Human life rightfully rests in our hands - Josh MacDonald - Daily Bruin -
Sometime in the next week, a judge is scheduled to rule on the legality of Proposition 71, passed in 2004 to allot $3 billion to stem cell research in California. The ruling will not only affect the future of human health, but the future of students intent on finding medical and bio-research jobs in California.
The proposition has been held up in court by organizations ethically and religiously opposed to stem cell research. Objections to stem cell research are generally a spin-off of anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia arguments. They claim to protect the sanctity of human life by taking the responsibility for life out of human hands, instead relegating it to a higher power. It is this line of reasoning that leads certain men to preemptive wars without any feeling of culpability, convinced that larger, holier purposes justify the human sacrifice.
But the reality is that life and death are our responsibility. It is dangerously naive to pretend we play no part in the giving or taking of life – we have always had that potential. When we send soldiers off to war, whether the war is just, we are responsible. When we take lives in payment for crimes, no matter how just the punishment, the blood is on our hands. Moral arguments may help guide our behavior, but they do not free us of the responsibility for our actions. There is no higher justification. The buck stops with us.
Instead of shying away from the complexities of the human condition, some organizations take on human suffering full force. Transhumanists, a worldwide group dedicated to advancements in biotechnology, place the responsibility for human health and happiness entirely in human hands. Through political and economic pathways, transhumanists support technologies that ease the biological limitations of humans. This stance is not without controversy. Most controversial, perhaps, is their goal of creating a new type of human, a post-human not bound by current biological limitations.
Link to originalFrancis Fukuyama, political philosopher and author of “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution,” sees the creation of a post-human species as a serious threat to social equality. Fukuyama warned in the September 2004 issue of “Foreign Policy” that the transhumanist movement posed one of the most serious threats to liberal democracy, since liberal democracy relies on the notion that all humans possess a similar “essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty and even intelligence,” and that transhumanist ideals will erode that equality.
“If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?” Fukyuama asked.
Many agree that taking responsibility for the human condition by manipulating our biology will open up a whole Pandora’s box of social injustice. But it doesn’t take altering the human species to stir up inequality. The Holocaust and the current situation in Sudan prove we don’t need a perverse post-human species for others to be labeled subhuman. In the United States, there is a distinction between those treated as human and those treated as subhuman. A lack of universal health care means those who can’t afford treatment walk around untreated with crippled bodies. Medical advances proposed by transhumanists would only shine light on inequalities that already exist.
The issue is not about overstepping our bounds, but undervaluing our responsibility. Advancing medical technologies only mean we will have more responsibilities. But pretending our battle with human pain and suffering is not our own battle to fight is cowardly. We are responsible, whether our actions are right or wrong.
