The American Journal of Bioethics

In my earlier writings on genetic engineering and biotechnology (Rollin 1995), I distinguished three possible categories of putative socioethical concern relevant to these modalities. The first, which I called "There are certain things human beings were not meant to do," encompasses various versions of the claim that genetic engineering, as one example, is intrinsically wrong—just wrong in itself, regardless of consequences. Examples of such an approach are the claims that "genetic engineering violates God's will," genetic engineering has man playing God," "genetic engineering views life as merely a bundle of chemicals," and the notion under discussion that "genetic engineering crosses species boundaries," "blurs species boundaries," "violates the natural order," and, most significant for our discussion, "illegitimately mixes human and animal traits."

The second category of issues is usually what claims of the first type devolve into when the alleged intrinsic wrongness of, say, genetic engineering is challenged. Such claims are transmuted into the view that genetic engineering is wrong because it will inexorably lead to bad consequences. I call this category "rampaging monsters." Insofar as no one—not even a genetic engineer totally devoid of moral sensibility—wishes to see bad consequences result from these activities, if only so he or she will not be shut down, this concern becomes as much a prudential as an ethical concern, with the major ethical concern arising in the question, "how much benefit morally justifies how much risk?"

The final category I call "the plight of the creature," the well-being of the newly-engineered entity. In genetic engineering of animals this becomes the issue of harming animals for human benefit, as in genetically engineering suffering animals as models for human diseases. In my view the latter category presents the greatest moral challenge to genetic engineering.

Questions of the first type—that is, those regarding the alleged intrinsic wrongness of genetic engineering, though widespread—are in my view examples of what I have called a "Gresham's law for ethics," where bad ethical thinking drives good ethical thinking out of circulation. Like Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003), I have argued that the arguments about species barriers (particularly mixing human and animal genes) rest on a mistaken, biblical or Aristotelian view of species as fixed and immutable rather than being slices of a dynamic, ever-changing process. Also like the authors, I have tried to show that both common sense and the writings of some scientists tend to perpetuate the view that accords ontological/valuational pride of place to the idea of species. Their analytical critique of such a move is, in my view, exemplary. If the notion of species is disputed, vague, or indeterminate, we cannot tell with any exactitude where one species begins and another ends, including the genetically-manipulated human species.

Against this background the authors attempt to determine why people continue to see crossing species as morally problematic. Their argument is, in essence, that however metaphysically and biologically problematic the concept of species might be, it is built into moral practice: "notwithstanding the claim that biologically species are fluid, people believe that species identities and boundaries are indeed fixed, and in fact make everyday moral decisions on the basis of this belief." The notion of fixed species determines [End Page 15] how "we live our lives and treat other creatures, whether in decisions about what we eat or what we patent."

For Robert and Baylis then, the explanation of social resistance to crossing species barriers is moral in that crossing species boundaries shakes what we consider to be constitutive of being an object of moral concern and forces us to reconsider our moral categories. Crossing species barriers is abhorrent because it challenges our conceptual scheme and our moral dividing line between human and nonhuman, because it shakes our confidence in our superiority over other creatures as the only rational beings. In our world view, according to Robert and Baylis, being human automatically confers moral status, whereas animals'...