Human Dignity and Bioethics

344 | Susan M. Shell
Kantian principles will thus retain a sense of the ultimate mysteriousness
of life—not on dogmatically religious grounds but as an extension
of the speculative modesty that flows from a critical awareness
of the necessary structure and limits of human cognition. We cannot
help but understand our own organs and aptitudes as naturally
purposive in a way we are not free to disregard. To be sure, such understanding
does not meet the demands of objective scientific knowledge.
That the eye is “for seeing” cannot be established on the basis of
a mechanical science (or its contemporary equivalent). And yet this
assumption is, in Kant’s view, the indispensable subjective foundation
of any objective scientific inquiry into the processes of vision. 20
Man is not a brain in a vat; but he is also not a disembodied spirit
free to use the matter in which it happens to be housed any way it
chooses. Kant interprets this to mean that one must respect oneself
“as an animal being,” e.g., by not killing oneself or defiling oneself by
lust. It also means that one ought not employ one’s body in ways that
strike us as counter-purposive: e.g., committing suicide for the sake
of pleasure. Some of Kant’s arguments in this regard are no doubt
idiosyncratic, especially where sexual matters are concerned. Still,
the general point seems both valid and of potential bioethical significance.
Recognition of the impossibility, in principle, of reducing
life to a mere mechanism argues for humility when confronted with
new opportunities for genetic or other radical “enhancements” of the
human organism. Wherever we strive to exceed the standard set by
normal life functions (a standard roughly equivalent to “health”), we
risk grave harms that we cannot in principle foresee. *Ethical compunction
here conspires with ordinary prudence to urge the greatest
caution in engaging in experiments that exceed what natural functions
by themselves support.
A pragmatic orientation in Kant’s sense no doubt suggests other
ethical limits on uses of one’s body—proscribing, for example, sale
of organs or of services that drastically impinge on basic bodily processes.
21 Here fine distinctions may have to be drawn: selling one’s
hair or small quantities of blood differs from selling a kidney or contracting
to become a maternal surrogate. Still the implicit ethical
* One example: according to one very recent study, disabling the cell’s “aging”
gene—a procedure undertaken in the hopes of extending its life expectancy—
proves instead vastly to increase its susceptibility to cancer.