CHAPTER 6

Human Nature

When we think about the dignity and value of humanity—our reason, logic, morality, humane care, understanding, expansive vision, and spirituality—it seems an insult and affront that our bodies should be made out of meat. It’s really pretty disgusting, and very inappropriate. Reasoning moral beings … made sweaty and squishy soft—and with a strange impulse to rub against one another (but only in private, out of shame). “Man,” as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) put it, “is a burlesque of what he should be.”

And yet, of course, the mind is the meat, at least in some sense. We are our bodies, and yet we are not only our biology. We are animals, but unusual ones who have (arguably, at least) transcended our animality. What roles do our bodies play in our self-determination? What roles should they play?

A Dog’s Life

Our biological drives are very simple, limited perhaps to seeking sustenance, comfort, play (games, music, dancing, etc.), friendship, and sex. How did things get so complicated?

What would a society directed purely to satisfying these basic interests look like?

Would you like to live there? Wouldn’t it be possible for you to “drop out” of society, join a commune, and live a simpler, more natural life? Why (unless you do live on a commune) haven’t you done so?

The Philosophy

Diogenes the Cynic (412–323 B.C.E.)—in the Greek, that means “Diogenes the Dog”—thought that even back in ancient Greece, human society had made things far more complicated than they needed to be, and humans, he thought, pretended they were some greater and more special thing than they really were. He was known as “the dog” because he lived according to this belief. He slept in a large broken clay pot among the dogs in the street, for he saw that animals had no need of beds or to sleep in the dark. He kept few possessions: a cloak to wear, which he slept in, and a bag for food. He once walked through the marketplace while masturbating. When confronted about his crude behavior, he said that he wished he could dispel hunger in the same way, by rubbing his belly. At a banquet, he was ridiculed by others, who threw bones to him, as they would a begging animal. So he peed on them, embracing his animality as a virtue, where they intended it as an insult.

Although he used unusual and shocking methods of propounding his views about human vanity and the actual simplicity of human needs, he was recognized as a wise man, and at least one story about him is still widely known to us today: He once carried a lantern through the marketplace at midday, explaining “I am looking for a man.” This is often retold as “looking for an honest man,” but the meaning is the same: He was illustrating the futility of finding anyone honest about what it is to be human.

Another story that illustrates his strange brilliance is that Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.), as his army moved through Greece, sought out Diogenes. Alexander found him sleeping on the side of a road and said that he had heard of Diogenes’s wisdom and would give him anything he desired. As Alexander stood over him, Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my sun.” Alexander left him there and is said to have commented, “If I were not Alexander the Great, I should wish to be Diogenes the Dog.”

The Law of the Jungle

In some previous questions, we’ve assumed that God exists and that He has particular ideas about how we should be treating each other. Assume now that there is no god. Why should you care about others?

What kind of morality would evolutionary “survival of the fittest” create in herd animals like us?

Why do we believe in right and wrong? Is it in our nature, or in our culture?

The Philosophy

As Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie (1917–1981) pointed out in a famous article, “The Law of the Jungle,” evolutionary “survival of the fittest” doesn’t happen on an individual level but on a genetic level—so, although there is individual competition for mates and food and so forth, a great many species, including our own, compete in their larger environment by banding together. Selfishness might further an individual’s interests, but genes that motivate us to look out for one another—an uncle to protect his niece or cousins, for example—are carried forth generation after generation because they create mutual benefits. The willingness to sacrifice your own interests or even your own life may not help you survive, but it helps that gene survive, and that’s what matters evolutionarily, as Richard Dawkins showed in The Selfish Gene.

Consider an example of Dawkins’s that Mackie used: a bird species parasitized by dangerous ticks. If each bird only looked after itself, they’d all die, because they can’t remove the ticks from the backs of their own heads. So they groom one another. But they don’t do so indiscriminately—if they did, we’d see a genetic variation of birds who allowed themselves to be groomed but who didn’t waste time grooming other birds. Those birds would have more offspring and take over the society, which would then die out because not enough birds would be grooming one another to keep the tick population in check. The strategy that’s evolutionarily stable is what’s called “reciprocal altruism”: to groom another bird unless you find out that it won’t groom you back, and then to never groom that bird again.

This is the kind of evolutionarily established morality we would expect to (and do in fact) find in pack animals, including humans: “Be done by as you did.” Of course, we are not merely our biology, and culture and logic may bring us to change our behavior, but there’s good reason to believe that this strategy of reciprocal altruism forms the biological basis of human morality.

Authority in the Pack Mentality

When have you done something you believed was wrong because you were “just doing your job”? What would it have cost you to have done the right thing instead?

When have you stood up against procedure, authority, or orders from a superior in order to do what you believed was right? What was the deciding moment for you?

What strategies can you think of that would help you do the right thing in the future, and resist excusing yourself from doing something wrong by saying “Well, I just work here …”?

The Philosophy

In 1961, Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) conducted an experiment at Yale University to see how far people would go to obey authority against their own beliefs. Participants were told they would take part in a study on memory, in which they would read a list of words to the subject, ask the subject to remember the proper word pairs, and administer a shock whenever the subject got it wrong. The shocks increased in intensity as more answers were incorrect, and the strongest shocks were indicated to be dangerous or possibly fatal. The “subject” was an actor, although the participants did not know that. He screamed when the participants thought they were shocking him, and as the “shocks” became more intense, he complained of a heart condition and cried out to be let go and for the experiment to end. The participants were uncomfortable continuing, but were told that the experiment required them to go on. In Milgram’s initial experiment and in later recreations of the experiment, almost two-thirds of participants continued to the maximum shock.

Milgram designed the experiment to understand better how the Holocaust could have happened. Is it really possible that so many horrors could have been perpetrated by people who, for the most part, were ordinary, seemingly decent people? The answer seems to be yes. The tendency to obey authority is so strong that many people can be induced with relatively little incentive to do things they believe are wrong.

David Luban, Alan Strudler, and David Wasserman, researchers at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, extended this to the realm of business to see how decent people take part in corporate activities that injure, defraud, and kill. They suggest that we think about getting involved with bureaucracies the same way we think about drinking: Go in with the awareness that your judgment may be impaired once you’re in the middle of things, and try to remain aware that you’re not fully in control of your own behavior.

The Other

Picture someone in a position of power and authority—a president, prime minister, CEO, or doctor. In what ways do you think her gender affects how she is viewed and the level of respect given to her by those she directs?

You probably didn’t picture her as a woman until the second sentence of the previous question, even though the terms used in the first sentence were gender neutral and applied equally well to women. What differences in the lives of women does it make that we assume that those in positions of power and authority are men?

We tend to talk about men as generic people: “he,” “man,” “mankind.” For the next few days, whenever you talk about a generic person or anyone whose gender isn’t known, try saying “she” instead of “he” or “they.” Then write down here what you learned from the experiment.

The Philosophy

In what is usually called the “first wave” of feminism, women focused on gaining rights previously given to men alone: for example, rights to vote, inherit property, and hold public office. In the second wave, starting in earnest in the 1960s, women struggled against inequalities that had more to do with social exclusions rather than actual laws limiting the rights of women. The legal right to have a career and live a public life either instead of or in addition to traditional roles means little so long as women are disrespected and so long as the public continues to believe that a woman’s place is in the home.

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908–1986) 1949 book The Second Sex, a thorough investigation of the meaning of women’s biology and history, played an influential role in the development of feminism. From the title itself we immediately get a sense of the basic view she advanced: Woman has been defined as secondary; man is generic, and woman is “Other.” The Other is defined by opposition to the norm and as a kind of exception to it. In biology and medicine, as well as in views of history, and perhaps most of all in psychoanalytic theory, women are viewed as altered, incomplete, or mutilated men. At most, women are viewed as “separate but equal,” allowing the illusion of parity while men are still viewed as the “real” members of “mankind,” as the word itself indicates.

The story of how male and female roles emerged, and how women became the second of the two sexes, is long and complicated, and the solution of granting equal legal recognition is a paltry and insufficient fix when merely superimposed on this cultural history. We must also think through the Otherness of woman. Imagining woman rather than man as generic, as I asked you to do in the third question, is one way to discover how deeply seated the view of women as Other is, for women as much as for men.

Feminine Virtues

Leaving aside the question of rights—I hope it’s safe to assume we all agree on equal rights—do you think women have more domestic urges than men, and that it’s natural for women to more often be in caretaker roles than breadwinner roles?

Is it “only natural” that we see more women in service jobs, early childhood education, and nursing, rather than in positions of more power and authority? Is this a problem we as a society ought to fix?

Professional women often are granted and use maternity leave and family sick days, and often don’t go as far in their careers because of these interruptions to their career paths. Should we grant men paternity leave, and encourage men to equally take on the time commitments necessary for raising the next generation? Why or why not?

The Philosophy

A controversy within feminism concerns how to regard women who choose to adopt traditionally female roles. A truly liberated woman should be free to choose what she wants, but how can we tell whether we are honestly choosing to place family over career, or merely giving in to internalized oppressive prejudices?

Cultural feminism takes a different view of the issue. The central idea is that there really is an essential difference between men and women. Equality shouldn’t be about women’s ability to do men’s work and be considered equal; instead it should be about changing our social values so that women’s work and women’s virtues are valued as highly as are men’s work and men’s virtues. In this view, in a male-dominated culture, the values and reward systems of our society have been set up to privilege men, so “women’s liberation” in the absence of a change in our values and reward systems just means that women are free to act like men. What if, instead, we changed our society so that raising children, or professions of service and care, were viewed as activities as important and valuable as the stereotypically male pursuits of business and politics—or, at least, changed political and business environments so that they were compatible with and rewarded feminine virtues like collaboration and support rather than masculine virtues of individualistic competition?

An interesting variation of this was brought up by psychiatrist Peter Kramer in his 1993 book Listening to Prozac. He asks whether the prevalence of depression among women might be an indication not that many women are mentally ill, but that feminine attributes have been defined as illness. He looks to Victorian feminine ideals—emotional, pensive, moody—and points out that today we’d call these symptoms rather than virtues. What if women are being medicated in order to make them act like men, and to “fit in” better in a male-dominated society?

Of Cyborgs and Goddesses

Identify three things you did because you are female (or, if you are male, because you are male).

You may have been unhappy with that question, but I hope you gave it your best effort. What kinds of considerations did you struggle with in trying to answer the above question?

Given these considerations, when, if ever, does it make sense to say that someone’s biological sex determines or even plays a role in their actions and decisions?

The Philosophy

In her famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (1944–) tried to put forth a third way, leaving behind this troubling dilemma of how to identify and value some feminine essence. Just arguing for liberation in a patriarchal culture won’t work, but trying to recapture and validate a hidden and disrespected feminine nature risks mistaking symptoms of oppression for woman’s essential nature. The myth of recapturing your “inner goddess” may be just a way of learning to love your chains. So let’s try the idea of a cyborg instead! As she says, “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves…. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

The cyborg has an origin and a nature, but it does not determine her. She is part biology, part technology—nature and nurture—but neither is what she essentially “is.” She can make choices about what she becomes; she can change out one part for another. The cyborg doesn’t emerge from the Garden, nor is she a Goddess, which implies its own singular (and therefore exclusive) essence. The “truth” of the cyborg’s technobiology is found in the military-industrial complex, and this history surely influences, but does not determine what she becomes, as any science fiction story will tell you.

By adopting the image of the cyborg, we can tap into a self-conception that opens up possibilities and leaves room for ambiguities of the kind we all, in fact, experience—of the kind you were asked to explore in these questions. But the role of technology in the image of the cyborg is not just allegorical: Our technologies inform us about who we are, just as do our biology and our culture. Technology has transformed the home, has helped women to free themselves from “women’s work,” and has allowed “disabled” people to be Olympic athletes. Why not use technology to allow us to transform our nature in order to become who we are?

The Lazy Parents

Assuming that we are soon able to do so without discarding “undesirable” fetuses, should we use genetic engineering to ensure that children are no longer born with predispositions to heart disease or to cancer?

What about mental and developmental disabilities? Or just low IQ?

If it is acceptable to use genetic engineering to cure disease, presumably it is because doing so brings about an improved quality of life in our society. Is there any reason not to further improve quality of life by selecting or treating for enhancements, like exceptional health, strength, or intelligence?

The Philosophy

Eugenics has become a dirty word, and for very good reasons. In the past, the idea of “improving” the human gene pool has been a screen for racism, and has been used as a justification for programs of forced sterilization in Nazi Germany and in the United States. Some contemporary bioethicists, however, have raised the possibility of a “liberal eugenics” that doesn’t allow for these reprehensible possibilities. A liberal eugenics would not force any participation, but would simply allow parents to make genetic choices about their own offspring. Elimination of undesirable characteristics would be done by opting in on an individual basis rather than by excluding certain people from having children, so nobody’s rights would be infringed upon, and there’s no possibility of takeover by a racist or political agenda.

There are clear advantages to genetic engineering. There are a great many genetic disorders that cause suffering and death, and these could be avoided. But once we open the door to curing genetic disease, the question of genetic enhancement arises. Bioethicist and Oxford professor Julian Savulescu (1963–) argues that not only is it acceptable to choose to enhance our children, it would in fact be wrong not to. He asks us to consider “the case of the Neglectful Parents.” They have an exceptionally intelligent child who needs a cheap, easy-to-find dietary supplement to maintain her intellect, but they don’t bother with it, and she becomes normal. We would say these parents have been irresponsible, and have wronged their child. Now consider another case: “the Lazy Parents.” They have a normal child, but there’s a new, cheap, easy-to-find dietary supplement that gives normal children an exceptional intellect—but they don’t bother with it. Isn’t this just as wrong? If so, then wouldn’t it be wrong of us not to make our children exceptional once genetic engineering technologies are advanced enough to allow us to do so? If we have an obligation to maintain a benefit, why don’t we have an obligation to create one?

The New Breed

Here are a series of troubling questions adapted from bioethicist John Harris’s Wonderwoman and Superman: The Ethics of Human Biotechnology. First, come up with a list of things you think are important genetic issues (maybe disorders, heart conditions, depressive disposition, etc.), and a list of things you think are trivial matters of genetic choice (maybe hair color, height, cheeriness, etc.).

Important:

Trivial:

Of the important issues: if they are important, why leave them to chance? Of the trivial issues: if they are trivial, why not let parents decide?

This seems to justify allowing parents full freedom to make all attributes of children available to parents’ choices. What kind of society would result from allowing parents to enhance their children in whatever ways and to whatever extent they can?

The Philosophy

A problem with the idea of liberal eugenics is that, although we might be able to say that the opt-in structure means that nobody is being forced to participate, there are widespread social effects that we can expect to emerge from those individual choices. Just as we saw with Economic Justice, when we look at individual rights alone (property rights in one case, choosing for your kids in the other) we risk missing important things in the big picture (economic inequality in one case, and in this case social-biological inequality).

These technologies will presumably be quite expensive at first, at the very least. This means that a liberal approach will allow economic inequalities to create genetic inequalities, giving the children of the wealthy an even greater set of advantages in our society. Now, equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal outcomes, and economic inequality already creates biological inequality—lead poisoning and nutritional deficiencies, for example, have lifelong consequences and affect the poor much more so than the rich—but surely liberal eugenics would further expand the opportunities and advantages of the wealthy over the disadvantaged.

There’s also a problem of coercion. If genetic enhancement becomes cheap enough to be widespread, those who might choose to have a “natural” child would be, in effect, giving their child a disability. How are they supposed to compete with what John Harris called “The New Breed”? What if some physical trait showed that they were of the “old breed”—for example, a slight asymmetry of the face? Would employers hire them when an enhanced “new breed” candidate was also applying for the position?

But then, what’s the alternative? Only allow enhancements once we can governmentally subsidize them, so they are equally available to all? Put genetic choice off limits, and allow people to suffer and die from preventable genetic conditions?