Who Do Bioethicists Think They Are?

Abstract

The previous chapter exemplifies a basic paradox enacted by both cults: they oppose efforts of to engineer persons through biological innovations. Yet they combat those efforts, and the biotechnologies which underwrite them, by themselves re-engineering persons through social means. From their physically, psychically and socially embodied origins, both cults aim to recreate persons in their own images, making them over into the transcendent specters they spin from their moral imaginations. At the same time, they depict human persons not as essentially constituted by their specific bodies or minds or personalities or social relations, but as essentially identified with transcendent properties. These timeless properties, however, cannot essentially qualify human persons who procreate, and age, and ail, and die. Nor can they, secure in their transcendence, dignify particular human persons in their human particulars. To the contrary, only human practices — aimed at personalizing specific persons — can secure that end. Only on that basis, moreover, may we value human life for what it is, as irremediably embodied amid the contingencies of nature and of time.