Upsetting the balance of nature
By Michael Cook, MercatorNet:
It’s not surprising that a report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an influential independent British bioethics think tank, has received almost no publicity since its release last November. “Ideas about naturalness in public and political debates about science, technology and medicine” is not a title which sets the pulse racing.
Perhaps they should have christened it “Unnatural Acts”. That would have guaranteed it blanket coverage in the London tabloids. (Summary here. Full report here.)
But this study of why people call some things “natural” or “unnatural” could be one of the most important position papers of the decade. It is fundamentally an attempt to deconstruct and then to outlaw what US bioethicist Leon Kass called “the wisdom of repugnance”.
A new medical technology encounters the most resistance when voters describe it as “unnatural”. If you nailed a placard to a door with the words “plague within”, politicians could not run away fast enough. So one strategy to secure government approval for controversial new technologies is to reframe the debate — either to make the technologies look natural or to send the word “naturalness” to Coventry. The latter is the approach favoured by the Nuffield Council.
As the report points out: “People’s ideas about naturalness may influence the degree to which advances in science, technology and medicine are embraced or opposed by the UK public.” So it sets out to deconstruct the word, to make it meaningless, and so to bury it as a term of intellectual discourse. If people can be taught to distrust their own moral intuitions, securing regulatory approval for the most far-fetched projects will be a snap.
The British scientific establishment, which is fond of white papers, has a lot of experience in massaging public opinion. In recent years, it has shepherded through Parliament laws permitting “unnatural” technologies like IVF, mitochondrial donation, hybrid embryos, GM foods, animal experimentation, cloning, surrogacy, and gamete donation.
The most famous of all British white papers, the 1957 Wolfenden Report on Homosexuality, covered much the same ground when it concluded that homosexuality was neither a disease nor a crime. (A decade later the UK repealed its ban on homosexual offences.) Nor was homosexuality “unnatural”, the committee argued, for the same reasons that the Nuffield Council was to employ 60 years later:
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