2

The Moral Sense

I n the mid-1980s, a massive famine ravaged the Horn of Africa,

especially Ethiopia, a country racked by severe, prolonged drought
and battered by a bloody civil war. As the drought deepened, tens of
thousands of people congregated in rural areas waiting to die. The
civil war prevented aid from getting where it was needed. News of
the unfolding tragedy in the countryside was spotty and inadequate,
because the· civil war had made reporting dangerous and difficult.
Consequently, the West was largely unaware of the tragedy.
Finally an .enterprising reporter for the British Broadcasting
Corporation was able to get to the Ethiopian interior and videotape
the massive starvation. When his footage finally made its way to the
newsroom, staff members stood transfixed by the scenes of human
misery-people lying on the ground waiting to die, mothers holding
dying children with no relief in sight. Many of the staffers started
crying spontaneously. It is as if they were saying-or better, feel-
ing-"something is wrong here."
Very frequently we see or hear about an event that we immedi-
ately recognize and feel to be terribly wrong. A famous photograph
from the Vietnam War era shows Ohio national guardsmen firing
on student demonstrators at Kent State University. The picture
captures demonstrators and a horrified female student kneeling
and screaming over the dead body of an innocent classmate, who
was not even one of the demonstrators. 1 Whatever their view of the
Vietnam War, almost everyone who saw that picture recoiled in dis-

27
 NATURE's END

gust and horror. The common response was simple: "This should
not be happening."
These moral experiences are so common that we often do not
stop to think about them, much less justify them. They are part of
our compl~and violent world. Only the willfully obtuse or the mor-
ally blingfwould deny the reality of these simple moral reactions. In
college classrooms we often discuss complicated "moral problems."
Such discussions constitute the very essence of many courses with
names like "social ethics" and "contemporary moral problems."
Typically, the topics covered are controversial "hot-button" issues:
abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, euthanasia, ani-
mal rights, etc. 2 But focusing on a divisive set of moral topics often
obscures the vast amount of moral agreement that exists among
ordinary people, a level of agreement that we take for granted on a
daily basis. Most parents care for their children, most friends keep
their word, most strangers respect the physical security of others.
We go to shopping malls with thousands of others and largely feel
safe doing so because we correctly assume that most people do and
will continue to abide by such simple moral rules as "don't harm
other people." 3
Americans were profoundly divided over the Vietnam War, and
that division only deepened over time. But when a photograph of
a bound prisoner being shot at point-blank range by a South Viet-
namese officer was released, there was general revulsion on all sicles.
During that time, one could have had (and many classrooms did 1

have) a vigorous discussion of whether the Vietnam conflict could

be justified within the just-war tradition. But there was a broad
consensus on a much deeper moral principle: intentionally killing -
r-
unarmed prisoners is wrong.
Discerning what is morally right or wrong is a nearly univer-
sal human experience. It appears to be a core part of our existence
as embodied human beings. Recognizing these moral experiences
is obvious and easy; giving an account that links them to human
nature is more complicated, as the history of moral philosophy in 1
the West has shown. ----+-
/
A first method of accounting for this feature of human existence
is rooted in a rationalistic approach to human nature. 4 In this view,
the experience of a particular act as right or :wrong involves a rational
apprehension of the supposed moral qualities of the act. We under-

28
 The Moral Sense

take complicated chains of reasoning about ethics only ori the basis
of these prior moral intuitions of right and wrong. On this account,
moral properties are unanalyzable into other properties such as
"useful" or "frightening." The analogy, for the rationalists, has often
been made to color. A yellow bottle cap sits on the table before me. I
look at it and see it to be yellow. I do not typically ask, "What makes
it yellow," or "Why is it yellow," or more basically, "What is yellow?"
Yellow is yellow. It is a basic term that cannot be broken clown into
further qualities or properties. I simply see the bottle cap as yellow.
Further analysis is unnecessary and pointless. 5
For the rationalist, natural moral experience operates in much the
same way. As human beings, we simply "intuit" the inherent moral
quality of the act before us. Once the act is seen as a simple type of·
act-e.g., theft-the moral quality of "wrongness" is immediately
apprehended along with it. 6 These immediate moral apprehensions
are like sense perceptions. They are subject to error. Moral mis-
apprehension is common. In fact, one very plausible response to a
moral reprimand is to daim that the one making the complaint is
misinformed: "If you knew all of the facts you wouldn't say that."
So we use various checki~g procedures to test our immediate appre-
hensions. We try to ascertain as much information about the event
as possible. Omniscience is for God. But gaining as much informa-
tion as possible is a humanly proper good that helps to clarify moral
intuition. We try to adopt an impartial point of view. We do not want
1
persona! ties or loyalties to distort our moral sense. In the eighteenth
century, these qualities of knowledge, disinterestedness, and impar-
r- tiality were said to be those which we should adopt in a "cool hour."
It is in such a "cool hour" when we should make moral judgments on
the basis of our rational moral intuition. 7 On the rationalist account,
then, there are two moments of moral apprehension. The first is
the immediate apprehension or sense of right and wrong, good and
evil, virtue and vice. The second moment is the rational judgment
of right or wrong in as ideal or "cool" a set of conditions as we can
achieve, given our human limitations.
1
--i--
1
This sort ofrationalism about human knowledge and judgment
has an honorable history, and a number of thinkers like the English
intuitionists Richard Price, H. A. Pritchard, and W. D. Ross have
adopted it. It is, however, less persuasive when considered carefully.
The idea that we have a natural, intuitive grasp of morality is not

29
 NATURE's END

problematic. Besicles, perhaps, pathological narcissists and socio-

paths, only those who have convinced themselves of the truth of
nihilism are morally immune to the obvious. Conscience as a key
component of morality was an idea richly developed by medieval
and Reformation 7iters, as was the idea of the two movements of
apprehension al)cl judgment. 8 The problem with rationalism is that
it is hard to comprehend moral obligation in purely rational terms.
The experience of moral obligation is a feeling of duty, a feeling that
we "ought" to do something or refrain from doing it. Of course,
this feeling of ought or obligation may be wrong or incomplete.
However, this does not detract from the observation that obligation
seems more like a feeling and less like an idea.
When we think carefully about our own lives, we can see this
point clearly. Consider the difference between seeing the yellow
bottle cap and "seeing" people· dying of starvation in Ethiopia. ln
the case of the bottle cap, we have the rational idea of the cap's color
planted firmly in our minds by our perceptual faculties and nothing
more. ln the case of starvation, however, we are presented with an
event that arouses our deepest moral emotions: anger at what is hap-
pening, sadness over the fate of the victims, and especially a desire
to help in whatever way seems reasonable given our individual situa-
tions. The yellow bottle cap is just that, an object of observation that
carries no weight, no emotional overload. Right action is powerfully
accompanied by-if not actually defined by-feelings of approval or
remorse, praise or blame, that move us to action.
Consider the different judgments we have of government offi-
cials who for too long ignored poverty and those like Dorothy Day
and Mother Teresa who actually did something about it. For some,
poverty was like a bottle cap; for others, it inspired action. Our
higher moral estimation of Dorothy Day implies a recognition of
what moral perception is all about.

This concept that moral "perception" is a matter of feeling, not a

rational grasp of the idea of rightness, lies at the heart of the second
powerful tradition of thinking about the relation of the natural moral
"sense" to human life in general. The basic idea is that the source
of morality lies in our feelings of approval or disapproval when we
T
30
 The Moral Sense

. observe an act or person. Of course, we need still to keep in mind

the caveats noted above about feelings felt with proper knowledge of
the situation and a dispassionate and impartial frame of mind. But
the idea of the moral sense as a particular feeling is different from,
though structurally similar to, the idea of the moral sense as a ratio-
nal apprehension of something in the same manner as perceiving the
bottle cap as yellow or blue.
The "feeling" version of the moral sense approach to our moral
nature as human beings also has a long and honorable tradition, one
especially well developed by the great eighteenth-century thinkers
David Hume and Adam Smith,9 then developed into a scientific the-
ory by Charles Darwin, and recently revived by important students
of human moral nature like James Q. Wilson, Larry Arnhart, and
Robert McShea. 10
Skeptical Scottish Tory David Hume is one of the greatest phi-
losophers of the English-speaking world. Whatever we may think of
his metaphysical skepticism, his discussion of our nature as moral
beings is richly textured and profound, though often misunderstood.
Morality, Hume notes, is a subject that "interests us above all." Its
extreme importance in our lives means that we should exercise care
in considering its sources in human nature. Book Three of Hume's
Treatise ofHuman1vature and his Inquiry Concerning the Princip/es ofMor-
ais constitute'his attempts to give the subject the attention it deserves.
We do not need to agree with Hume on every particular, such as his
notorious essay on suicide, let alone share his attitudes about religion,
miracles, or knowledge, in order to be impressed with his natural-
istic view of ethics as rooted in humankind 's passionate nature. In
our brief discussion here we will only consider the main points that
Hume develops in Book Three of the Treatise of Human Nature. 11
Hume begins his discussion of morality by distancing himself
from moral rationalism-i.e., the view that morality is a judgment
about ideas. Hume notes that morality is a profoundly practical
subject with an intimate relation to human action. Abstract specu-
lation, or merely having the idea of yellow or believing that 2 x 2
= 4, does notmove us to action. Morality does. Reason "is utterly
impotent" to prevent or motivate action for Hume, but morality as
such is supremely motivating. To make his point, Hume appeals to
what he regards as common human experience, "which informs us
that men are often governed by their duties, and are deterred from

31
 NATURE's END

'~.-
t
..·.·.,·

some actions by the opinion of injustice and impelled to others by

that of obligation." 12 A student who solves a complicated physics '·

problem now knows that answer. He is not, however, motivated to

do anything else. Seeing st~V-ing children is profoundly different,
in Hume's view, because o the immediate desire we feel to relieve
their suffering. Hume belie es that any account of morality that fails
1

to give an adequate account of the way in which "moral perception"

moves us into action is woefully inadequate. Rationally understand-
ing the causes of drought in Ethiopia is very different than morally
sensing how wrong it is that people are starving.
Reason, for Hume, performs two fonctions. First, it infers
matters of fact, that is, the relation between ideas in the mind and
objects in the world. Second, it forms relations between ideas in the
mind, such as judging two ideas as similar or different-i.e., that the
yellow of the bottle cap and the yellow of the pencil are the same. 13
However, he argues, neither of these judgments bears the slightest
resemblance to a moral judgment. He offers two reasons for this.
The first is the point that Hume makes throughout section one of
Book Three: these sorts of rational judgments do not move us the
way morality does. 14 Second, Hume notes that animais perceive
both matters of fact (e.g., the food is in the trough) and relations
(e.g., this prey is just like the last one I ate). But animais are not held
to any moral standard. For Hume, like Aristotle in a much different
way, morality is specific to human beings. It is natural to us and it
moves us to act or refrain from acting. 15
At the end of section one of Book Three cornes one of the most
celebrated (and overrated) passages in the history of serious thinking
about morality. This is the passage where Hume points to the dis-
tinction between matters of fact and matters of morality. He argues
that no collection of facts about the world can lead to a conclusion
about what ought to be clone or avoided. 16 One cannot get from a
statement about what is the case to what ought to be the case. We
have been told repeatedly, on the supposed authority of Hume, by
positivist deniers of substantive morality or formalists like Kant that
you cannot get from a statement of facts to a statement of moral-
ity. One of our leading philosophers even went so far as to call this
"Hume's Law," which moral philosophers must respect just as surely
as engineers must respect the laws of Newton. 1ï
But Hume was not arguing for moral irrationalism or complete

32
 The Moral Sense

relativism. He did not daim that something like moral ·judgment

does not exist, only that the source of morality does not lie in human
reason, which judges matters of fact, the "is-ness" of things. Imme-
diately after the celebrated passage about "is and ought," Hume
proceeds to locate the source of morality in a moral sense, or a feel-
ing of pleasure or pain on contemplating an action or person with
certain characteristics. "Morality is more properly felt than judged
of," 18 he writes. This does not mean that morality is not common,
or that it is not intersubjectively validated. It is. Hume repeatedly
appeals to common human moral experience to ground his treat-
ment of morality, a grounding that would be beside the point if
morality were only a personal feeling or an opinion:

An action or sentiment or character is virtuous or vicious;

why? Because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of
a particular kind. In giving a reason, therefore, for the
pleasure or uneasiness we sufficiently explain the vice or
virtue. To have the sense of virtue is nothing but to feel a
satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a
character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admi-
ration. We go no further. Nor do we inquire into the cause
of the satisfaction. We do not infer a character to be virtuous
because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after a par-
ticular rrianner we in effect feel that it is virtuous. 19

Natural morality is a matter of feeling pleasure at the observa-

tion of virtue, or feeling pain at the sight of vice. lt might be called
natu.ral morality, because for Hume morality is natural to human
beings. Indeed, the moral sense is "natural" in several ways. First,
it is not divine in origin. It does not, for instance, corne from God
as the voice of the Holy Spirit. Second, it is natural in the sense
of being common rather than rare. Says Hume, "There never was
any nation of the world nor any single person in any nation who
was utterly deprived of moral sentiments." 20 A stronger statement of

r
universalismwould be hard to find. Finally, at least some sentiments
are natural in the sense of being basic human responses not based on
social conventions. Sorne of our moral sentiments are based on con-
ventional rules, or what Hume calls "artifice," such as property rules
and notions of theft, or rules of honesty that circumscribe what we

33
 NATURE's END

call "obligation" or duty. 21 But other examples of the moral sense,

such as parental affection or friendship, are natural, and the sense of
pleasure or approval in their performance is immediate:

the only difference betwixt thf~al virtues and justice

lies in this, that the good, which results from the former,
arises from every single act and is the object of the same
natural passion: whereas a single act of justice considered in
itself may often be contrary to the public good and is only
the concurrence of mankind in a general scheme or certain
of action which is advantageous. 22

Promise-keeping may always be right, but this cannot be because in

every single case we always approve of the immediate result. Rather,
it is because we approve of the general rule-or as Hume calls it, ·
"the general scheme or system"-that tells us to keep our promises.
ln some cases we have to break a promise. This is common in our
experience. But the general rule "always keep your promises" is still
a sound moral principle.
Moral apprehension, or the data of our moral sense, lies in us,
not in the external world. This observation, however, does not, for
Hume, refute the reality of ethics or the possibility of moral judg-
ment. The yellow bottle cap appears as yellow to normal observers,
though we know that the basic quality "yellow" exists in the observer
as a result of the atomic structure of the bottle cap. Still, the yellow-
ness of the cap can be judged, and those who fail to see it as yellow
can be criticized for misapprehending the color of the cap. "The cap ,
is yellow" is a shorthand way of saying that any normal observer
should have an impression of yellow upon viewing the cap. If some-
one does not see the yellow, they are simply mistaken.
The example of the bottle cap is suggestive of the sort of richly
textured view of moral judgment found in the writings of Hume
and others who regard morality as rooted in sentiment. Moral senti-
ments are impressions in us resulting from our viewing directly or
in memory an action or person. The impression of sentiment simply
is. lt is neither true nor false, but the impressions generate ideas in
the mind, ideas of either right or wrong, virtuous or vicious, good
or bad. Now, ideas certainly can be judged as correct or incorrect,
true or false. 1 have an impression of the bottle cap, and on that basis

34
 The Moral Sense

1 form the idea of the yellow bottle cap. Others may challenge the
idea as incorrect. They may say 1 do not know standard English,
that yellow is not the right word for what 1 see. Or they may say that
1 do not understand standard conditions, that my view is clouded.
Moral judgment operates in much the same way. We may chal-
lenge someone's moral grasp of the nuances of the situation on which
their moral judgment was made. We may argue that the one mak-
ing the judgment is swayed by personal interest or overwhelmed by
other emotions aroused by the act or actor. Finally, and importantly
for Hume, we may misjudge the motives of the agent. Hume believes
that the core of moral judgment is a judgment about such motives.
From an observation of a person's actions we infer that someone's
motives are worthy of either praise (moral approval) or blame (moral·
disapproval):

'Tis evident that when we praise any actions we regard only

the motives that produce them and consider the actions as
signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and
temper. The external performance has no merit. We must
look within to find the moral quality. This we can not do
directly and therefore fix our attentions on actions as exter-
nal signs. ~ut these actions are still considered as signs and
the ultimate object of praise of approbation as the motive
that produced them. 23

lt would thus appear that we could be mistaken in our moral

judgment by not reading properly the signs evident in the action. In
so doing, we would fail to attribute proper motives to the agent. By
testing our judgments against the judgments of others we thus corne
to validate them intersubjectively, just as we validate our perceptual
experience. We treat such judgments as universal, as applying to
anyone in an equivalent situation, and the accompanying sense of
obligation binds us as it would bind anyone else who had observed
the same event.
Hume's account of morality as rooted in human sentiment is
much too complex to cover here adequately. In particular, 1 have
omitted a discussion of the mechanism of sympathy by which we
corne to ·feel what another person is feeling and thus to judge his
moral character in light of his situation. 24 But my discussion has

35
 NATURE's END

been limited by my desire to focus attention on the general idea of

Hume's grounding of moral daims in a specific account of human
nature. Hume constantly refers to huyian---nature as the basis of
moral judgment as rooted in the data,<)four natural moral sense. In
fact, for Hume it is only because we have such a stable nature that
we can daim, as does he, that moral sentiments give rise to moral
judgments and provide the grounding on which we can daim that
moral judgments are either correct or incorrect. There is a universal
quality to Hume's ethics. As, prior to the recent past, most moralists
have always thought, Hume believed that moral judgments apply
universally and impartially. Others will judge a person pretty much
as we do-unless they are overcome by passion or distorted in their
vision of the event or agent.
Hume's universalism is incop.erent without an assumption that
human nature is stable and consistent over time and circumstance.
As he argues, our moral "sentiments are so rooted in our constitution
and temper that without entirely confounding the human mind with
disease or madness 'tis impossible to extirpate or destroy them." 25
Hume's references to human nature, to daims about our "constitu-
tion" or "temper" as a species, are so numerous as to become almost
invisible. But Hume's theory of the moral sense as natural and uni-
versal, and his belief in the need for impartiality, all conspire to show
how much Hume depends on a view of human nature as morally
sensitive and stable, yet prone to error and partiality. The relevant
question for a Humean is: what is the source of this human nature
that displays this moral quality which can be nurtured and enlarged
by care and experience?

The founder of modern biology rather explicitly adopted Hume's

1

1 ~
view of ethics as rooted in sentiments that are part ofhuman nature. 26
For Charles Darwin, human beings are the result of a process of evo-
lution that gave us a "human nature" fit to survive and even thrive in
competition with other species. Like Aristotle, Darwin understood
human beings to be social or political animals who could only sur-
vive and thrive in groups of others. Thus, for Darwin, morality is
first and foremost a social phenomenon, one in which we unite in
feeling with others in our group. Darwin always calls our moral fac-

36
 The Moral Sense

ulties the "social and moral faculties" or "social instincts," in order to

emphasize the social nature of our moral sentiments. 27
In addition, for Darwin, somewhat like Aristotle, the beginning
of moral feeling for others lies in the family. Human young require
an extensive period of nurturance before they are ready to survive
on their own. This parental care is necessary if human beings are
to survive. From an evolutionary perspective, only those children
who are cared for can survive, and only those parents who provided
care have seen their genes carried forward into succeeding genera-
tions. Children are born with a propensity to elicit care from their
parents, especially the mother. This "care arousal" seems to be a
natural feature of our existence. Response to it by parents is uni-
versal and of the utmost importance in human existence. lt is out
of the biological requirements of human nurturance that the family
is barn, for only the family can provide this care over an extended
period of time. Families are essentially small groups that require for
their maintenance moral rules and feelings for other members of the
group. Human beings do not survive alone. They live in families
first, then kinship groups, and finally larger networks that we know
as political communities. 28
But it is in the family where moral attachments are nurtured,
and these attachments are the basis of our ability to form the larger
groups necessary to the thriving of the species. The parent-child
attachment that developed through evolution provides the basis
for social attachments that define the moral life. We learn about
attachment and sympathy through our first experiences of care.
For Darwin, this is the biological starting point of our moral sense:
"[T]he feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of
the parental or filial effects, since the social instinct seems to be
developed by the young remaining for a long time with their par-
ents; and this extension may be attributed in part to habit but chiefly
to natural selection." 29
Darwin argues that the "moral sense of conscience" is the most
important feature distinguishing man from the lower animals. This
fact of our moral nature. requires an explanation, which Darwin
gives, starting with the family. The moral sense develops out of a
social instinct that brings people together in small groups. In small
groups, feelings of sympathy are extremely helpful to group sur-
vival. The individual observes what is happening to another and

37
NATURE's END

draws from his memory similar experiences of his or her own. On

this basis, feelings of approval or disapproval. emerge. This feel-
ing for what others are going through (an emRathetic response) is
essential if groups are to survive through tin:Ç and thus compete in
the struggle for survival. "Those commm/ities which included the
greatest numbers of the most sympathetic members would flour-
ish the best and rear the greatest number of offspring." 30 Habit and
inheritance increase our capacities for moral behavior on the basis of
natural sympathy. In community, we nurture the seeds that nature
has planted. Reason is extremely useful in nurturing and guiding
the expression of these feelings, but evolution, not reason, generates
them.
We develop a sense of what is right and wrong from a feeling of
what aids the other members of our group in the struggle to survive
and thrive in evolutionary competition. These feelings are persis-
tent, long-term instincts, and we corne to feel remorse at giving in to
momentary passions at the expense of these permanent features of
our nature. The moral "ought" emerges on the basis of these persis-
tent "social instincts."
Darwin notes that many societies have developed "observed rules
of conduct"-such as what we might call etiquette-as well as what
he calls "observed religious belief." But he daims that, in general,
we have little difficulty in distinguishing between the "higher" and
the "lower" moral rules. The "higher" rules are those derived from
our basic natural social instincts. These are the rules that describe
how we ought to treat others. Rules against harming others, and
for treating them fairly and honestly, derive from our need to sur-
vive in groups where fellow-feeling is crucial. From this need we
develop rules of behavior that inculcate in the young the standards
required for a thriving group. In Darwin's discussion of the moral
sense's origin, we obviously see the influence of eighteenth-century
writers, especially David Hume and Adam Smith. 31 Darwin's own
references also make this intellectual debt clear.
Two themes, however, are evident in Darwin's discussion. The
first is what we might call biological, in the strict sense. Though
at several points Darwin confesses to a lack of key data, he tries to
give an evolutionary, biological understanding of the nature of our
moral lives as they are described by Hume and Smith. This part
of Darwin's discussion offers a compelling account of how a cer-

38
 The Moral Sense

tain sort of moral sense could persist in human beings and in large
human groups.
The second strand of thought we should note in Darwin's account
is less obvious and more contentious but no less crucial. Darwin's
references to "absurd" religion, "savages," and "rude" levels of exis-
tence call attention to his own latent standard of judgment, that of a
secular Victorian, for which he gives no account. At one point Dar-
win writes, "[A]s man advances in civilization small tribes are united
in larger communities and the simplest reason would tell each indi-
vidual that he ought to extend his social instincts to all members of
the same nation though personally unknown to him." 32
Two problems are obvious with this passage. First, on what basis
do we call a wider "nation" an advance over a tribe? Certainly an·
argument may be made for this view, but it is not one that can be
derived from Darwinism itself. Second, Darwin must show that the
"simplest reason" leads to the conclusion that he supposes. Ethnie
or racial hatred persists and has persisted in nations large and small
since human beings have existed. A human existence shaped by reli-
gious background beliefs about the unity of all humankind certainly
does teach Darwin's universalist conclusion. But it is doubtful that
reason, developed as a survival tool for the passions, teaches any such
conclusion. At the very least Darwin gives us no reason to think so. 33

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the contribu-

tions· of Hume and Darwin to the development of an understanding
of human moral and political life. In many ways this is a refresh-
ing change from the arid attempts to rewrite the dictionary that
often characterized academic philosophy in the decades after the
Second World War. lt is an even greater change from the ethical
nihilism that has become popular in recent decades. Whatever our
ultimate judgment about the sufficiency of a Humean or Darwin-
ian account and moral-sense theory in general, we should recognize
Hume, Smith, and Darwin as serious thinkers who believed in the
reality of human moral life and experience. Moral experience, they
believed, was real. lt was not to be explained away as mere opin-
ion or class consciousness. They understood human beings to have
a nature, which is intrinsically the root of morality and stability.

39
 NATURE's END

We as human beings have the capacity to feel for others and with
others. We can feel a sense of ought, of benevolence, and compas-
sion. These writers stressed that we feel this first in ~amily and
later within larger groups. This is surely a powerful daim about
the importan~e of the family in a sound political and social order.
Parents naturally care for their children, and children naturally
reciprocate that care with affection. lt is naturally virtuous that this
should happen; when it does not, something is amiss-something
"unnatural" has occurred.
The stability of human nature, derived from millions of years
of development, means that those human institutions, which devel-
oped to enable our nature to flourish, are themselves inherently
natural and should remain for the most part stable. For the Humean
or Darwinian, dreams of vastly changing human nature by chang-
ing institutions are dreams destined to be unfulfilled. Utopians
who want to do away with government (the "withering away of the
state") or the family will always fail because they conceive of human
nature as infinitely malleable. Especially after the failure of modern
utopianism in its most virulent twentieth-century forms-Nazism
and communism-the facts speak loudly against such dreams.
Even the much-criticized philosopher Peter Singer, whose
writings on animal rights, euthanasia, and infanticide are highly
controversial, has recently explored in a nuanced way Darwin's
importance for politics. ln A Dar-winian Left, Singer puts forth
what turns out to be a quite conservative thesis. 34 Left-wing politi-
cal movements, most noticeably Marxism in all of its varieties,
have viewed humanity as the product of institutions that shape us.
Change the institutions and you change human nature. If you do
not want greedy people, change the economic system so that avarice
is not rewarded, and you will thereby produce more altruism and
self-sacrifice.
Singer argues that this leftist dream is impossible. Human nature,
Singer says, drawing from Darwin, is not malleable. It is powerfully
stable, changing if at all over tens of thousands of years in response
to small changes in the environment. Hence, human nature is not
under our control. What a "Darwinian Left'' can legitimately aim at
is not massive social change in the direction of the "new man." The
"new socialist man" is a chimera. A "Darwinian Left," rather, would
aim for little more than compassion for the less fortunate and wel-

40
 The Moral Sense

fare efforts to provide them with a better life. A "Darwi:tiian Left"

ends up being hardly recognizable as a Left at all. On this account
Darwin reveals the falsity of Marx.
Among recent books bringing Hume and Darwin together to
bear on the study of morality and politics, Robert McShea's Morality
and Human Nature: A New Route to Ethical Theory is one of the most
accessible yet comprehensive. 35 In considering McShea's work we can
grasp the possibilities and limits of the Darwinian/Humean point of
view on the derivation of ethics from human nature. McShea sets his
position in opposition to what he regards as the other fashionable or
serious alternatives: 1) skepticism about ethics; 2) cultural relativism;
3) reductionism; and 4) God in any form.
Skepticism is rejected readily by McShea. He notes that, like ·
extreme skepticism about knowledge, few if any persons are extreme
skeptics about the good. No one besicles the insane actually believes
that it makes no evaluative difference what one does either in general
or in specific cases. With Hume, McShea argues that to undertake
any action requires some belief in its value. In other words, human
agents who deny that anything is valuable are either mistaken or
dishonest. 36 Relativism is not the same as skepticism, nor is a lim-
ited self-interest theory. What skepticism amounts to is the view that
nothing is valuable, and this is a position that no one in fact holds. As
Hume notes in a passage appropriately cited by McShea:

Those who have denied the reality of moral distinctions

may be ranked among the disingenuous disputants, nor is
it conceivable that any human creature should seriously
believe, that all characters and actions were alike and enti-
tled to the affection and regard for everyone. In short we
make moral distinctions and which can be discussed
intersubjectively. 37

The idea of a transcendent source of ethics is noted by McShea

as an idea that takes shape in three forms: God, reason, and history.
The problem with God, as the basis of ethics, is that we do not have
any firm way of knowing what God desires us to do or to refrain
from doing. Sacred texts and prophetic witnesses are so varied in
their teachings and based in such contradictory theological or quasi-
theological contexts that we simply cannot rely on divine guidance

41
NATURE's END

as a means for grounding the obvious reality of moral distinctions

held universally. 38 Though he partially concedes that a wide vari-
ety of different religions teach essentially the same moral beli~
McShea grounds this in the fact of a stable universal human nafure,
not a universal revelation of God 's will to humanity. Interestingly,
McShea adopts a rather unfashionable, but 1 think correct, view of
morality as nonrelative and substantive. He then uses this rather
conservative view of morality to criticize the possibility of ground-
ing a substantive universal morality in the vast, relativistic diversity
of religions.
Nature, in the pantheist or mythical sense, fares no better. We
sometimes illegitimately project human feelings or values onto a
metaphorical "nature" and then deceive ourselves into believing that
we have discovered moral values by consulting nature. Conversely, if
we try to determine what is "unnatural," we are caught in a dilemma
first stated by John Stuart Mill. 39 In one sense, nature is all that
exists. There is, on this view, nothing that is unnatural which has
being. So nature cannot provide a way of making distinctions. On
the other hand, if some things are considered wrong because they
are "unnatural," we must have either a "nonnatural" means of mak-
ing such a distinction, or we must have a teleological or Aristotelian
view of nature as purposeful. Such a view goes beyond what we can
ascertain from nature alone.
Logic or reason is the third seemingly transcendent source of
morality, but it too ultimately fails to account for certain obvious
features of the moral life. lt violates none of the principles of logic
to prefer the death of one's own child to the harm of another, yet
we surely would regard it as wrong. Consider an example once put
forth by the late moralistJoseph Fletcher of "situation ethics" fame.
Suppose you were in a burning building and could only save one
of two people. One was your father and the other was a man with
a cure for cancer. At this point logic is silent.40 Logic or reason by
itself contains no value content. The tools of reason are crucial in
developing a full moral theory and working out rules that express
our deepest moral sentiments, but these tools are notthemselves the
source of moral sentiment.
McShea reserves comparatively more space for a critique of
cultural relativism. 41 Cultural relativism may be defined as believ-
ing that all moral principles are relative to cultural contexts. The

42
 The Moral Sense

criticisms of relativism are well known and for most s~rious moral
thinkers insurmountable. The first problem such a belief encoun-
ters is the obvious presence of stable moral convictions across a wide
variety of cultures. We do not disagree across cultures about the vast
majority of moral matters, nor about general moral rules concern-
ing, for example, murder, lying, and theft. What we disagree about
are a small group of highly contested issues and about the applica-
tion of general rules to highly complex cases of moral choice.
Consider disagreements concerning complicated, specific moral
problems such as abortion or care for the dying. No serious moral
thinker denies either the importance of these topics or the fact of
disagreement. But the relativist believes two things that are emi-
nently contestable. The relativist believes that all moral principles·
or beliefs are relative to cultural fashions. However, we can say that
the universality of many features of our moral lives seems to escape
the relativists' notice. Parents everywhere are expected to care for
their children, and moral principles universally reflect this nurtur-
ing propensity and pronounce it good. Gratitude for parental care
and the honoring of parents are universally upheld as right and
good. People everywhere are horrified at the senseless slaughter of
innocent civilians. Truth is valued and lying is condemned univer-
sally. Few in any culture believe that promises are only to be kept
when one firids it convenient.
Second, thè relativist must hold that whatever disagreements
exist cannot be resol ved by reflecting more deepl y on them, by care-
ful attention to detail, or by taking a wider, more dispassionate view
of our moral sentiments. The fact that we do resolve our differences
everyday in ordinary life by appealing to better knowledge or a wider
sentiment suggests quite directly that the relativist is simply too fast
in concluding that the existence of some as yet unresolved moral
quandaries means that no such moral problems can ever be resolved.
Furthermore, the relativist has no basis for evaluating cultural or
social change. This view seems clearly wrong and contravenes even
the most obvious feature of human existence. We do evaluate social
change. We make judgments about such changes on a regular basis.
The ending of slavery is right. So, too, was extending the vote to
women and the ending of child sacrifice. Many regard some of the
changes wrought in American life by the generation of the 1960s
as wrong. Rising divorce and abortion rates and sexual intimacy

43
1 !

1
NATURE's END

outside of marriage disturb many people, as they rightly should.

The relativist must hold that we should have nothing to say about
these changes. Yet even they hold such judgments. What academi~
relativist would be happy with social and legal changes that m~de
abortion more difficult to obtain? What relativist does not use moral
language to argue for the superiority of the civil rights movement
over its segregationist opponents?
Moral judgment is universal. We all make such judgments. We
discuss them passionately with each other. We revise them with
more information or sounder arguments. Considered in light of the
most elementary features of human nature, relativism can hardly
be accepted.
The final alternative that McShea dismisses is what he calls
"reductionist human nature theory."42 This is the theory most \
directly associated with Thomas Hobbes and, later, Jeremy Ben-
tham. Hobbes sought to base moral and political principles on the
sound basis of human nature. However, his idea ofhuman nature was
narrowly conceived, defined as matter in motion dominated by an
overwhelming passion for persona! survival.43 On this account, the
valuable is what is useful for our survival. Later, Bentham adopted
the overriding pleasure/pain principle as a modification of Hobbes.
For Bentham, human beings always seek pleasure and try to avoid
pain. That is our nature and we cannot avoid it. Once we recognize
this primordial fact of human nature, according to Bentham, moral
choices can be made quite easily. Add up the pleasures and pains
associated with an act, discount for the uncertainty of what will hap-
pen in the future, and pick the option that best maximizes pleasure
for the greatest number of people.4+
Reductionist human-nature thinkers start with some seemingly
"self-evident" feature of human motivation-lust for power, fear of
death, desire for pleasure, etc. They then hold that this one motiva-
tion can explain in some ultimate way all of human action. Hence,
all moral and political rules can be derived from this one motivation.
Principles and practices can be fully evaluated in its light.
Reductionists like Hobbes are generally correct in pointing to
some important feature of human nature and in arguing that human
nature can form the basis of moral and political life. But reduction-
ism is afflicted with a fatal dilemma. If reductionists state their
theory with precision, then single-motivation theories seem far

44
 The Moral Seri.se

too narrow to account for the complexity of human nature and our
moral lives as we find them. Hobbes is correct that survival is an
exceedingly powerful human motivation. But soldiers do sacrifice
their lives for kin and country. Parents give up their lives for their
children. Deeply religious people sacrifice their lives for their faith.
Each of these is an act that Hobbes has a difficult time explaining.
On the other hand, some reductionists are notas bold as Hobbes.
, They attempt to use rhetorical sleight of hand to save their theory
from facts that can be observed by anyone. Self-interest theorists, for
example, often water clown the notion of self-interest to "doing what
you want." But this winds up as nothing more than a trivial truism. 45
Self-interest theorists also sometimes resort to the concept of eternal
reward in order to salvage the complete self-interest that their theo-.
ries require. People who give up their happiness for others "really"
expect a reward in heaven, so they are "really" pleasure-seekers or
looking after their self-interest after all. These moves seek to salvage
a narrow view of human nature after the fashion of a single-factor
conspiracy theorist, and they are just as persuasive. A conspiracy
is thought to exist. Doctor Evil is the master conspirator. Someone,
however, daims that we cannot find evidence that Doctor Evil 's
activities are the cause of all our miseries. "See," the conspiracy theo-
rist retorts, "this .just shows you how clever Doctor Evil is; he is able
to hide his actions so that you never know what he is up to."
McShea's alternative to relativism and reductionism is what he
calls "traditional human nature theory." This is a non-reduction-
istic Humean/Darwinian theory of human nature as complex. and
motivated by a variety of moral passions. Our common human
nature, understood biologically, is the basis of moral sentiment:
"Our common membership in a distinct and determinate biologi-
cal species makes all humans within a relatively narrow range very
much alike in physical form and functioning and in intellectual
capacity."46 This physical human nature includes our "emotional
profile," which has not fundamentally changed over the past several
hundred thousand years:

The species' typical feelings are, for humans and for the
higher animais, the only possible motivating force. Our
feelings are the only basis on which we can make value judg-
ments .... [T]here is no external standard or inner resource

45
 NATURE's END

that can either instruct or resist our feelings; every capacity

that we have atour command is at their service. We are in a
profound way the sum of our feelings. It follows that there
is no conceivable good for us but· the maximum satisfaction
of our strongest and most enduring feelings.47

This is a robust theory ofhuman nature as the basis of ethics, and it

is quite obviously inspired by Hume and Adam Smith. McShea con-
stantly refers to our "species feeling pattern" as a way of signifying
the human nature he is referring to. "Our feeling pattern ... is a fact
about our species" from which we may derive no moral distinction.
We are not better than other species, just different. Furthermore,
moral terms such as "evil" or "depraved" mean only that persons
like us have negative feelings about a person whose "feeling pattern'\
is so different from ours that we cannot comprehend it. 48
This biological human nature is genetic in basis. Though he does
not delve into biology McShea's views of genetic humanity are fully
consistent with those of modern biologists like Ernst Mayr, who
developed the view of species as genetically similar, reproductively
isolated units. Human beings, for McShea, are the products of either
"genetic" structure or cultural conditioning or both. Since cultural
conditioning does not explain the continuity and general uniformity
of human nature, the alternative. genetic explanation is given pride
of place. A species is, on this account, a genetic blueprint for how a
member of that species will typically behave: "Genes not only con-
tain the instructions for the assembly and operation of the physical
body of the animal but they also specify instincts, behavioral pro-
pensities, feelings aroused by certain 'stimuli."' 49 As a species, we
are our genes. McShea argues that a species has just the genes it does
because of what he calls (following many biologists) "inclusive gene
fitness," i.e., gene survival.
Higher animals have evolved a genetic basis for bath learning
and feeling that transcends mere chemistry or instinct. Reason and
passion go together in human beings for McShea just as they do for
Hume and Darwin. But feelings corne first, and reason exists as a
tool "to facilitate the satisfaction of the feelings." For McShea, feel-
ings are the most stable and enduring aspect of a species, more so
than physical form or even intellect. "They are, in the deepest sense,
our true selves." 50

46
 The Moral Sense

Based on this account of biological human nature, McShea

believes that he can offer a complete account of morality, or of
our nature as moral beings. With Hume, he believes that value
judgments express our feelings of pleasure or pain on viewing a
situation. The intellect tells us what is the case and we react emo-
tionally. As human beings, we canuse our reason to develop rules
and practices that will enable us to comprehend and articulate our
sentiments in the vast majority of cases. We can sort out our desires.
We can rank them. We can envision ways of satisfying them. These
ways we comprehend as moral oughts, as standards of behavior that
we should follow. Feelings are basic. They simply are and seem to
be impervious to our will. We can rationally rank the strength of
our feelings. We can also use our reason to plan how to lead lives·
that satisfy our feelings and avoid painful ones. We find others who
share our feelings and we can then plan together ways to satisfy
each other. We can even criticize others for their failure to feel what
we feel. McShea argues that such criticism amounts to the daim
that "if you knew what I do about John's treatment of Mary, you
would feel what I feel. You have overlooked something that I see.
You have misunderstood a word, an expression, or a gesture." Moral
discussion becomes a discussion of "ways of seeing" what is going
on. This is the ~ssence of judging other people's acts. We judge
them as better or worse ways of fulfilling their desires. We often
say that they are wrong because they are "short-sighted." We chal-
lenge their assessments as "morally blind," when what we mean is
that they have overlooked some feature of the situation. If they saw
what we saw, they would have feelings of disapproval towards the
act they are now contemplating. 51
McShea's Humean/Darwinian moral theory has all the virtues
of its ancestry. In an era in which moral skepticism and relativism
abound, it is refreshing to see a serious author argue for a moral
position that is strongly committed to a certain kind of moral real-
ism and universalism. But McShea's position, like that of Hume and
Darwin, is open to two fatal, though friendly, objections. These are
not objections from the point of view of relativists or skeptics. These
might be called friendly objections from the side of realism, univer-
salism, and moral stability.
The first problem is the problem of the multiplicity of human
feelings and the possibility of moral growth. ''Anger and hatred,"

47
 NATURE's END

writes Hume, "are passions inherent in our very frame and constitu-
tion. The want of them on some occasions may even be a proof of
weakness and imbecility."52 These passions are part of human nature.
But can hatred in its strongest form ·ever be thought of as noble? If
so, then its occasional nobility cannot derive from its mere existence
but from some other feature that determines its moral quality in
these rare cases. Anger or even hatred are almost always ignoble
passions that lead to self-defeating acts that bring us a great deal of
displeasure. Hume rightly points out that this cannot be the whole
story. I agree. But then the whole story must include some account
of how to determine when anger or even hatred is even justified,
which McShea does not provide.
Anger is part of our natural set of passions, but we surely do not
1
want to say that anger is like benevolence. Anger is not always good.
It is good or valuable only sometimes. The problem is that we do not
have, in the account given by McShea, any idea of what those times
might be.
McShea might have recourse to Adam Smith 's impartial specta-
tor at this point. He could argue that the way we judge our passions
is by appealing to such a less partial, more knowledgeable observer.
It is the passions of such a person that we look to for guidance about
our own passions. But this does not fully solve the problem. For
how are we to recognize the feelings of the ideal spectator? Simply
consider the issue of knowledge. The spectator will obviously have
knowledge that we do not possess. That, supposedly, is one quality
that makes his or her evaluative feelings better or sounder than ours.
However, how are we to recognize the spectator's wisdom? The idea
that his or her evaluation differs or agrees with ours is no sure guide.
In order to follow the word of another, e.g., a spectator, don't we first
need to trust the other morally? Don't we need to trust the goodness
and virtue of the spectator before we can know of the value of his or
her moral feelings? Furthermore, how can we know these feelings if
the spectator does not tell us about them? 53
The problem of how we can corne to an appreciation of moral
change is seen even more dramatically in the case of· ethnicity or
kinship relations. A central fact ofhuman survival is the importance
of parental care. This much is a given. Furthermore, a large body
of Darwinian literature shows how the first "community" of the
family naturally expands to include a small kinship group. In fact,

48
 The Moral Sense

small "tribal" communities have been the norm throughout most of

human evolution. 54
Such kinship groups and the group feelings they engender are
normally human, and it is on the basis of those feelings that we
develop a set of norms to guide our children. Small groups must
develop habits of cooperation and corresponding feelings of approval
for cooperative activities that help the group and thus the individual
survive. This is what standard Darwinism teaches us.
But this does not go far enough. How, on this basis of a "kinship
ethics," do we develop the universalism we admire in a document
such as the Declaration of Independence? 55 The founders wrote of
"all men" as being equal and endowed with rights by a creator. This
view has formed the noble· bedrock of American political thought
for more than two centuries. But its nobility cannot ultimately be
based on its congruence with basic human nature. Human nature,
while admittedly social, is only social within rather narrow limits.
We are partial to our kin, prone to distrust and even hate strangers
or those of a different color or creed. The "other," the outsider, has
been viewed with suspicion or worse throughout human evolution.
Even today, in large parts of the globe, ethnie and tribal hatreds are a
dominant social and political fact. As McShea admits, kin-selection
theory in biology suggests precisely the partiality of human nature:
"The self that all our feelings serve includes those who share our
genes and a few to whom we have bonded emotionally."56 On what
basis, then, should we argue that the Declaration of Independence
is a superior view to, say, the old Soviet constitution, or from the
"facts on the ground" in places like Bosnia or Rwanda? As Darwin
himself noted, from a biological point of view "the social instincts
never extend to all the individuals of the same species." 57 The Decla-
ration cannot be defended simply on the basis of human nature per
se. lt must be understood as consistent with some, but hardly all, of
the facts of human nature. lt requires a selective reading of human
nature to get to the Declaration or to moral universalism in general
against the plain facts of the persistence of tribalism.
On whatgrounds, then, may we choose the Declaration? Nature
does not make this choice for us or provide a comprehensive basis for
our doing so. If anything, nature teaches precisely the opposite of the
Declaration. The foundation of our admiration for the Declaration of
Independence or for Martin Luther King's "1 Have a Dream" speech

49
 NATURE's END

of 1963 must transcend nature. It must corne from without or beyond

our partial, limited, and suspicious human nature. We admire, mor-
ally, the idea behind Reverend Martin Luther King's dream that "all
men are created equal," but we cannot say that we do so because it
fits with the kind of beings we are. We have a moral vision, a vision
of what we approve, and in light of that vision we can judge things,
but we cannot explain that vision as simply coming from human
nature. In his seminal discussion of the moral sense, Darwin himself
wrote: "[T]he chief causes of the low morality.of savages as judged
by our standard are, first, the confinement of sympathy to the same
tribe." 58 On what basis do we justify the superiority of our standard
and thus conclude that less-developed peoples have a "low moral-
ity"? It cannot be because of hatural sympathy, for as Darwin notes,
natural sympathy is developed and maintained tribally.
My point is not to cast doubt on our moral admiration for King's
dream or Thomas Jefferson's noble conviction. Rather, I am suggest-
ing that our admiration for Jefferson's document shows that there is
within us a capacity to respond to a moral vision that is more than
what human nature itself teaches. It is a transcendent vision that
provides the grounding for our judging the Declaration a superior
standard. Nature finds its ultimate home in the supernatural.

The second significant weakness in the naturalist account of moral-

ity given by McShea is the idea that human nature provides a stable
ground for moral convictions. Of course, human culture changes
over time, and recently the pace of change arguably has vastly
increased significantly, thanks to globalization and technology. But
in recent years this change has also begun to emerge in the biologi-
cal world as well, in human-directed ways. We will examine in detail
human-directed biological changes in the next few chapters. For
now, we will only consider some of its key features. Human beings
are changing the mix of flora and fauna around the globe, and we are
altering the genetic make-up of plants and animals in dramaticways
to suit our needs and demands for increased productivity.
These may be changes that are on balance good, when judged
in terms of their effects on human welfare. But we should remem-
ber that these changes mark a growing ability to dominate biological

50
 The Moral Sense

nature. 59 For the same science that gives us the power to genetically
modify plants and animais to our specifications will also allow us to
engineer human beings to suit our desires. We already use prenatal
diagnosis and selective abortion to winnow out human beings with
what are called "defects." In the future, we will use even more pre-
cise genetic tests to perfect this selection. And this sort of negative
selection is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Before long, genetic
technologies will allow us to offer precisely the selection of any fea-
ture with a genetic basis. If McShea and the neo-Darwinians are right
that our "species-typical feeling patterns" are rooted in our genetics,
and therefore that they are passed genetically from one generation to
the next, then we increasingly must ask ourselves what changes we
might want to make in the future to this once fixed pattern. Would'
we want males with less testosterone-induced aggression? Would we
prefer greater parental sensitivity? Would we welcome more human
risk-taking? Would we like a diminished ability to feel another's pain
or suffering?
In other words, in an era of rapid genetic change we can no lon-
ger assume what McShea and the Darwinian moralists assumed: the
fixity of human nature, at least considered biologically. If human
genetic destiny is not fixed, then we require a standard that is itself
not genetic in order to determine what sort of genetic destiny we
should choose for ourselves. The standard of choice either must
not exist, or it must be transcendent. lt may very well be that the
foundational choice is between nihilistic assertion and divine guid-
ance. The classical tradition may no longer be adequate to our needs,
because its very standard-nature-is no longer beyond the reach
of human choice. In other words, nihilism or the Jewish, Chris-
tian, or Muslim traditions may ultimately be the only alternatives.
Nietzsche or scripture.
Recall that both Aristotle and Hume argue for the importance
of natural feelings as the key to moral awareness and moral judg-
ment. For Aristotle, having the right sort of feeling, in the right way,
at the right time, in the right amount, and toward the right person,
is crucial. Virtue. is a state of character coricerned with choice and
what is chosen or desired. Therefore, both the reasoning must be
valid and the desire correct if the choice is to be right. The coura-
geous person must feel the right kind and amount of fear in the
right situation. One is not brave, for Aristotle, when nothing fearful

51
 NATURE's END

stands in the way; nor can one act bravely if one is paralyzed by too
much fear. Hume is more straîghtforward. The feeling of pleasant-
ness or unpleasantness is primary. We cannot ask, "lt pleases, but
is it good?" "We do not infer a character to be virtuous because it
pleases but in feeling that it pleases in a particular manner we feel
that it is virtuous."60 This emphasis on feelings as the starting point
of a natural morality, however, is problematic in our era, which
provides us with the technology to control our moods. Psychophar-
macology, for instance, is just in its infancy, but it already gives
us the ability to alter a person's feelings. Mood-stabilizers have the
capacity to blunt a person's ability to feel deeply about events, tragic
or otherwise. With the aid of mood stabilizers, one might not feel
so sad when faced with images of an Ethiopian famine. In a similar
way, mood elevators can even be used to give people a heightened
sense of their overall well-being. All of this could have a crucial
impact on the human moral sense.
Psychopharmacology has been around in one form or another
since the 1950s. At first, all that could be offered were heavy tran-
quilizers such as Haldal or Thorazine, which would calm the
symptoms of florid psychosis most often seen in schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder. Under the influence of such drugs, a patient no
longer heard voices or thought that the government was inserting
thoughts into his head. But Thorazine and its siblings left patients
drugged and lethargic and sometimes caused severe facial tics. Early
antidepressants likewise had unattractive features, with patients
often feeling sedated and dry-mouthed.
In both cases, the sicle effects proved to be such that there was
little likelihood that anyone would take these drugs unless they
really needed to. For severely depressed patients who were socially
withdrawn, not sleeping well, unable to concentrate, unable to eat,
and perhaps even suicidai, early antidepressants brought revolution-
ary benefits. Dealing with the sicle effects was better than feeling so
sad that one wanted to be dead. In the last twenty years, however, a
new class of drugs has been developed. These drugs have few of the
old unwanted sicle effects. They can elevate one's mood, one's sense
of well-being, and one's sense of pleasure without the sicle effects
that limited the administration of older medications to the truly
afflicted. One can now get a mild sense of euphoria in a perfectly
legal manner without nasty sicle effects.

52
 The Moral Sense

The problem now appears in stark relief. Are serotonin-enhanced

feelings equivalent to those which Hume makes so much out of in
Book Three of the Treatise? If you were happier or felt more pleasure
in life, you surely would be less likely to feel displeasure at other
people and their actions. When on mood stabilizers, people often
don't cry or feel very deeply when faced with wrongdoing. They
may stand and cheer as a social convention, but they don't feel the
deep pleasure or approbation that Hume talks about. Sorne experts
even argue that these drugs actually alter the human personality. In
any case, there is no doubt that psychopharmacology does now and
will surely in the future offer individuals an opportunity to alter
their feelings about the people and events around them.
Appealing to Hume and Adam Smith's concept of the "ideal ·
spectator" or "ideal observer" will not salve the problem. The spec-
tator supposedly occupies an ideal or perfect location from which to
experience the relevant feelings of pleasure or approval. He is com-
pletely neutral, dispassionate, and knowledgeable. The spectator
knows all the facts and has no personal ties that might color his or
her judgment. But we cannot now stipulate that the spectator must
have the sort of feelings that the average persan has. We have snuck
in a belief in right and wrong.
For the specta:tor theory to work, we must assume that our ordi-
nary moral feelings are generally on the right track and need only
to be corrected by greater impartiality, less passion, more informa-
tion, etc. Our natural feelings in a "cool hour" must be held to be a
reliable moral guide. But in the age of psychopharmacology, what
counts as "natural" is no longer a given. If happiness is something
we naturally pursue, we need a standard other than nature to show
us how too much happiness, with the assistance of psychopharma-
cology, is actually morally enervating.
If, to use an overworked phrase, psychopharmacology gives us
a view of the world through "rose-colored glasses," then how can
we properly view the disgusting as such? How can we corne to see
it as reprehensible and judge it as wrong? How, in Hume's account,
could we corne to see that we have the glasses on without slipping in
a notion of the "normal" or "standard" view of things, which belies
Hume's stated purpose of describing our lives as social beings with a
moral sense that generally provides reliable moral guidance? Moral
distinctions, writes Hume, "depend entirely on certain peculiar

53
NATURE's END

sentiments of pain and pleasure." If this is granted, then in the age

of biotechnology, turned now on humanity itself, the very ground
of moral distinctions, and thus the distinctions themselves, would
appear to be the malleable, impermanent results of human creativ-
ity. 61 Modern science has brought us to a fork in the road where
nature becomes an ever less clear basis for serious thinking about
what kinds of lives we should live, the characters we should develop,
the virtues we should cultivate, and the activities we should engage
in. We may be left with, on the one hand, novelty and inventiveness,
the standardless standard in which creativity is its own reward, and
on the other hand a transcendent standard around which we might
structure our lives with confidence.
That is, in order to make sense of the practice of moral assess-
ment, we must first grasp the standard by which that assessment "
must be made. The standard cannot be read from our feelings. We
think it quite proper to give antidepressants to those who can only
feel sadness. Yet many of us become uneasy when evaluating the
attempt to elevate the mood of the otherwise "normal." In order to
make this distinction a sound distinction, we need to already have an
idea of the proper or appropriate feelings of pleasure or disgust we
want people to have in various situations. In other words, we must
be able to judge whether a person's responses are so sad, so happy, or
so nonexistent that they cannot be a reliable moral guide. Reading
the guide from the feelings puts the cart before the horse. In the age
of biotechnology, we must consider whether we must not ground the
natural in the supernatural.

54
 3

Nature Challenged: Genetie Technologies

H uman beings are imperfect in many ways. We have limited

knowledge. We are often driven by passions that we have dif-
ficulty confrolling. "What I want to do I do not, what I hate I do,"
writes St. Paul, in as apt a description of our situation as any. 1 Yet
these deep passions are only part of our problem. A large portion of
our imperfection concerns our proneness to injury, illness, disabil-
ity, and death. The reasons for these biological imperfections have
yielded a vast philosophical and theological literature.
Modern sè::ience has largely ignored this discussion, which is
to say, they have ignored the theological question of the psalmist,
"What is man?" Rather, science has decided that whatever else man
may be, he is a physical or biological being whose illnesses science
can do something about. Modern science seeks to dominate nature
in the service of human welfare. 2 From better housing to nutrition,
from sanitation to vaccinations, we are its beneficiaries at every turn.
No one, not even the sternest critic of science, would actually wish
to live in the state of nature described by Hobbes as "solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short." 3
Until recently, medical advances have focused on treating inju-
ries, relieving diseases with drugs, and performing surgery to repair
broken parts of the body. But human beings are also afflicted with
diseases and disabilities rooted in our biological nature itself. Many
of these illnesses have their genesis in our genetic code, the DNA
that controls the formation of our physical being, the physical eidos

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 NATURE's END

nature-is-here-to-stay writers does not necessarily follow. If the

argument is that we do not need to be concerned about "redesign,"
this is also a too-easy dismissal of a real problem. The history of
technology is littered with the remains of daims that something is
impossible, only to see it actually clone-and usually sooner rather
than later. Can we really say that any form of human enhancement
that forces us to engage the transcendent telos of humanity is impos-
sible? No serious scientist would make such a daim.
In addition, there are already advances at hand which raise the
very same theological questions as enhancement-psychophar-
macology, for one. As such, appealing to a structure of "natural"
feelings is no longer be sufficient for moral guidance.
Finally, students of gene therapy make continua! reference to
"species-typical functioning" to explain the goals of therapy, which
supposedly are aimed at restoring such functioning. However, this
move begs the most profound questions: fonction for what? For sur-
vival, for growth, for dominance, for service, for love? Any account
of the species-typical functioning of human beings must indude not
only survival and but also something we might call "thriving." If
you cannot read without glasses, you can survive. Yet no one denies
that glasses are an asset to someone with flawed vision or weak eyes.
We are left once again with the theological question: functional for
what? Even those who reject the theological answer must recognize
that this is the very question that can no longer be avoided.
Thinking about the deepest purposes of humanity cannot be
avoided in our reflections on the new biological technologies.
Moral naturalism, even in its most persuasive forms, is inadequate
to the task.

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 4

Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

I n 2002 and 2005, the U.S. Congress engaged in a poorly under-

stood debate about human cloning and stem-cell research. 1 say
poorly understood because the connection between these topics is
mostly ignored by the press, and the public remains ill-informed. So
let's make sure that we know what we are talking about.
To clone .. something, in biology, is to make a copy of it, a
duplicate-but for technical reasons not an exact duplicate. In Feb-
ruary 1997 th.e whole world took note when USA Today and CNN
announced the first successful cloning of a mammal from adult cells,
a sheep named ''Dolly." But the breakthrough with Dolly was not
cloning per se, but rather cloning from an adult cell of a mammal. 1
Previously, cloning had only been successful using embryonic stem
cells. These cells develop in the early stages of an embryo. After a
sperm fertilizes an ovum, the resulting blastocyst begins to <livide.
Eventually, the cells differentiate into all of the various types of cells
in the body (e.g., blood, liver, brain, kidney, heart, etc.). But at this
very early embryonic stage such differentiation has not yet occurred.
These early cells are called stem cells because they are like a stem
or tree trunk from which all of the limbs and leaves of the organism
later develop. They are also referred to as "totipotent," meaning that
they have ''total"potentiality to become any cell in the body. As we
shall see, the ethical questions surrounding stem-cell research arise
from the fact that harvesting and using human stem cells in research
inevitably means the destruction of an early embryo.

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 NATURE's END

In Dolly's case, cells from an adult mammary gland were used to

supply the DNA for the clone. An egg from a female sheep had its
DNA sucked out by a vacuum device; then, a cell from the sheep's
mammary gland was inserted into the egg. The egg and the mam-
mary cell were fused together, and the egg was chemically tricked
into thinking it was fertilized. Finally, the egg was implanted into
another female who was also chemically tricked into thinking she
was pregnant, astate called "pseudo-pregnancy." Dolly, the result-
ing offspring, was an exact genetic copy of the female who supplied
the mammary cell. This breakthrough enabled us to think for the
first time about human cloning with a method that bypassed the
serious question of the destruction of a human embryo at the start of
the process. It also allowed us to think about cloning human beings
without sexual reproduction.
However much Dolly fascinated us with science-fiction pos-
sibilities of clones of Hitler or Mother Teresa, the real action
lay in combining cloning and stem-cell research. Cloning could
be used by infertile couples as a reproductive technique, but for
this purpose a number of other technologies exist, such as artifi-
cial insemination or the use of donor eggs and sperm. The most
powerful use of cloning and stem-cell research is most likely to be
when they are combined to produce perfectly matched organs and
tissues for transplant. These "designer organs" would be specifi- i:
cally suited to an individual and would have dramatically lessened
chances of rejection.
The process would work like this. Suppose Joe needed a liver
transplant. He could take an ovum from Jane, perhaps paying for
the service rendered. The nucleus of Jane's egg would be sucked out
and inserted in would be Joe's DNA. In the lab dish, the egg would
be chemically tricked into believing it was fertilized, spurring it to
<livide into stem cells. These cells would then be harvested. At this
point, these cells would be chemically stimulated to grow into liver
tissue. As stem cells they are biological chameleons or blank slates.
They can be whatever someone wants them to be-if only the right
chemical signals are sent. 2
___
\

The advantage of this combination of cloning an early embryo

and combining it with the harvesting of stem cells is that as a clone
the early embryo is a perfect genetic match for Joe. The problem
of organ rejection is thereby virtually eliminated. Sorne advocates

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

assert that designer organs developed with cloning and· stem-cell

research will eventually bypass xenotransplantation all together.
When the late Christopher Reeve confidently asserted that he
would walk again, and when Michael J. Fox testified to a Bouse of
Representatives committee on prospects for developing cures for
Parkinson's disease with stem cells, it is this combination of clon-
ing and stem-cell research that was being talked about. At the time,
Congress was debating bills dealing with this kind of research. One
bill would have outlawed all cloning outright, without exceptions.
The other bill, sponsored by an unusual coalition of liberals and
conservatives concerned about cures for diseases, would have out-
lawed any reproductive cloning of a human being, but it would have
permitted the kind of research we have been talking about, called ·
"therapeutic cloning" or, more technically, "somatic-cell nuclear
transfer."4 (Recently, President Obama has lifted. the Bush admin-
istration's ban on using embryos for embryonic stem-cell research.)

In the wake of Dolly, President Clinton announced three things.

First, he announced his opposition to human cloning. Second, he
signed an executive order barring federal fonds from financing
i: human cloning research. 5 Third, he asked the National Bioethics
Advisory Commission to study the issue. The commission's report
of June 1997 is a usefol starting point for thinking about cloning.
It very nicely exemplifies the pitfalls of public ethics in a liberal
regime. The commission reviewed the science and analyzed- the
issues and arguments for and against human cloning. 6 lt presented
some thought-provoking "hard cases" in which cloning might, in its
view, be acceptable. 7 Yet the commission failed to engage the most
fondamental questions.
The state of the science at the time was such that it took 277
fertilized ova to produce one Dolly. Many ova did not implant in
a pseudo-pregnant female. Another large group miscarried. Sorne
_J -- were born gravely abnormal. Faced with these troubling facts, the
commission concluded that human cloning should not be attempted.
Bence, it called for a moratorium. Bowever, in order to argue for a
complete ban the commission needed to show that the odds were
dramatically worse than those in "natural" human reproduction.

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 NATURE's END

Here we find low odds of success or the serious possibility of abnor-

mal births acceptable, in the sense that no one thinks of forbidding
couples from trying to have a child. Furthermore, the commission
failed to demonstrate that the odds of successful implantation would
not change. They also endorsed further societal debate about cloning
in the hope that the issues would become clearer and more carefully
considered, perhaps leading to a consensus. 8
No consensus did emerge, but perhaps the issues are somewhat
clearer. The proponents of cloning-or at least of research leading
eventually to cloning as a reproductive technology-fall into two
groups. First, there are those who see cloning as being much like
other assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertiliza-
tion, artificial insemination, and even gestational surrogacy. They
then consider special cases where cloning might be preferred or even
merely allowed as part of this basket of acceptable technologies. Of
course, this move presumes that there is agreement on these other
technologies, which is not true. But at least the move is clear; liken
cloning to technologies thought to be widely admitted treatments
for infertility, select some emotionally compelling cases where our
moral sense seems to pull us towards cloning, add the proper rhet~
oric about limited cases and professional guidelines, and you have
opened the door to human reproductive cloning.
These proponents of cloning begin by arguing that much of the
public's unease or even "revulsion" at the prospect of reproductive
cloning is based on serious misconceptions of what a human clone
would be. A clone would no more be an exact duplicate than an iden-
tical twin is an exact duplicate. We do not consider twins to be mere
copies of each other. They are independent human beings with their
own thoughts, feelings, desires, and life plans. Clones would each
have a special moral worth, and in theological terms each would have
a soul and an eternal destiny. ln the wake of Dolly, otherwise careful
authors seemed to endorse the "genetic copy" view more than was
warranted. James Q. Wilson spoke of a natural moral sense being
"offended by the mental picture of identical babies being produced
in some biological factory." 9 Jean Bethke Elshtain raised the specter
of a "virtual army of Hitlers, ruthless, remorseless bigots who kept
reproducing themselves until they finished what the historie Hitler
had failed to do." 10 (This view, of course, seems to deny that Hitler
had any control over his genetically predetermined bigotry.)

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

In· other words, certain critics seemed unwittingly to endorse

hard genetic determinism, which posits that all, or nearly all,
interesting human features are controlled by genes in a fashion
equivalent to the manner in which eye color is determined by
genes. 11 In this view, environment and free choice matter little in
determining qualities of the human intellect, human desires, and
human virtues. But the overwhelming consensus of experts, as
well as the experience of ordinary persons, shows that hard genetic
determinism is false. Our environment plays a crucial role in how
we develop from childhood onward. Intelligence, a trait that we
highly value, has some genetic component but it also includes an
equally if not stronger environmental component. Other qualities,
such as compassion or prudence, ar~ decisively influenced by our ·
nature and our own choices to display and reinforce qualities of
virtue that we value highly.
But a positive case for cloning cannot be made merely by show-
ing that some critics ·have overplayed their hand by claiming more
for genetic determinism than any reading of the relevant genetic
studies would warrant. The second group of cloning proponents,
therefore, proceeds as has the National Bioethics Advisory Com-
mission, which has offered three interconnected reasons to support
research towards" cloning and cloning itself, if the research were to
prove that the· practice is safe and reasonably effective. The first is a
general presumption in favor of liberty or autonomy, ofwhich repro-
ductive autonomy is an especially salient social value. They regarded
the value of autonomy as a "consensus value" in America, one that
is held dearly and widely but not absolutely. It is a presumption
in favor of persona! choice unless serious reasons can be given for
overriding this value in particular cases or with respect to specific
activities, like cloning. We do not screen parents for fitness, restrict
access to reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, or limit
family size by social edict. 12
. The argument is that human cloning should be treated like other
assisted reproductive technologies. It should be a matter of per-
sona! choice. when and if it matures as a usable technology. This
argument, of course, presumes that none of the arguments against
cloning are of sufficient strength to moderate or override the con-
cern for autonomy. Whether this is correct we shall examine below.
The concern for liberty, however, ought to cause those who love it

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 NATURE's END

to pause before simply rejecting the means a couple have chosen to

fulfill their entirely natural and good desire for a child simply out of
persona! distaste for the means they use.
Second, the commission voiced a genuine concern for the free-
dom of scientific inquiry, or as the commission put it, "the need
to encourage research and scientific advances." 13 As the commission
noted, this value has always been subject to reasonable restrictions.
But many of these restrictions are process restrictions. For example,
in medical research we require the full and informed consent of the
volunteer/patient before beginning such research. In biotechnology
research involving microorganisms, we require laboratory safety
precautions. In research involving designer animais, such as dogs
or primates, we require standards of humane treatment, even if the
experiments will ultimately lead to those animais being euthanized.
All of these restrictions are process restrictions. They do not speak
to the substance of the goal being pursued by the research, which
is usually left open. This practice befits our respect for the value of
autonomy and the autonomy of researchers. The value of autonomy,
combined with our market-driven approach to technological change
in general, usually means that if a desire exists of sufficient strength
a scientific entrepreneur will attempt to satisfy it.
Even so, the commission implied that in the case of human
cloning the burden of proof ought to be reversed from what is typi-
cal. The burden should not be on those who want restrictions but
rather on those who would proceed with research on human clon-
ing. This reasoning seems eminently sound. At the very least, those
who would pursue human cloning must show that it is safe before
a moral case can be made for pursuing it. Yet how can they do this
without first experimenting on human beings? Animal studies can
only go so far. Different species have different technical problems
that need to be overcome before cloning can be considered a gener-
ally low-risk procedure in those species. Consequently, in order to
attempt human cloning we must be willing to bear the risk not just
of miscarriages in human beings, which are all too common, but
of severely abnormal births. Thus, the proponents of human.clon-
ing must make a strong case for why it should be permitted even if
the procedure seems to be as safe as natural reproduction in other
mammals. The problem might be one of moral intentionality. The
intention is to clone. But to do this one must engage in a process that

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

one knows beforehand will produce a number of abnormal births.

which is clearly not the case with normal reproduction. 14
N ext the commission brings forward an argument based on hard
cases where one might feel compelled to support cloning as the best
outcome of the specific fact pattern presented. The commission
presents three such scenarios:

1. A couple desires a child but both parents/partners are car-

riers of a lethal recessive gene. This means that they have
a one-in-four chance of birthing an infant who will have a
short life marked by severe suffering. Rather than rely on
sperm or egg donation, prenatal diagnosis, or selective abor-
tion, they want to choose cloning.
2. A family of three is in a terrible accident. The father
is killed and the only child is dying. The mother decides she
wants to use some cells from the child to clone a biological
offspring of her deceased husband.
3. The parents of a terminally ill child are told that only
a bone marrow donor can save the child's life. No match-
ing donor can be found. The couple decides to clone their
daughter in order to produce a child that will be a perfect
match ... If ~uccessful, the couple will wind up with two
healthy èhildren.

These cases are ingenious but hardly compelling. They are all
tragedies, certainly. But do they require cloning as a solution? In
the first case, surely not. Sperm donation will provide a solution
without cloning. Such a donation and fertilization are imperfect to
be sure, but they may be better than cloning. In the second case,
we might as well say that life is not always fair. This provides little
reason for moving into uncharted waters with a technology like
cloning. The commission itself was not folly persuaded by the first
two cases, but it did regard the third case as compelling. "The trag-
edy of allowing the sick child to die because of a moral or political
objection to clol).ing overall merely points out the difficulty of mak-
ing policy in this area." 15
There is an old adage that difficult cases make bad law. That
adage applies here. Technology tends to have a life of its own, and it

83
·~1
 NATURE's END

can rarely be kept within speciaJ limits designed to meet very spe-
cial or exceptional cases. Once we cross the line from "no cloning"
to "yes, in a few tragic cases," we will soon find that the proviso of
limiting it to a few cases is dropped. Two examples from recent his-
tory in allied fields deserve mention here.
Abortion was once limited only to cases in which the mother's
life was at risk and, in some states, to cases in which the woman had
been raped. Beginning in the early 1960s, a movement to change
American law focused on expanding the so-called exceptions under
which abortion would be considered legal. The key change would
be to accept the mother's health, especially her mental health, as a
legally sufficient reason to have an abortion. Sorne supporters of this
change undoubtedly thought of it as a limited and humane exception
in cases of severe health risks-mental or physical-for the mother.'
Others may have had broader goals in mind. But the health exception
became the exception that swallowed up the general rule. California
provides an example. When Governor Ronald Reagan signed Cali-
fornia's abortion reform law in 1967, the idea was to provide relief to
persons in serious and troubling cases. Within five years the result
was clear. California was the place to go if you wanted an abortion.
Clinics were giving women a thirty-minute mental health screening,
after which they were certified as having a mental health condition
requiring abortion as a solution. 99 percent of all applications were
approved. More abortions were performed in California in 1972, the
last full year before Roe v. Wade, than in 1974, the first full year after
that decision took effect nationally. The point here is that making
law based on special cases soon led to undermining all but the most
strenuous le gal restrictions .16
A second example involves widespread access to medical con-
traceptives. Originally, the oral contraceptive was said to be useful
for married couples. Rather quickly, however, social pressure and
legal decisions made the Pill available to any woman of adult age
and then to any woman, period, age being no barrier to obtaining
contraceptives without parental consent.17 This change has had
momentous consequences. As the noted anthropologist Lionel Tiger
has eloquently argued, this technology gave women virtually abso-
lute control over their reproductive decisions. Is it any wonder that 1

in relieving men of responsibility for making reproductive decisions ~.

we have weakened their attachment to the result? 18 1

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

f,.:,
Based on these realities, we need to ask those who support human
cloning to be straightforward about the goal they seek. History casts
serious doubt on the proposition that the use of cloning can be kept
within very narrow and strict limits either by law or professional
guidelines, as the hard-cases argument would suggest. If we decide
to support research leading to human cloning, then we ought at the
same time be willing to endorse it as a normal part of the reproduc-
tive tool kit that individuals may use to give birth to a child. We must
ask ourselves, however, what our society would be like if this were a
widespread practice.

· So far we have considered only the limited case for cloning addressed
by modern commentators and the National Commission. We must
also turn our attention to the 2002 report of the President's Council
on Bioethics, the successor to the National Commission that was
formed in the wake of President Bush's August 9, 2001, decision to
deny federal funding for stem-cell research. The council's report,
"Human Cloning and Human Dignity," represents a somewhat
more conservative approach to reproductive cloning than is found in
the work of its predecessor. 19
The council reviewed the science and arguments on both sicles
of the issue of human cloning and stem-cell research. In the end, it
presented two policy options. The first was to ban both reproduc-
tive cloning and the so-called "therapeutic" cloning used to produce
stem cells for research. The second was to ban reproductive clon-
ing and impose a moratorium on "therapeutic" cloning. 20 By a slight
majority the council voted to support the second proposal. There
was no disagreement on the council about the recommendation to
ban reproductive cloning.
Unlike the council, some authors, like biologist Lee Silver, jour-
nalist Ron Bailey, and fertility expert Panos Zavos, have made a
much more expansive case for human cloning. Those who make
--.- this more expansive case for human cloning employ a two-pronged
! strategy. First, théy argue that none of the arguments against clon-
1 ing is sound. Yes, serious commentators all admit that at present

~ '
human cloning cannot be regarded as safe. 21 The rates of success are
so low and the rates of abnormal births so high that even defenders
1

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 NATURE's END

of an expansive approach to the future of cloning do not propose

to start cloning now. Furthermore, the state of the art is such that
no serious scientist believes that we could clone human beings now
even if we wanted to.
For hardline cloning defenders, however, these are but tempo-
rary concerns. They do not amount to an argument against cloning
per se. They do not show that cloning as such is wrong. Consider the.
celebrated argument that relies on public revulsion at the prospect
of reproductive cloning. For cloning defenders, this is not regarded
as a serious argument. 22 The history of relying on public revulsion
as a basis for moral thinking about serious issues and the public poli-
cies that follow does not instill confidence in the public's corporate
judgment. Does anyone really believe that the anger once aroused
by interracial marriage or the prospect of staying at hotels that were '
also open to Jews or other minorities was a sound basis for policy?
Second, the argument that cloning compromises self-determina-
tion runs up against many other cases that raise the same question
but are not condemned. 23 Being an identical twin can result in a sense
that one is not an individual. Yet no one proposes that we should
ban twin births. Overbearing or overly protective parents infringe
on their children's sense of self-determination, but no one suggests
legally forbidding this parenting style.
Finally, there is the objection to cloning because it is "unnnatural"
and is a form of asexual reproduction. This point may be granted,
but those who make this argument usually do so selectively. The
argument that condemns cloning because it separates sexuality from
its natural telos in reproduction also condemns many other widely
accepted ·practices, such as contraception, which encourages non-
reproductive sexual expression, and artificial insemination, which
separates reproduction from sexual intimacy. Either the argument
is sound or it is not. It cannot be selectively employed in the case of
cloning alone. 24
The advocates of reproductive cloning do not daim that such a
method should be employed by everyone. Rather, they merely daim
that one should have the liberty to clone one's children if one so
chooses. Since none of the arguments against cloning is sound, every
persan should be free to clone when the technology becomes safe
and reliable. Sorne infertile couples will desire a genetic tie to their
children. Sorne couples will want to preserve desired parental or

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

sibling traits. Cloning, combined with other forms of gerniline engi-

neering and preimplantation genetic screening, will, in the future,
allow us to escape the fatalistic genetic lottery and choose a better
future for our offspring. 25
ln sum, the positive case for cloning is founded on three pillars.
The first is a rejection of all arguments against cloning as unsound.
The second is respect for the value of individual liberty, which, it is
alleged, ought to allow us to employ whatever method of reproduc-
tion we desire, so long as no other persan is harmed, including the
child to be created. The third is an appreciation of the benefits that
may accrue if we can escape the genetic lottery and apply human
wisdom and creativity to reproduction.
In turn, the critics of cloning raise two objections that are more·
fondamental than those based on rates of success and abnormal
births. First, they raise questions about the effect of cloning on what
is called "the child 's right to an open future." 26 The basic idea is that
children should have a right to thrive and flourish on their own,
without their lives, being planned in advance by others. This argu-
ment concedes that individual autonomy is a central value at stake in
the debate. But it emphasizes the way in which self-created auton-
omy-living in a manner that one chooses for oneself-promotes
individual happiness. Other values, such as societal diversity or the
maximizatiori of goods like aggregate happiness, are subordinated.
N ow, those .who adopt this view must admit that not every
autonomous choice turns out well. Sorne choices are bad and lead
to unhappiness. Sorne choosers are harmed by the choices and
decisions they make, and in some cases these choices harm others.
Social institutions and rules can be constructed to minimize the
harm to others. But if we are serious about promoting individual
freedom, then the freedom to fail must be an essential part of these
rules and institutions. r
Additionally, in some cases diversity has to be sacrificed in
order to foster autonomous choices by children or to protect their
right to make life choices for themselves. Consider the famous
Supreme Court case ofWisconsin v. Yoder, 27 in which Amish families
challenged a Wisconsin law mandating school attendance through
age sixteen. The Amish argued that in the context of their tradi-
tional lifestyle, their children did not need to attend school after
the eighth grade. Furthermore, school attendance would tend to

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 NATURE's END

weaken their children's attachment to the ways and values of the

Amish community. Thus, they claimed, mandatory school atten- i:
dance hindered their community's effort to preserve its religiously
based, traditional way of life. The state of Wisconsin, by contrast,
argued a version of the "open future" position. They claimed that a
high school education was necessary for success in any field in the
modern world. Sorne Amish children will not remain Amish their
entire lives, it reminded the court. For them, limited formai educa-
tion would be a hardship. Formai education is essential in giving all
children the tools they need to create their own futures, including
the decision of whether they should remain attached to the commu-
nities of their birth. 28
The Supreme Court sided with the Amish. Martha Nussbaum,
among others, thought this a wrong decision. She wrote an essay '·
listing ten "functional capabilities that are part of a minimally good
life." Number six is "being able to form a conception of the good
and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's own
life. This includes being able to seek employment outside the home."
Number ten is "being able to live one's own life and nobody else's."
This last capacity includes being left to decide for oneself intimate
matters of "marriage, child rearing, sexual expression, speech, and
employment." In Nussbaum's view, autonomy has primacy in defin-
ing the parameters of the good life and should be respected, even if
doing so means placing restrictions on how parents can raise their
children, such as through mandatory school attendance laws. 29 In
the history of liberal thought, John Stuart Mill is the champion of
this sort. of concern for individual autonomy. In his celebrated On
Liberty, Mill identified individual choice as the key to the good life:
"The human faculties of perception, judgment, discrimination, feel-
ing, mental ability, and even moral preference are exercised only in
making a choice. He who does anything because it is custom makes
no choice." 30
Now, how does the child's right to an open future relate to the
question of cloning? The concern, recall, is that a cloned person will
have already essentially had certain choices made for him. His iden-
tity and sense of autonomy will thereby be limited, and his "open
future" will not be as open as it should be.
Dena Davis, who opposes cloning on these grounds, distinguishes
between logistical cloning and duplicative cloning. Logistical don-

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 Nature Chal/enged: Remaking Humanity

ing, in her view, is simply a matter of using cloning in order to have

i: a child that is one's genetic offspring. The fact of genetic identity is
a sicle issue. Duplicative cloning is another matter. Here cloning is
undertaken for the purpose of duplication. The parent or parents
want certain specific traits to be carried forward into the next gen-
eration. They may wish to "replace" a beloved child who has <lied at
an early age. They may wish to have two or more good basketball
players or to nurture two children with extraordinary empathy for
others. Davis and others argue that this kind of cloning represents a
serious stumbling block for a child's growth toward an open future. 31
The autonomy of choice that is granted to the parents in the pursuit
of their own happiness compromises the child's happiness by under-
mining his autonomy in the most insidious way. Thus, say critics like ·
Davis, we must limit reproductive cloning or ban it altogether.

The open-future argument is fully nested within the assumptions

of liberalism and its focus on the individual 's right to autonomous
choice, the right so highly touted by writers like Nussbaum and
Mill. A much more profound criticism of cloning goes beyond the
assumptions of liberalism to a consideration of human nature itself.
This argument is made most powerfully by Leon Kass.
In Kass's view, the fondamental problem with cloning is that it
is a form of asexual reproduction. lt is a way of reproducing humans
that does not require two parents, even in as minimal a role as
sperm or egg donors. For Kass, asexual reproduction is unnatural
and therefore dangerous for import~nt human goods. The first of
these dangers concerns guarding sexuality in the bond between
man and woman. Erotic sexuality is at once our most noble and our
most volatile passion. It is the means of unity between husband and
wife, a unity that remains a mystery which even our greatest poets
and most sacred texts have never been able to explain fully. lt is a
passion for bonding, for coming together, that unîtes parents in the
most awesome-task of creating new life out of a mysterious union
in which two become one and participate in a creative process that
allows them to become more than the sum of their parts. 32
The mystery of this unity is nowhere better described than in
the eloquent words of St. Paul, who uses the universal experience

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of sexual union to mirror the mysterious unity of Christ and the

church: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and
be united to his wife and the two shall become one flesh." 33 The
analogy works also in reverse. By analogizing sexual union to the
mystery of the unity of Christ and the church, St. Paul ennobles
the sexual union as an image of the eternal bond between God and
his people.
But the nobility of sexual union as an act of creation, a return
of gratitude for the gift of life the united pair has been given, is
connected with the awful passion that is erotic attraction discon-
nected from its mooring in marital union. From Romeo and Juliet
to Tristan and Isolde to the latest potboiler, doomed lovers rent by
passions they cannot contrai are a perennial literary theme.
At the dawn of Western literature, Homer sings of the "doomed \
and ruinous" love that brought the Achaeans "loss upon bit-
ter loss." 34 For the clearest example of the danger associated with
erotic love, we may turn to one of the saddest events in the Bible.
Christians know that the Crucifixion is followed by Easter, the Res-
urrection, and that the Fall is a prelude to salvation. But the story
of David is one of loss without recompense. 35 David's lust for Bath-
sheba reveals the power of sexual attraction shorn of its mystery
and confinement in the covenant of marriage. To conceal his evil
deed of adultery with her, David is driven to the foulest deed of all:
arranging the death ofhis servant, Bathsheba's husband, whose wife
he has impregnated. This story about erotic love begetting both a
child and a murder is universal. Nathan's prophetic words to David
could just as easily be "you are a man" not "you are the man." David
is, in essence, "every man" when unconstrained by the sacramental
union of husband and wife.
Sexual reproduction in the context of marital unity is the way in
which the erotic passion is constrained by what Leon Kass regards
as the natural telos of sexual union aimed toward reproduction. This
natural telos of sexuality embeds sexual desire within an ambit of
meaning that enriches it while also curbing its most destructive
effects. The desire for children, which is natural and good, is fol-
filled in the intimate union in which children are the natural ·end.
Cloning, on the other hand, rips reproduction away from its anchor
in the telos of sexual expression and so frees sexuality from the end
that constrains it. 36

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

Kass does not illustrate how his conception of the teleological

structure of human sexuality can be squared with contraception,
and he only hints at difficulties with new reproductive technologies
such as in vitro fertilization (especially when donor egg or sperm is
used) and surrogacy. lt is worth noting, however, that cloning can
be regarded as on a continuum with these other comparatively new
reproductive technologies. The desire to reproduce oneself is man-
ifested in the technological domination of nature. Cloning, at the
deepest level, is an extension of this process.
Kass's argument is rich and nuanced. lt represents the best that
philosophy has to offer on the matter of cloning. But it is ultimately
less than successful, because it fails to fully appreciate the deep con-
nection between technology and human nature. 37 Man is not only'
a natural being, a slave to natural rhythms and biological routines.
We are also more than natural, and hence capable of transcending
natural routines. Man, and not nature, is the author of the Iliad, the
Republic, and the Nicomachean Ethics. Wind and water did not build
the White House or carve Michelangelo's David. Mount Rushmore
was not the result of a tornado. These are intentional abjects created
by more-than-natural, specific human beings.
Human transcendence of the natural is a fondamental theme of
modern political" thought, especially for the English contractarians
Hobbes and ·Locke. The contractarians created a political science
after the fashion of Bacon's natural science. Man, for Hobbes and
Locke, begins as a natural being who, with intelligence, grasps
the difficulties of this backwards Eden. Nature/is anything but a
paradise. It is more like Dante's Inferno. lt is a war of all against all
in which no one wins. Our ability to both reason and plan is what
sets us apart from animals and allows us to form a society in which
everyone achieves that modicum of peace and security that is the pre-
condition of material progress. Political life is a triumph over nature.
The very ground on which we all stand-liberal democracy-repre-
sents the scientific triumph over nature via human artifice. 38
Modern science is in some ways more foundational than politics.
Modern science began, -in. Bacon's eyes, as a project of domination
in the service of human welfare. Mere knowledge, he believed, was
in the final analysis impotent and unworthy of human beings. But
knowledge that was intentionally related to making, to dominat-
ing for human welfare materially conceived, was worthy of human

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beings, who could thereby build better houses and eventually bring
into being all the technological wonders of the modern world. Thus,
technology is the intrinsic purpose of modern science, from medical
technologies that make our lives physically more comfortable to the
latest computer on which this text is being composed. 39
Technology is a product of human inquisitiveness about nature
and human acquisitiveness in seeking the fruits of nature for human
welfare. These desires for knowing and mastering in the service of
human well-being are as much a part of our nature as are erotic
attraction and the moral sense. Technology presents us with a prob-
lem born of human nature itself. Our manifold desires will not be
contained by our nature. Nature can only give partial guidance to
our activities, because the desire to domi~ate nature is part of what
makes us human. This fact lies behind the common objection to the\
idea that we should seek guidance from nature for human activities.
For nature, it is said, is as likely to be hostile to human well-being as
it is beneficent, and human nature is prone to ignorance, weakness,
illness, and evil. Living as nature intended would result in lives that
were bitter, short, and for the most part miserable. Infection, dis-
ease, violent struggle, and exposure to extreme temperatures would
be our lot. Surely we cannot presume that living in accord with
every natural regularity is morally good, nor can we presume that
all men only desire the good for man as such. We are often confused
about the good and we are frequently driven by our natural desires,
..
like David, to pursue evil. It is our nature as creative beings that
gives us the power to live long and prosperous lives.
Nowhere is this dilemma of appealing to nature for guidance
better exemplified than in the case of cloning. The best case for
cloning is made on the basis of entirely worldly, natural desires. The
desire for children is natural and in most instances good. We are so
constructed that we typically strongly desire children. They are also
the natural result of erotic intimacy. And once we have children, we
naturally desire to care for and nurture them. In the case of cloning,
these natural desires lead us to consider putting in their service a
seemingly unnatural technology. Nature itself surely cannot tell us
which of the two parts of our nature must be followed, for it is clear
that both are in their own way noble precisely from the point of view
of what is "natural."
Guidance on the matter of cloning cannot finally corne from

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

nature itself unless we make a choice between those parts of our

nature that <livide us. The silent choice that Kass makes is to sus-
tain the need for limits to sexual expression within the confines
of the purpose of marriage. As we shall see, I believe that Kass is
profoundly correct in this choice, but not simply because the telos
of sexual expression in a reproductive end is part of human nature,
considered in and of itself.40 Rather, I think he is right because it
is part of human nature as created by God, who gave man the first
commandment to "be fruitful and increase and fill the earth." This
theological conviction alone, I believe, provides an adequate ground
for Kass's choice regarding cloning.

Let's return to the public controversy surrounding stem-cell

research. We are told that this research has promise in the produc-
tion of designer organs and tissues for transplant and that it may
ultimately provide cures for diseases and defects afflicting millions
of human beings. The science of stem cells is somewhat complicated,
however, and this in turn complicates discussions of its morality and
policy implications. But we will begin at the beginning.
The debate about the biotechnological use of stem cells began
in 1998, with ,the announcement that researchers had been able to
trick stem cells .in the laboratory into beginning to differentiate. The
hope was that, with the right chemical signais, it would soon be pos-
sible to stimulate stem cells to differentiate into tissues for transplant
and eventually into entire human organs. Hopes were particularly
high for the use of stem cells in creating new nerve, liver, and pan-
creatic tissues. 41
The controversy surrounded whether researchers using
embryonic stem cells could be supported by federal fonds, given
the existence of a law that prohibits experimentation on human
embryos. The Clinton administration took several months to think
about the issue, but eventually the director of the National Institutes
of Health, ·Harold Varmus, suggested a solution worthy of Solo-
mon:42 scientists could use frozen embryos leftover from fertility
clinics. Fertility clinics specializing in in vitro fertilization typically
harvest a number of eggs and fertilize them with sperm. They then
implant one, and if it does not succeed, they implant another. When

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the couple has success, the remaining frozen embryos are flushed
clown the drain. The NIH director argued that since these embryos
were going to be destroyed anyway, experimenting on them would
not violate the spirit of the congressionally imposed ban.
Now, note that no one is clamoring for using prisoners on death
row for research experiments, let alone ones that are inevitably fatal.
We concluded long ago that while capital punishment may be accept-
able, torturous punishments and the use of prisoners in potentially
lethal experiments are beyond the pale of civilized society, even
when the potential benefits are believed to be great. lt appears that
because the embryo is not yet sufficiently "like us," we do not want
to grant it even the minimal dignity afforded the serial killers of the
world. We will not carve up Ted Bundy in macabre fashion in order
to meet our needs for longevity, even though he is destined to die ',.
at the hands of the state. But embryos destined to die at the hands
of anonymous clinic technicians, according to the logic of Varmus's
decision, had less value as living human beings than they did as tis-
sue resources for the needs of the more fully grown.43
When George W. Bush took office, it remained for his new
administration to decide among three options for the federal fund-
ing of stem-cell research. The first option was to forbid federal
funding for any research using embryonic stem cells. This was what
we might call the "hard" pro-life position. The second option pre-
sented was the one the president eventually chose: to allow federal
funding for research on already existing stem-cell lines. Since these
lines held some therapeutic promise and since they had been created
before the president came into office, he could maintain his pro-
life stance while allowing federally funded research to go forward.
The third option was the position taken by the NIH director under
President Clinton. Not even on the table for consideration at the
time was the British decision to deliberately create cloned embryos
for research purposes.44
After Bush made his decision, both the pleas of the sick and of
scientists grew more intense. Within a year, voices were raised in
Congress urging America to follow Britain's lead. 45 Especially in the
Senate, support developed for allowing the NIH to fund the deliber-
ate creation of embryos for stem-cell harvesting. A majority in both
the House and Senate went on record in favor of the Clinton solu-
tion. Public celebrities like the late Christopher Reeve and Michael J.

94
1
 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

Fox marketed their personal tragedies in a bid to build opposition to

the pro-life position, which became increasingly unpopular.
· But let us follow to their logical conclusion the principles of those
who want America to follow the lead of the British. The fondamen-
tal challenge in developing organ tissue from stem cells is to find a
way to trick the embryonic stem cells to differentiate into precisely
the needed tissue. Now, if an embryo can be created and destroyed
at will in order to cure the diseases of others, why fool around with
the technically problematic process of stem-cell research? Why not
wait a few more weeks until the embryo has developed the begin-
nings qfliver tissue, and then abort it? If the embryo has been cloned
from the sick persan, the tissue will be a perfect match. 46
Of course, certain details would have to be worked out. Women ·
would need to be willing to carry the embryo sufficiently long
before aborting. But. some women have proven themselves willing
to be surrogates for couples who provide the egg and sperm, so
long as they are well compensated for their trouble. Can anyone
really doubt that money would overcome moral qualms in this case
as well?
Since the embryo has no moral standing, in the logic of the Brit-
ish position and its American sympathizers, what is at stake in the
use of organ farms-whether from ~tem cells or not-is the very
logic of the argument that allows us to use the weak in order to serve
the biological nèeds of the strong. If we recoil at the babies-as-organ-
farms scenario that 1 have sketched here, it is because we are revolted
by the thought of creating life just to destroy it for others. Yet this
is exactly what otherwise sensible people wish us to endorse in the
matter of embryonic stem-cell research.
In fact, embryonic stem cells may not even be needed to supply
organ tissues for transplants. Astonishing progress has been made
with what are called "adult stem cells." As the embryo develops all
the organ systems it will need to fonction, each organ begins as a
cluster of stem cells for that organ, from which all the organ's cells
then will develop. Could these already-differentiated cells be used
to provide-relief to sufferers? Could we take neural tissue, separate
out the stem cells, grow the stem cells into tissue in the lab, and
then transplant the tissue back into the patient's brain as a cure for,
say, Parkinson's disease? Sorne experiments suggest that this is a
distinct possibility.47

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 NATURE's END

The most promising area of research involves adult bone-marrow

stem cells that have been coaxed into differentiating into other types
of tissues. Thus, for example, in 2002 researchers at the University
of Minnesota announced that they had made adult bone-marrow
stem cells differentiate into liver cells. The liver cells were fully
functional, as proven by the fact that they secreted three key ele-
ments of normal liver cells: albumin, urea, and cytochrome.48 These
adult liver stem cells could perhaps be used in treating genetic dis-
orders of the liver such as OT, cirrhosis, and other kinds of acute
liver failure. And they may be useful in creating what are called
bioartificial livers, the functional (but less problematic) equivalent
of animal livers.
This research does not receive the press coverage of other topics
related to stem-cell research and cloning, in part because virtu- \
ally no one proposes banning it. Furthermore, the strong passions
aroused by embryonic stem-cell research have much to do with the
questions such research raises about the moral status of the unborn.
In other words, this topic has everything to do with abortion. To
oppose stem-cell research with embryos is to grant the unborn a
moral status that is incompatible with the national abortion culture
that has existed since Roe v. Wade. 49 This is why embryonic stem-
cell research has been embraced as a cause by so many, and it is the
cause of the virtual silence of the national press on promising adult
stem-cell alternatives.

The combining of stem-cell research and cloning represents the

ultimate domination of human nature by science. Consider the pro-
posa! of biologist Stanley Shostak to combine cloning and stem-cell
research in the service of human biological immortality. Shostak is
no crank. He is a professional biologist whose work has been pub-
lished by a major academic press. A number of other commentators
have argued that we should seek to achieve dramatic increases in
the human lifespan, and several have proposed specific research pro-
grams.50 For his part, Shostak believes that in order to continuously
maintain the health of the human body, we must find a way to con-
tinuously generate embryonic stem cells to replenish or repair organ
systems that are inevitably degenerating.

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

The technological key to producing immortals is threefold. First,

the immortalized beings will need to be, in Shostak 's terminology,
permanently "juvenilized." The maturation of sex organs is pre-
cisely the point at which biological degeneration begins to supplant
growth. Hence, "the immortals" will be fundamentally asexual or
presexual beings. Second, they will need to have a permanent sup-
ply of embryonic stem cells that can replenish all of their organs.
Third, they will need an organ that can generate these embryonic
stem cells in perpetuity. The solution to these three problems lies in
a technological medicine that could perform prenatal surgery. The
idea is to <livide a blastomere in the early stages of embryonic devel-
opment. Freeze one and implant the other in the female at about
two-and-a-half weeks past fertilization. The saved blastocyst would
then be microsurgically implanted in the embryo exactly where the
sex organs develop, a spot known as the gonad ridges. The blastocyst
would then supplant the fonction of the sex organs and become a
permanent generator of embryonic stem cells. 51
Of course, such a prospect is not on the horizon, but Shostak is
convinced that animal research along these lines should be started
now. He engages in typical speculation about what life would be like
for the immortals among us. Would they feel different? Would they
congregate among themselves and organize themselves in clans?
How would the rest of us regard them? Would immortalization in
a preadolescent state be thought to be worth it? What about the fact
that the immortals would be created without their consent? These
are serious questions to which Shostak gives no answers.
But the deepest question raised by this proposa! cornes from
its attempt to so alter human nature that two of the great biologi-
cal constants-sex and death-are eliminated. This is not merely a
Baconian natural science of increased crop yields and less manual
labor. lt is a Nietzschean science of the will-to-power over human
nature itself. lt does not seek to improve the "given" at the margins.
It takes the given as malleable at the source. Nature has become
putty in the hands of man, who has supplanted God. For Nietzsche,
God. is dead, but the need for God remains and is fulfilled by the
übermensch: the superior man who has become God in his power
over lesser mortals. Shostak's science is the science of pure domi-
nation in the service of immortality. Alas, we cannot call the
immortals übermenschen because they will be permanently deprived

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 NATURE's END

of adulthood. They will trade nature for the cloak of immortality,

and in the process they will lose that which makes men fathers and
women mothers.
Shostak is not the only thinker promoting the dream of an ageless
or eternal humanity. There is also the proposai outlined in Fantas-
tic Voyage: How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil
and Terry Grossman. Kurzweil is a computer and artificial intel-
ligence genius and member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Grossman runs a longevity institute in Colorado. Put briefly, their
thesis is that if you can get through the next fifty years or so, you
will be around when truly life-extending technologies corne on line
by the middle of the twenty-first century. These new technologies
will include the use of biotechnology to turn off disease and ~ging
genetic codes that cause the human body to deteriorate. They will \.
also include a combination of cyborg technology and nanotechnol-
ogy that will enable us to repair our bodies at the molecular level.
In other words, serious minds are now contemplating ways to
eliminate or alter our most fondamental biological realities-espe-
cially death. But, for example, how will our politics be transformed
if the fear of death, which is the foundation of political liberalism,
is overcome? Will we still desire children if we are no longer time-
bound beings for whom past and future are meaningful concepts?
Can we justify the enormous expenditures required to develop this
technology in a world where billions of human beings do not have
daily access to clean water?
Understand: any view of politics or morality derived from nature
is finally incapable of meeting the challenge of this Nietzschean sci-
ence. The immortal man on his fantastic voyage is Nietzsche's last
man, the man who has no humanity because he has no passions for
anything. He longs for nothing because all has been satisfied. The
true alternative to Nietzsche is not the Platonic but the Christian
one. Christianity offers a vision of nature transformed not by man's
will.;,to-power, but of a nature elevated by grace and oriented toward
achieving the true immortality of love. Ironically, this is an immor-
tality that answers the very questions about beneficence, autonomy,
and eqiiity that have escaped Shostak and those like him. As a free
gift from the source of all good, the goodness of salvation cannot be
denied. As a gift requiring the response of a human being, auton-
. omy is preserved. Salvation can even be rejected. Finally, as a gift

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 Nature Challenged: Remaking Humanity

given to all, it is equitable. Only a full and vigorous theology can

counter the will to dominate nature that is the inner dynamic of
genetic science today.

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 7

Conclusion
Faith 's Voice

A distinguished tradition holds that when faith communities

address the public square they must do so with the tools of
natural law. If they want to be heard and perhaps even heeded, they
need to speak a language that others not of their flock can under-
stand. This position, however, results in the argument that to speak
to the public sphere religious communities must become what they
most surely are n()t: spokesmen merely for those moral principles
that are not grounded, or only very partially grounded, in revealed
faith. Such a vièw demands that, to be heard in the pluralist moral
chorus, faith must sing like everyone else .. Faith must cease being
robust, or it supposedly will be-and should be-ignored. 1
There are two broad versions of the view that faith must speak
with the voice of "universal" rationality in the public square. The
first view states that in the public sphere we seek general agreement
on public policies, agreement resulting from possibly vigorous but
always respectful open discussion. Participants may have to seek
a compromise,. but the compromise will be grounded on rational
daims expressed by the various parties. Ideally, each persan should
recognize the rational compelling character of the daims of other
parties. Thus, they can find a common ground for public policy.
Consider how Catholic spokespeople argued for the ban on the sale
of contraceptives, in the era before the Supreme Court found such
bans unconstitutional in Griswold v. Connecticut. These Catholics
articulated their position in the language of natural law. The natural

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 NATURE's END

purpose of sexual intimacy is reproductive. The reproductive end

gives meaning to what is otherwise an irrational act of wild passion.
Artificial contraception thwarts this natural telos connecting inti-
macy and reproduction and is therefore deeply immoral. As such,
the public authorities may prohibit the sale and use of artificial con-
traception as a matter of protecting public morals. 2
This sort of argument, often presented as a scientific truth deriv- i ~·

able from a mechanical notion of natural law inferred from what

animais do, deserves the rejection it ultimately received even from
conservative Catholics. 3 It was, however, a "natural law" argument.
It did not appeal to any religious premises or concept of the good
life, it did not appeal to a moral sense, and it did not appeal to various
noncognitive moral positions. lt squarely derived a moral conclusion
from an analysis of a natural act.
Suppose, however, that a proponent of this position was more
interested in bearing witness to a moral conviction rooted in faith 19
than in navigating secular politics. He might say that self-giving ;ri
love, charity, is the highest virtue of humanity seen from the stand- \
point of faith, a charity exemplified most powerfully in the cross and
Easter. In sexual intimacy, this self-giving of one to another reaches
its apex when the couple opens itself to new life in charity. Artificial
contraception encourages not total giving in charity but the sexual
equivalent of a pub crawl, where coupling becomes a momentary act
of pleasure. Contraception encourages us to connect like animais,
not as children of God aspiring to the charity that is God among us
and is seen on Golgotha.4
If the public square is the place where we seek rational agreement
on delicate issues among contending parties, this second sort of posi-
tion will not do. lt is frankly and robustly theological. lt does not
infer a moral principle from an analysis of human nature with the
help of animal behavior. Rather, it articulates a vision of human vir-
tue in light of God's intentions for humanity as self-giving agents. lt
then concludes that the liberal availability of artificial contraception
intrinsically leads individuals away from divine charity in intimacy.
The argument from natural law may or may not be sound as it
stands. Perhaps it can be improved in ways suggested by theorists
of the "new" natural law, such as Germain Grisez. 5 But on a num-
ber of contentious issues, no rationally compelling agreement has
been found. For example, clearly rational persons disagree about the

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moral status of the unborn and, therefore, about the morality of tak-
ing the life of the unborn. 6 Science has not "proven" that human life
begins at conception. Whether life begins at conception is a question
that is beyond the purview of science. Embryologists can present to
us the facts of fetal development from conception to birth. But what
counts as a human being, and furthermore, what counts as a human
i ~· being with moral standing, is not a question for medicine, nor can
the scientific community demonstrate that an unborn child is not
a person because it lacks this or that psychological or physiological
feature-such as brain activity-at a certain stage of development.
Philosophers and theologians themselves cannot agree on the
status of the unborn. Philosophers advance serious rational argu-
ments on each sicle of the question regarding the moral status of
the unborn. From an explicitly and seriously Christian theological
position, I believe that a strong argument can be made for the moral
1?,, status of the unborn. But from the standpoint of reason itself, the
!' question appears unresolved and probably irresolvable.
\ The same point can be made about the concept of a "life not worth
living," a concept that figures prominently in debates about the ques-
tion of end-of-life care. To discontinue life-sustaining care for severely
brain-damaged individuals is ultimately to conclude that such a per-
son no longer has a\ "life worth living." His quality oflife is considered
to be so poor that death would be preferable. But the very question of /
what makes life worth living is a personal, individual blend of philoso-
phy, attitudes toward life, and especially religious faith. 7
Consider a person in what physicians call a persistent vegeta-
tive state (PVS). If the PVS patient is not in continuous pain, a
fact which can be known, and is beyond suffering, which requires
consciousness, why should they want to have respirators or feeding
tubes removed? 8 Why not wait and hope for some new treatment?
From a purely human viewpoint, we must admit that this view is at
least credible. From the perspective of Christian theology, however,
the case looks entirely different. In light of the reality of the Easter
event, Christians should consider that discontinuing extraordinary
treatment is an act of mercy that enables, finally, the soul to achieve
its destiny with God. It also allows resources to be used to help oth-
ers in need who might return to astate of loving others.
Though my own convictions are clear, I do not believe that
a purely rational argument can decide between the secular and

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Christian positions I have articulated. Yet if reason alone, apart

from faith, cannot so decide, then on what basis can we make pub-
lic policy? It might be said that we should follow the wishes of the
patient, but in many cases we do not know those wishes. We are
often reduced to what some writers have called "loose substituted
judgment." Loose substituted judgment means that we attempt to
use whatever tidbits we can collect from fragmentary statements
and life patterns to try to determine what the patient would have
wanted. Sorne commentators argue that we need to adopta "con-
structive preference standard" (or "rational man" test); others argue
that it is better to openly admit that we are making a "best interest
judgment" about the patient. We are really deciding what is in the
patient's best interest, not reading obscure tea leaves concerning
what the patient would desire. 9
Judging best interest, however, brings us back to the same morass
that we encountered earlier. "Best interest" requires us to think care-
fully about the destiny of the human person. You simply can't judge
best interest apart from some background beliefs about the ultimate
meaning and destiny of life. But adopting the "natural law" idiom
was clone precisely to avoid having to consider these questions in the
"public square," i.e., in the shaping of public policy.
A second approach, associated especially with the later work of
John Rawls in his Political Liberalism, is to admit that we will never
reach rational agreement on issues like abortion, cloning, euthana-
sia, or genetic enhancement. 10 These are essentially and irreducibly
contested questions about which reason is not conclusive. Hence,
Rawls argues that in shaping public policy liberal societies must
rely on citizens' overlapping consensus about contested public ques-
tions. Though such a consensus may not be definitively defensible
on philosophical grounds, theologically or metaphysically ultimate
beliefs may not legitimately form the basis of public policy in a
pluralistic society. 11 As such, we must avoid policies that require
such commitments.
Rawls's argument here is structurally similar to the critique
of Humean skepticism put forth by Scottish common-sense phi-
losophers like Thomas Reid. 12 Reid did not offer a comprehensive
metaphysical critique of Hume. Hume's general skepticism regard-
ing our knowledge of the external world was not considered to
have been shown to be decisively wrong by the common-sense phi-

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losophers. Rather, Reid appealed to a consensus among otherwise

reasonable people that our senses give us generally reliable informa-
tion about the world. Logical proof is beside the point, and appeals
to sensation, sense data, or qualia simply beg the skeptic's questions.
The best we can do is to appeal to a shared consensus about the gen-
eral reliability of sense perception.
The Rawlsian appeal to "overlapping consensus" works much
_,-------- the same way. Consider the situation we started with, a natural-law
argument against contraception. The consensus appeal admits that
this argument is at least rationally plausible and cannot be defini-
tively refuted. Sorne versions of it, such as Grisez's, may be sounder
than others. But the consensus argument holds that irrespective of
the rationality of the ~rgument, the argument in any version cannot
form the basis of public policy in a liberal order because there is a
very wide agreement that the state should leave these matters to the
decisions of couples. 13 At bottom, this consensus approach admits
that arguments for "reproductive privacy" are as indecisive as the
older natural-law appeals. For policymaking, however, one only
requires broad consensus on the role of the state, not rationally sat-
isfying agreement among citizens. 14
The same argument may be made in the case of end-of-life care.
One may not be able to construct a rationally compelling argument
for removing respirators or feeding tubes from patients in a PVS
condition. But when the patient has not made and cannot make
his wishes known, we appeal to two principles that form a public
consensus. They may be rationally disputed, but they form the
consensus necessary for public life in a liberal society. The first of
these is that families should always make these kinds of decisions.
Why this should be so may be contested. After all, families may be
divided, angry, and driven by agendas that are not necessarily con-
gruent with the patient's best interest. But a consensus confirmed
by laws in nearly every state hands the matter over to families in
consultation with doctors. Likewise, a consensus exists that if fami-
lies decide to withhold or withdraw certain medical technologies,
they are not doing something that the state should forbid. Logically,
this consensus may be questioned. There is no cogent argument for
the policy of always letting thé family decide.15 What remains is a
Rawlsian "overlapping consensus" that is the basis of a stable, if not
always rationally persuasive, policy.

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The appeal to an overlapping consensus does not really solve the

contentious issues that 1 have noted, nor does it solve many others.
Rawls, however, wanted his primary focus to be on what he calls
"public reason" as a means for resolving questions of public policy.
Fundamentally, what Rawls wanted was exclusionary. He thought
that in liberal societies comprehensive religious or philosophical
doctrines should be excluded from the twin tests of (1) designing a
set of political processes that ensured basic rights and (2) resolving
difficult questions. "Non-public reasons," writes Rawls, "are those
of associations of all kinds: churches and universities, scientific soci-
eties and professional groups." With respect to these associations,
· liberal regimes must be tolerant, while the associations in return
must not employ nonpublic reasons-such as theological convic-
tions-in the public square. 16
Public reason, for Rawls, is defined as an argument employed in
support of a belief that any other reasonable person could corne to
accept after fair deliberation. Only such reason can lead to what he
calls political legitimacy, a policy that is legitimate or acceptable in
a liberal society of free and equal citizens. In sum, Rawls believes
that legislators, executives, and courts, as well as citizens, should
employ public reason and only public reason in the development
of public policy. Neither citizens nor policymakers are permitted
in the Rawlsian system to employ comprehensive religious, meta'."'
physical, or philosophical views, to which they might otherwise be
seriously devoted, in making policy in a pluralistic society. This in
effect requires liberal citizens in any capacity to adopt a sort of "split
personality" that distinguishes sharply between their personhood
and their citizenship. As persons, they may hold a set of views that
they should not hold when they vote or legislate.

The Rawlsian solution will not do. Deeply and sincerely held beliefs
cannot be put on or taken off like a coat. Can a sincere atheist ignore
his atheism when considering George Washington's argument for
the social utility of religion in his Farewell Address? 17 Could he
accept the fact that what Rawls calls "presently general beliefs" hold
that there is a transcendent being called God? Or that a clear major-
ity of Americans believe that Genesis tells an accurate story of the

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 Faith's Voice

creation of human beings, not Darwinism? What Rawls requires

of those who hold deep beliefs about ultimate reality is not respect
for public legitimacy but rather public hypocrisy. Believers of any
sort must in effect lie about or dissemble regarding their reasons for
public action. But dishonesty with one's fellow citizens is neither
honorable nor constructive. lt breeds discord and social fragmen-
tation. Dishonorable deeds and words encourage distrust, not
agreement. ln effect, Rawls's solution to the fact of disagreement
becomes its own worst enemy.
A second and more moderate view of the making of public pol-
icy with respect to religious communities has been advanced by
Columbia law professor Kent Greenawalt. 18 Greenawalt is deeply
interested in the intersection of religion and public affairs in Amer-
ica, and by extension any liberal society. Though his socially liberal
views are obvious, he tries to treat other positions with respect. He
greatly admires the civil rights and and-Vietnam War movements
that were led by religious leaders and suffused with religious con-
tent. But he recognizes that if one accepts the legitimacy of Father
Daniel Berrigan's involvement in shaping public attitudes in the
Vietnam era, then one cannot deny the Catholic hierarchy or the
Family Research Council the right to try to shape public attitudes
about abortioll: today.
ln Greenawalt's view, however, there is a proper difference
between citizens' and citizens as policymakers. As citizens, there
is nothing wrong with voting on the basis of deeply held, often
religious, convictions. Citizens may also, in his view, employ their
beliefs in the public marketplace of ideas. When voting, citizens are
not trying to convince others. They are only intending to influence
an outcome. As long as the voting is fair and losers are treated with
respect, the deployment of deeply held beliefs in making decisions
is surely acceptable. "I have urged that even though a model of our
liberal democracy includes a limited commitment to shared bases
of evaluation," writes Greenawalt, "it leaves considerable room for
religious citizens to rely on religious grounds for moral judgments
that affect law and public policy." 19
But citizens as policymakers are another matter. Policymak-
ers enact laws for a society that encompasses diverse, deeply held
beliefs. As such, according to Greenawalt, persans in a policymak-
ing capacity must give publicly accessible and reasonable grounds

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for their decisions. In effect, policymakers must employ Rawls's

"public reason" to support whatever policies they enact. Take abor-
tion, for example. There are at least plausible reasons for a variety
of views on abortion, from a strict pro-life position, to a moder-
ate view, to a strong pro-choice position. Policymakers of any sort,
including courts, could reach any one of several conclusions. What
they must then offer are reasons that all citizens can consider
plausible, even where they disagree strongly with the conclusion.
Greenawalt writes:

A public official need not wholly eschew discourse directed

at coreligionists: when he speaks to church groups he may
urge that the tenets of the religion support the policy he
adopts. He may also admit, when asked, the degree that
his own conscience is informed by religion. But during the
period of his office, when he is undeniably a political leader,
he should probably not also hold himself out as a religious
leader, making original arguments about the implications of
religious doctrine for public policy. 20

For example, legislators might take a strongly pro-life position

and legally ban all abortions except to save the life of the mother or
where rape or incest is involved. In doing so, they might appeal to
how great a good life is. They could note that we already agree that
life is precious by the way our criminal law treats homicide and by
the universal condemnation of murder. To this they would need to
add premises about the unborn being human beings deserving of
the same protection given to other lives. For Greenawalt, what a leg-
islator must not dois appeal to uniquely religious beliefs not shared
by others-for example, the idea that "all life, from conception on
is precious as blessed by God. Thus abortion is wrong." Or, "My
religious leader says abortion violates the laws of God. Thus, I as a
politi~ian will vote to ban it."
The problems with Greenawalt's position are the same as those
that afflict Rawls's, although less extensive. This view, like Rawls's,
encourages hypocrisy. Policymakers must give reasons that they
may not sincerely hold. They must articulate reasons that they do
not in their hearts deem sufficient or plausible for their conclusions.
Take capital punishment as another example. Reasons might be given

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 Faith's Voice

for a number of views on this contentious issue. In opposing capital

punishment, a political leader might appeal to the criminal justice
system's inadequacies and the likelihood that actually innocent per-
sons will be executed. This is a perfectly acceptable "public reason"
that even supporters of capital punishment must accept as at least
reasonable. Suppose, however, that this leader actually believes that
--------all human life, even the most crim:inal, is sacred as blessed by God.
Or suppose that as a devout Catholic he has chosen to follow the
teaching of the American Catholic bishops and the Vatican? This is
nota "public reason," since it appeals to a nonpublic comprehensive
religious vision to ground its conclusion. Yet, he must present his
conclusion as one derived from a belief that capital punishment does .
not deter murder. Do we really want our political leaders to engage
in this sort of dissembling about their real views? Doesn't doing so
only encourage habits thar are dishonorable and even dangerous?
A third position, even friendlier to theology, has been articu-
lated by Michael Perry. 21 In his view, persons, either as citizens or
as policymakers, should be held to a single standard. What religious
individuals and communities must offer in public debate are views
that are at least intelligible to others, especially to those who do not
share the comprehensive vision that gives rise to whatever view
is being articulated. This position does not require that one give
"public reasons~' for a public policy that might convince others. It
only requires the lower standard of "intelligibility," that the view
put forth be comprehensible to others. "It is the habit of trying to
elaborate one's position in a manner intelligible or comprehensible
to those who speak a different moral language," writes Perry. 22 Con-
sider again the daim that all life is sacred as the gift of God. Even
atheists will find this daim intelligible. Otherwise, why would they
spend time refuting it? The proper response to the utterly unintelli-
gible is silence. The fact that opponents of this plainly religious view
of life spend so much time arguing against it is surely evidence that
it meets Perry's minimalist criterion.
Perry's calls his second criterion "public accessibility," which is
"the habit of trying to defend one's position in a manner that is nei-
ther sectarian nor authoritarian." 23 Perry is not worried that failure
to follow this standard will lead to holy war. Rather, he argues, "It is
difficult to understand how religious convictions can play a delibera-
tive or much less a, justificatory role in American politics that is not

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only not divisive but constructive unless some such standard is hon-
ored."24 Perry is probably right about this, if the point is to engage in
a rationally persuasive argument.
On any of these views, however, the fondamental task of religious
communities in public debate is to give reasons for the positions they
hold on difficult issues. For Rawls and Greenawalt, especially, reli-
gious persans must employ some form of reasonable moral naturalism
in their public roles. They must give reasons that are acceptable to
any rational person who does not accept religious premises.
Appeals to natural law, overlapping consensus, and public reason
fail because they assume that the deepest faith commitments can be
set aside in the public square. Perry's view is plausible as far as it goes,
because any public conversation requires that the participants make
sense to each other. But what is the aim of the public conversation? I
believe that religious communities and persans of faith should enter
the public square with fewer rational arguments and greater faith.
Their faith will need to be intelligible to others if they are to bear
true witness. As men and women of faith, however, they should do
what they are empowered to do: bear witness to the faith they hold
and their vision of humanity as seen through the eyes of faith.
The natural law and public reason standpoints leave too many
areas of public policy unresolved. As we have seen, the possibility
of permanent genetic alterations to our biological nature cannot be
comprehended or resolved by natural law. Transgenics proposes to
alter the very ground of natural law, nature itself. If nature is then
not understood biologically but transcendentally as oriented toward
a nonphysical telos, this raises the very theological questions that the
concepts of natural law and public reason were supposed to bypass.
The dilemma cannot be resolved by the philosophy that cornes
from political liberalism. If we understand "natural" biologically,
as a certain strain of naturalism did regarding birth control, then
current issues in transgenics can't be solved. They cannot even be
properly comprehended. On the other hand, if we start with a tran-
scendental understanding of à human person, as oriented to his or
her eternal destiny, we raise questions, whether classical or Chris-
tian, that go beyond the confines of liberal theory.
The overlapping consensus argument is even worse. Only the
most meager of issues can be resolved by appealing to such a con-
sensus. There may be a consensus about a certain version of privacy

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 Faith's Voice

that prevents outlawing the use of contraceptives, a consensus that

was · pivotal in Griswold. But what about abortion? There may be
a voting majority in many states against restricting the access of
adult women to abortion. A mere majority, however, is nota con-
sensus. Polling data sh~trrâtthere is no such consensus either on
the moral or the legal status of abortion, and therefore no basis for
public policy. Many polls show a majority in favor of legally restrict-
ing abortion to: (1) cases where the life or health of the woman is at
stake; (2) pregnancies caused by rape or incest; and (3) cases where
the child is likely to be born handicapped. There is hardly a consen-
sus for the public policy we now have on abortion. 25
Furthermore, how does a consensus change except by vigorous
chf!llenge from opponents? Consider capital punishment. Right now,
there exists a substantial agreement among a majority of the Ameri-
can public that capital punishment is an acceptable response for the
most heinous forms of murder. (Mentally handicapped, mentally
ill, and juvenile offenders are another story; in these cases no such
consensus exists.) Opponents, however, do not just cave in to the
"overlapping
\
consensus" and leave public policy alone. They pro-
duce arguments. First, they argue that capital punishment has never
been shown to deter either crime in general or homicide specifically.
Second, they argùe that our system of justice is imperfect at every
stage, from inve,stigation to prosecution to appeals. Hence, there is
a serious possibility of fatal errors in imposing the death penalty.
Finally, they point out that when the cost of appeals is considered,
it is more expensive to put someone to death than to keep him in
prison for life. 26
These sorts of arguments have some force. 27 But they do not deal
with the most profound argument for the death penalty: the belief
that for some particularly heinous or gruesome murders the only
appropriate penalty is death. Only capital punishment can express
our sense of injustice in the face of some particular murders. To this
argument, opponents reply that each life is sacred or precious. Each
life only deserves a final judgment by God, who alone can read the
human heart and know truly the murderer's intent. Such a response
has not convinced the public to give up the death penalty, even when
it is advanced by such a revered figure as Pope John Paul Il. Oppo-
nents therefore hold vigils outside of prisons on "death day." They
sing hymns, offer prayers and persona! reflections, and silently bear

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witness against what they see as an affront to God's graciousness.

They witness to the victim's loved ones, asking if they feel doser to
God by desiring the death of another human being. What they do
not do is to argue, rationally, that the appeal to retributive justice is
finally unsound.

In bearing witness in this way, the opponents of capital punishment

are right in their approach, no matter what one believes about capital
punishment as such. Faith can best participate in civil dialogue not
by reducing itself to a collection of spokespersons for natural law or
public reason. Faith is more than this and should boldly say so. Nor
should religious persons merely appeal to public consensus, even if
for many decades such a consensus was supportive of the position of
faith communities on abortion or even contraception.
What religious believers must aim for is a serious "change of
heart" about contentious public, and largely moral, concerns. Faith
communities must aim at moral conversion, not agreement via ratio-
nal argument. Thus, 1 agree partially with Rawls's later work about
the ways in which reason cannot ultimately provide a completely
satisfactory solution to contentious issues. But that does not mean-
as many, including Rawls, seem to conclude-that faith is impotent
or should not enter the public square.
Rather, if conversion, a "mighty change of heart," is the model,
we must begin by exploring the nature of religious conversion. 28
Does one become a devout theist because one has concluded that
Leibniz's modal ontological proof for the existence of God cannot
be refuted? Does one decide to become a devout Catholic because
one concludes that Thomas Aquinas must be a saint, because his
"five ways" of proving God's existence are rationally compelling?
For nearly everyone, the answer to these queries is "no." Conversion
is a process of coming to find the answers to the deepest questions
of life in a particular vision of human existence seen and lived in a
transcendent context. A person finds who he is and what he should
become by grasping who God is and what God requires of him.
Conversion is coming to see the world differently.
So, how does this happen? How does one corne to see the world
differently? Such a change usually occurs because those who see it

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 Faith's Voice

in the different, transcendental context bear witness or testimony to

their vision, and the one who is the hearer of such a testimony finds
himself illuminated in the searching light of that vision. Bearing
witness out of a faith tradition may, in Perry's terms, be "sectarian,"
insofar as it relies on faithful witness that is not universally shared.
But it is not authoritarian in any manner that threatens the tolerant
state. Christians, in any case, are especially called to treat others
with dignity and respect. 29 Humility before God requires that we
honor the worth of all humanity. We are forbidden by the example
of Jesus from dictating to others. Christ testified to a better, more
joyous way, but He never sought to use His authority to force others
to follow Him.
Religious conversion is often referred to as a process of rebirth, of
being "born again." This metaphor is apt. When one is born physi-
cally, one begins to see the world of objects as consisting of material
things. Later, one perceives differences, such as between persons
and objects. Being reborn spiritually leads to a "re-seeing" of the
world. Persons corne to be viewed as related in a special way to God.
The beauty of creation is seen as a reflection of divine beauty.
Perry and others believe that failing to follow the standards of
public accessibility will doom religion to impotence. On the con-
trary, rejecting this liberal goal would free faith communities to do
what they do b~st: to speak a language of true faith, hope, and love
to a world in need; to seek a moral and religious conversion born of
a true witness to another way; and to respect pluralism because the
obligation to respect others is finally an obligation to God to let His
spirit work its will in others. 30
Consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous address at the Lincoln
Memorial in 1963. The bulk of King's speech was delivered from a
prepared text. It constituted a litany of the problems that African
Americans faced and an argument that racism caused many of these
problems. This much of King's speech was a classic appeal to public
reason. Toward the end of the speech, however, King threw away
the prepared text and, in his own account, "spoke the words 1 was
given." 31 This is the part we remember. It was not a rational argu-
ment, but a bearing of witness. lt consisted in testifying to a vision
of the destiny of both white and black America. It was not apoc-
alyptic but rather proleptic in its witness to an alternative future.
We remember and are still moved by this witness, not so much by

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King's "argument" or even his person, since, like all of us, he was
a flawed human being. The witness transformed us by transform-
ing our way of seeing the world. ln a very real way, through King's
words, we became the sons of former slave owners and the daughters
of former slaves, wanting and hoping that we too could lie down
together in the "red clay hills of Georgia." The words that King
was given that August afternoon more than forty years ago were not
the words of "natural law." Nor were they the phrases of a national
consensus-which did not exist until after he had borne witness to
what it should and must be. They were the prophetic words of faith,
and they refused to be anything other than faith. King's testimony
transformed our hearts by being fully faithful to a divine vision, not
by being couched in the language of public reason.
Consider a second example: pacifism. There is a secular case for
pacifism, which has been chronicled eloquently by Peter Brock. 32 ln
the recent past, the strongest secular arguments for pacifism have
been made by Robert Higgs in his seminal work Crisis and Levia- .
than. 33 It is a work with which I have a great deal of sympathy. War
has always increased the power of government. It never liberates.
Arrests of dissenters, suppression of dissenting publications, identi-
fication of opponents as traitors, seizure of private property for war
ends-these are all the results of U.S. wars. Many pacifists argue
that just-war theory ends up justifying anything and condemning
nothing. Philosopher Donald Wells has asked the question, "How
much does the just war justify?" The answer may be, "Whatever
you want it to." 34
But these arguments do not finally inspire people to oppose war.
What moves people is the faithful witness to another way, a way at
odds with the ways of war and warriors. Consider the four Gos-
pels, which many consider inescapably pacifist. Does the Sermon on
the Mount make any sustained argument for pacifism? The answer
must be no. Yet, can you read any version of it without being faced
with a vision of a people pleading for peace? Again, the answer must
be no. The sermon is a witness borne to a different life, not an argu-
ment made to rationally convince. 35
During World War II, John Ford SJ., a professor of moral theol-
ogy at the Catholic University of America, wrote an article titled,
"The Morality of Obliteration Bombing." His argument was that
the mass bombing of cities, as happened to grave effect in Dres-

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 Faith's Voice

den and Tokyo, was deeply immoral. It was one thing to aim at
military targets and miss, accidentally killing civilians. But it was
quite another to target deliberately cities full of civilians. In the lat-
ter case, one intentionally sought the death of noncombatants. Since
noncombatant immunity is a core principle of just-war teaching,
the targeting of cities is never morally permissible. Such targeting
always involves an intention that is per se immoral, the destruction
of innocent human lives. 36
Ford's argument is rich, nuanced, profound and in my view
absolutely correct. But it changed no policy, just as masterful sim-
ilar arguments ab0ut the use of nuclear weapons by John Finnis,
Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle made no difference to another
generation of policymakers in the 1980s. 37 What does makes a differ-
ence is coming to see the suffering of innocent victims through their
visual and oral testimonies.
The Sermon on the Mount is an example of precisely how reli-
gious believers ought to engage the public square. They ought to
do just as Jesus of Nazareth and other religious teachers, such as
Gandhi, have clone: bear witness to the faith that is in them. In Erik
Erikson's famous phrase, "Gandhi's truth" is a truth that is eternal.
lt cannot be rationally demonstrated, and it moved an empire. 38
Another example to consider cornes from what Catherine Alba-
nese has called "American N atural Religion." 39 This is a sort of
transdenominatiohal faith whose adherents can be found in every
religious group. These believers find God-or "His spirit," depend-
ing on their theological tradition-in nature itself. Nature bears
witness to or is the abode of God. As such, we as His children must
take care of the earth and nurture it. There are many variations on
this theme in almost every Christian theological tradition, and con-
temporary environmental thought is profoundly indebted toit. For
example, this "sacred earth" position heavily influences the essays in
an important new collection, Fatal Harvest:· The Tragedy of lndustrial
Agriculture, edited by a Catholic lawyer and environmental activist. 40
The book appeared in two versions. One version had a normal trim
size and simply comprised the essays. This would be useful for the
average reader or for the classroom. The other version had stunning
photographs of the nature and effects of "industrial agriculture," a
way of showing what the authors regarded as a tragedy. Think too of
the American classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee

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and photographer Walker Evans. The book presented vividly the

bitter poverty of the Deep South in the 1930s. Agee's text is moving,
but what makes the book a classic and the story corne alive are the
black-and-white photographs by Evans~
For the essential statement of this "nature" faith, however, we
must turn to Henry David Thoreau's seminal text, "Walking," writ-
ten in the early 1860s. This is the text from which the Sierra Club
takes its motto: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." For
the most part, the text is pure pantheism. Nature (which is always
capitalized) is the God that will set our paths aright if we will follow
Him. Walking in Nature is a religious pilgrimage to the holy land or
the isles of the blessed (both images are invoked), and cutting up the
wild land is visualized as demonic. 41
None of this, however, is argued for by Thoreau. It is presented
as a vision of a new humanity and a renewed earth. It is a human-
ity deeply engaged with God by being engaged with nature, where
God resides. Thoreau might be called an early "deep ecologist," a
man who saw the interconnected enchantment of the natural world.
He bears witness to his own vision of nature as divine. He points our
attention to the golden sun on the meadow, to the "solitary marsh
hawk" winging his way across the bog. He invites us to share his
vision of the wild by pointing to its power and beauty. If we see it,
we are transformed; if we are blind to the vision, it is a great loss:

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is

visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on
cities, and perchance as it has never set before, where there
is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it
or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is
some little black veined brook in the midst of the marsh,
just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a dying
stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the
withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, 1
thought 1 had never bathed in such a golden flood, without
a ripple or a murmur to it. The west sicle of every wood and
rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and
the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving
us home at evening. 42

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 Faith's Voice

Next, consider David Lynch's powerful 1980 film, The Elephant

Man. The film is based on the true story of the horribly deformed
Victorian man John Merrick, who is treated as an animal in his
"career" as a sideshow freak. He is rescued from this life by London
doctor Fredrick Treves. In o:ne scene, a crowd of hooligans chases
Merrick into an underground lavatory. They appear to believe that
he is no more than an animal and can be treated as one. Backed up
against the wall, Merrick turns and roars at his tormentors: "I am a
human being." The audience roars back their approval. Why? They
do so not because "science has proven" that the "elephant man" has
human DNA. They applaud because they have corne to see and to
feel that Merrick is what,he says: "a human being." He is one of us .
because a special bond or feeling has made it so. Christians would
recognize it as the transforming witness of the Holy Spirit.
I might finally tell a personal story. Sorne years ago I was invited
to address a group of students at another university who were study-
ing American protest movements. The professor had devoted several
class periods to hearing from committed, passionate advocates of
various movements for social change. He asked me to discuss and
defend the pro-life movement, even though we very much disagreed
about the subject. The class was polite, but their ,questions for the
most part revealed strong disagreement with my views.
I presented·my view of abortion as part of a much·larger vision
of the sacred gift of all life, which included opposition to all forms
of euthanasia, capital punishment, and mass warfare, in addition to
support for the weak, the poor, the handicapped, and the despised.
My Christian commitments were obvious, and I made no attempt to
hide them. After the session ended, a young man came forward to
talk privately. He had·been moved by my witness to a comprehen-
sive pro-life position that held sacred all life and opposed all assaults
on its dignity. It was not any specific argument that I made that
captivated him. It was rather the vision, obviously rooted in Chris-
tianity, that he had found compelling. He had heard pro-lifers and
opponents before, but they had seemed only devoted in part to what
he recognized intuitively to be a bigger picture. I had presented a
vision of life in which he could see himself nested.

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My view about the way in which faith can engage the public square
does not entail the view that deeply contested public issues like
capital punishment, abortion, or genetic engineering can only be
addressed by bearing witness out of a faith tradition. Rational argu-
ment has its place in the examination of these issues. The opponents
of abortion-on-demand are right to make arguments about alterna-
tives to abortion and to show how weak most arguments for abortion
are. What I am arguing is only that rational arguments are not suf-
ficient to change hearts and souls about something as contested as
abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and prenatal genetic diag-
nosis, among many similar issues. What opponents of abortion, for
example, must do is to find ways for others to see the humanity of
the unborn. For this purpose, technical discussions of genetic codes
and fetal development may be a largely wasted effort. Show people
color photographs of an eight-week-old fetus and ask them what
they see. Do they see a small, frail human being? Of course they
do. They would be blind not to. They would see it not because they
have been rationally argued to such a position. Rather, they have
seen the humanity of the unborn right before their eyes. Their way
of seeing the unborn is changed. Once the heart has been trans-
formed, then we can ask whether the reasons most often given for
abortion seem good enough to take a human life.
In the early 1970s, when Canada was embroiled in the same
debate over abortion as was the U.S., University of Toronto professor
Marshall McLuhan, an intuitive genius about the effect of emerging
visual media on culture, pleaded with the pro-life movement to use
more pictures of live and aborted fetuses to influence the general
public on the central issue: the humanity of the unborn. McLuhan
was a strong pro-life advocate. But he knew that arguments were
only one piece of a much larger puzzle.43
All of this is related to the difference between "telling" and
"showing." Most philosophers and theologians, as well as many
other writers, offer didactic lessons to make their points by employ-
ing discursive reason. Philosophers offer reasons to a conclusion.
Theologians do the same by quoting scripture and church authori-
ties, drawing out the conclusion they believe is warranted. These
are classic "telling" approaches. Telling or giving reasons for the
conclusion one reaches, and expecting that others will be similarly
convinced, is a classic and well-trod path.

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Showing is much different. lt uses dramatic staries that expli-

cate or illustrate. Plato's dialogues are foundational "showing" texts
in philosophy. In the Republic, Socrates does not specifically argue
Glaucon out of his tyrannical ambitions. Rather, he shows Glaucon
what the true result of his desires would require. Socrates shows his
interlocutors what the conclusions of their actions and desires would
be. Then they can corne to see the difficulties created by the position
they started with. Great art, from painting to music, also requires
a showing method. The teacher can point to certain features of
the painting or concerto on which one might focus to see what the
teacher sees or hears. But ultimately, if I cannot see or hear in the
same way, no amount of discursive reason will change that fact.
Sorne years ago, pictures called "magic eye" were popular. When
viewed normally, as one would a painting or a photograph, all one
saw was a dghtly packed collection of colored dots in nô particular
order. When looked at differently, in a sort of cross-eyed position, a
completely different scene emerged. Sorne people could never see
the hidden picture. All they saw were the dots. Others could ~ee the
picture readily with little help. Probably a majority required atten-
tion-directing advice such as "look at the picture in this way," or
"focus on your finger held about an inch from the picture." These
devices directed one's vision differently just as surely as does the
Christian story.. They made no argument but rather tried to enable
viewers to see the'picture in a new way. However, if, after long effort,
one could only see the dots, no amount of discursive argument could
force one to see the hidden picture. A persan could not see the beau-
tiful rose just by being told that the rose was in fact there.
Christians must show the story ofJesus and must live the Chris-
tian life if they are to change the worldview of those around them.
They must point to the half-forgotten parts of another's experience
that are illuminated in their true light in the Jesus narrative. In so
doing, they will show the power of a life of faith in love and the
power of the Easter event to transform our whole cosmic vision, wit-
nessing to its capacity for persona! and communal transformation.
Seen in this new light, the pro blems with and possibilities of current
life-altering technologies may be truly comprehended.
Theological commitment alone can ultimately answer the deep-
est questions posed by the new transformative technologies. Faith
must offer a vision of the meaning and purpose of human life within

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which we can make sense of judgments about daims like "genetic

enhancement," "remaking Eden," and "redesigning humanity."

The core of what Christians must bear witness to in word and deed
is the vision of existence seen in the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus of Nazareth. This is the sort oflife that God intends for us.
This is the flourishing, or well-lived life, in God's eyes. As we bear
true witness to such a life, others may corne to see the transforming
power of this life, even in its weakness over and against the powers of
this world. Others then may corne to recognize the true strength of
a life lived in opposition to the ways of worldly mastery and domina-
tion, for we are told that the meek are especially blessed. 44 The task
may not be to "remake Eden," but to live the life God envisioned
from the beginning in the revelatory story of Eden and its aftermath.
The fondamental core of this life is summed up by Jesus himself:
absolute love of God and neighbor. "Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all ·your might, and
with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. AU the law
and the prophets hang on these two commandments."45
The love of God, which is the anchor of the Christian life, might
be understood in terms of a complete or absolute commitment to
God, a complete covenant with Him. Trust is another word that
points to what love of God means. The words of Proverbs are uni-
versal: "Trust in the Lord thy God and lean not unto thine own
understanding."46 But trust can also be understood as self-giving
love, in which the individual gives up his own striving and loves
God without the conditions we usually put on such love.
By trusting in and following a transcendent power, we are freed
to bear true witness to the "principalities and powers" of this world.
Fear, especially fear of physical harm or death, paralyzes the human
tongue, even the Christian tongue, from speaking as it should. Com-
mitment to God frees us from fear. We become fearless because we
have a hope of eternity. And we then recognize the light that shines
even in the darkest corners of creation.
God has made us free, and this freedom is evident in the tech-
nologies that now concern us. What we must bear witness to is the

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true end of humanity in love of God and others. In so doing, we

can set forth a vision· within which humanity can see the proper
role of technology. If new technologies give us the tools to better
serve the weak, to enable them to love God and others-as treat..;
ments for Alzheimer's or autism might-then we may regard such
technologies as good in light of the Christian vision. But technolo-
gies that feed our vanity and desire for mastery may be confidently
rejected. The vision is primary; and only in light of that vision may
we see truly the purpose of our existence and, thus, the purposes
that should enlighten our technological creativity.
If love of God and others is what we must witness to, then we
must ask if any enhancement technologies enable us to love more
deeply. The love command was given to us as we are, not as a
new humanity may become with the help of biotechnology, phar-
macology, and cyborg technology. If even the weakest and most
handicapped have the same dignity as others, what does it say about
our souls if we desire to weed or breed them out of existence? What
does it say about our commitment to God 's gracious gift of eternity
if we desire the faux version promised by some scientists and phi-
losophers? What does it say about our sense ofhumility if we believe
that we ought to permanently redesign the human race?
Theology,, robust and unapologetic, offers the only plausible and
effective answer to the deepest questions raised by the new tech-
nologies of hum~n and earthly transformation that now confront
us. Bearing witness to a genuinely Christian vision of life is the best
role that religious communities can play in our time. In light of that
life-not hidden under the bushel of moral naturalism-humanity
may corne to see its true purpose and destiny.

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