators and especially the thinkers, who ought to be working out the rules from first principles. We now know that two months ago a South Korean laboratory cloned a human egg taken from a woman who had no idea what was being done to her bodily property. The man responsible, Lee Bo Yon, says he destroyed the clone `for ethical reasons' a few days later, but adds that his work is continuing. Strictly speaking, cloning babies is unlawful here, under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990), but this hasty piece of legislation is widely regarded by scientists as unlikely to survive. The British Medical Association seems to have changed its line. Having originally opposed cloning, its ethics advisers recently proposed legal changes which would allow cloning experiments, though embryos would have to be destroyed after a fortnight. Now its head of health policy research, Professor Vivian Nathanson, says it should be made lawful to clone babies for infertile couples or for parents with sick children.

From the legal clone-baby in special cases to the designer-baby for those who can afford one is only a small step. It will certainly be taken if human cloning is allowed at all. I have been arguing for some time that what makes genetic engineering fatally attractive is that its products fit so neatly into the consumer society. Once wealthier parents know that it is possible to have their future baby equipped with fair skin, blond hair, blue eyes, to be perfectly formed and immune to all the major diseases, they are going to buy the option whatever it costs, and encourage its legalisation. The social engineering of the 20th century, which ended in Auschwitz and the Gulag, and happily is now discredited, was never popular. It was imposed on helpless populations by authoritarian elites. But genetic engineering - the coming cardinal sin of the 21st century - is just what the doctor ordered. It will be driven by public demand and private money, marketed and advertised, bought and sold like cosmetic surgery, breast enhancement and all the other products of commercial medicine. It will not merely be popular but will generate its own lobbies, which will throw down any legislative fences likely to be erected. The industry will soon be enormous and seen as indispensable.

Moreover, the ability of the affluent to ensure that their progeny enjoy better health will aggravate the future problems outlined by Charles Murray in his book The Bell Curve. The main message of that remarkable summary of the available evidence about heredity was not the varying intelligence of racial categories, on which the media concentrated, but the tendency in modern societies for the intelligent and well-educated to intermarry and produce even more intelligent offspring who will get a better education as well. Murray warned us of the abyss between an overclass capable of exploiting a high-technology world demanding ever-growing skills, and an underclass which has little intelligence, less education, no real skills, jobs or prospects, and whose offspring will very likely do even worse. If, in addition, the affluent produce genetically enhanced children, the likelihood of them marrying outside their own social, economic and genetic group will vanish and we will be heading for a caste society. This will produce even deeper antagonisms than class-conflict and colourbars, for we will be creating two radically different groups of human beings - a master race and a servile race. If playing God with genetics is itself immoral, the society it will eventually bring into being will be biologically evil in ways we can scarcely imagine.

What kind of guidance are the elites offering at this stage? Nothing but confusion. On the one hand, there are those like Richard Dawkins, whose professorial mandate at Oxford is to explain science to the public, and who is quoted as saying he would gladly clone his daughter just as he would clone his current dog. On the other, there are oscillating pundits of the BMA, who oppose cloning one minute and back it the next. John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at Manchester, dismisses arguments against cloning as `sheer prejudice'. On the other hand again, Dr Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, opposes human cloning and thinks the arguments for it flimsy.

The scientists and doctors themselves are, in my view, incapable of producing a workable ethical code for genetic research and production. That is the job of the philosophers who have to set out the foundations on which such a code can be securely based. Can they do it? Throughout most of the 20th century, the cleverest academic philosophers, like Ludwig Wittgenstein and A.J. Ayer, turned their back on the problems of the world to engage in intellectual parlour games - or so it seems to the layman. But I was encouraged, last week, to hear Professor Alasdair MacIntyre give the annual lecture at the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He was not, I hasten to say, dealing with genetic engineering, but he used his experience in the electrical-supply industry and in mining to show how the compartmentalisation of society can lead important people to adopt an ethical tunnel-vision, arising from their job, which blinds them to the higher moral needs of society. He instanced the wartime German railway manager who pleaded that it was his moral duty to ensure that trains left and arrived on time without accidents. What they actually transported, such as Jews to Auschwitz, was not his business. Arching above all the particular ethical concerns of the trades, professions and callings ought to be the moral principles of the civilised person. It seems to me that, as we turn the century and embark on the age of biological triumphalism which is already flexing its formidable scientific muscle, it is the primary job of philosophers to describe that civilised person and show how he or she ought to impose those moral necessities on the ethical deformations professionnelles, especially among the scientists and doctors.