Week 2

There are several inconsistencies in both liberal and conservative discourse. Though many of these inconsistencies are resolvable given further distinctions; some are not. For example, in developing his moral anthropology, Cohen attempts to present what makes humans distinct from animals.

“We are special animals, separated by distinct powers of reason and by our moral aspirations and moral failings. the other animals live outside of good and evil-”

In my view Cohen makes this claim to hastily to consider cases where a biological human is unable to acquire or has no need for a classical moral tradition. Cohen recognizes this and treats these cases to the prescription that they are “human lives”, the term that only had two dimensions: the biologic and the ethical. Cohen leaves this fallacy by allusion to a vague biological notion that is particular to humans. Here unattended, one is left to assume that what makes a life human is first genetic, as no arguments can be made about the dependence of a moral tradition being to the equality of all humans. Macklin identifies this type of metaphorical reasoning as the main impasse to the conservative tradition of bioethics to having a constructive discourse with the established liberal and communitarian ideologies.

“But these criticisms seem misguided: first the council’s willingness to ask fundamental questions about “being human”- questions about birth and death, equality and community, happiness and excellence- shows it takes the discipline of bioethics seriously; it properly begins with an account of the human person as an ethical animal, and that without a moral anthropology it has little useful to say.”

   Its trivial to say that without moral anthropology you can’t apply moral anthropology to a moral anthropology. A normative moral anthropology defined by Macklin and any others- in pluralism; will inescapably be driven by ideology. Egalitarianism becomes myth when it is applied to issues, for which there are resulting a paradox’s that have to be resolved by arbitrary distinctions. What is egalitarian about the right of a pregnant women to save her life by aborting her baby, while barring someone from the possibility of life by restricting the use of embryonic stem cells?

    Cohen characterizes Conservatives’ embrace of the “culture of life” as accepting the human reality of mortality as always preferable to betraying “our neighbors, our family, or our nation.” How are the cases of Terri Schiavo and those presupposed by life extension technologies different? Cohen only addresses the case of embryonic stem cell therapy, for which his case is based on the principle that all humans are created equally.

Ecclesiastes 3:18-21: “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals.  Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath (literally “spirit“); humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

Cohen’s sentiment that human sexuality is clearly different than animals is born out of  his ignorance of the various behavioral and chemical mechanisms utilized by animals to the same end. I guarantee that some humans indulge in “merely the animalistic character of sex”. So it is seen that if all humans are created equal- intrinsically,  the “culture of life” embraced by conservatives is posited conditionally on DNA alone. The human genome is a very fickle thing to condition anything on. Quantitatively, a healthy human has about as much in common with a Bonobo then it does a person with Down’s syndrome.