Deconstructing “Grown versus Made”: A Derridean Perspective on Cloning

Abstract

Most philosophers discussing genetic engineering, including cloning, assume the "grown versus made" opposition. Therefore, their stance on the ethics of both revolves around whether they privilege one side of this binary over the other. Part and parcel of the "grown versus made" opposition is the liberal notion of freedom of choice also assumed in these discussions. Most philosophers engaged in debates over genetic engineering and cloning begin with some version of a liberal sovereign individual who has freedom of choice that must be protected, whether we are talking about the parents' freedom (or lack thereof) in considering genetic engineering and embryo selection, or the future persons' freedom (or lack thereof) resulting from such a process. The central question in these debates is whose freedom is most important and thus who gets to exercise their free choice, and why. Although they have different answers to this question--John Harris opts for protecting parents' rights to choose, Jurgen Habermas for protecting the rights of future persons, and some feminists for guaranteeing women's rights to reproductive choice, all of them assume a sovereign individual operating either within a social situation that also makes them interdependent, or on an abstract level preferred by some philosophers to avoid the mess of the real world in favor of moral purity. (1) In this essay, I consider what happens to debates over genetic enhancement when we "deconstruct" the opposition between "grown and made" and the notion of freedom of choice that comes with it. Along with the binary grown and made comes other such oppositions at the center of these debates: chance and choice, accident and deliberation, nature and culture. By deconstructing the oppositions between grown versus made (chance versus choice, or accident versus deliberate), and free versus determined, alternative routes through these bioethical thickets start to emerge. On both sides of debates over genetic engineering and cloning, we see that philosophers assume a sovereign liberal notion of the individual who is free to choose, who can make decisions, and control the future. For philosophers like John Harris this is a good thing while for Jurgen Habermas and others it is not. Habermas imagines that genetic enhancement would make us masters of our destiny in such a way as to undermine the contingencies that make us free. (2) Yet, for Habermas, it is the authorship of one's own life and the ownership of one's own body that results in human agency, an authorship and ownership already at odds with the contigency he privileges. If we refuse the sovereign author/owner as our starting point, then the contingency of life (and of morality) is not merely the result of an autonomous agent stuck in a contingent world. Rather, the subject itself cannot, contra Habermas, escape the Other and others to which and to whom it is beholden; its existence is a contingency all the way down to the kernel of its subjectivity and agency. It is not that the subject (perhaps ala Sartre) is battling against a hostile or contingent world that threatens its essential and authentic individuality at every turn. Rather, the battle takes place within the subject--or better yet, constitutes the subject--who cannot be unified or reintegrated because its experience is fundamentally fragmented. Ethical responsibility, then, is neither the result of mastery nor of authorship, but rather of a response to the call from the other/Other. Harris, on the other hand, argues for mastery over the future as an ethical imperative, that is to say, we have an ethical responsbility to make better people through genetic technologies including cloning. He assumes that we can use our scientific knowledge to control the future of the human species, which is precisely what Habermas finds abhorent. But, only by starting with a notion of human agency as sovereign, as lording over nature, can we come to either of these conclusions. …