Intuitions, Emotions, and Reasons in the Enhancement Debate by ALBERTO GIUBIL INI

Our moral judgments about bioethical issues (as about many other issues) tend to be heavily affected by our intuitive and emotional responses. This is not surprising if we think of how often bioethical issues touch on our taboos and deeply held values. Consider the recent debate on so-called after-birth abortion, for example. According to a prominent conservative thinker, “anyone should immediately be able to see that killing infants because they are unwanted is unacceptable” (emphasis added). The word “immediately” here suggests that it is our intuition, before any possible argument, that tells us that infanticide is impermissible. This is just one example of a common approach to (at least some) bioethical issues. Reliance on intuitive and emotive responses is widespread across many other areas of bioethics. The current debate on biotechnological human enhancement is particularly interesting in this respect. A strand of “bioconservatives” that has explicitly drawn connections to the modern conservative tradition, dating back to Edmund Burke, appeals to the alleged wisdom of our intuitions and emotions to ground opposition to some biotechnologies or their uses. Such reliance on intuitions and emotions is widely acknowledged as one of the distinguishing features of this conservative strand by both its supporters and opponents. Granted, a number of antienhancement positions exist that clearly do not fall within the conservative tradition of social and political thought—for example, positions that raise objections based on egalitarian arguments. What distinguishes the conservative strand examined here is, however, its focus on the methodology of bioethical discussion and particularly on the weight that intuitions and emotions should play in such discussion. Two argumentative strategies have been adopted to philosophically defend the role of intuitions and emotions in bioethical debates. The first strategy is to claim that at least some intuitive and emotive responses—particularly about “playing God” with human nature—capture something beyond our reasoning capacity that nonetheless expresses some form of not fully articulable “wisdom,” such as particular insights about human dignity. Michael Sandel has suggested that our capacity to grasp the wrongness of playing God with genetics is limited by the too-narrow language of modern ethics, which is based only on the three notions of “autonomy, fairness, and individual rights.” Leon Kass offered Don’t Mind the Gap: Intuitions, Emotions, and Reasons in the Enhancement Debate