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9 What’s Wrong with Genetic Engineering? Ethics, Socioscientific Issues, and Education 131

public that bioengineering is fundamentally immoral (p. 40). In continually pitting
nature and culture against each other, we are also reinforcing an embedded value
judgment, where nature is typically viewed as intrinsically good and sanctified;
culture, not so much. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762/1979) employs such a dichotomy,
demonstrating the ideal of the inviolability of nature when he writes: “Everything
is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the
hands of man” (p. 37). For our purposes here, it is science and technology that
represent culture, while the species they manipulate through genetic variation
represent nature. This binary thinking leads to a value hierarchy: It is not right or
good, so it is widely believed, to “mess with Mother Nature,” especially with a
biogenetic procedure that allows scientists in laboratories to treat life as an assortment
of malleable chemicals. But once we take a moment to reflect on what we mean by
“nature” and “culture,” we find that this divide is not as tidy and clear-cut as it
appears, particularly as it relates to the subject of genetic modification.
As the “green” movement becomes more prevalent, individuals are becoming
more conscientious with regard to how their daily behaviors and consumption hab-
its impact Earth; yet the fundamental question of whether we should change Earth
seems to be answered by nature. Human beings – Homo sapiens, a species of great
ape, the family Hominidae – are like other nonhuman animals in that, by our nature,
we change and have been changed by Nature in order to survive. As Rollin writes,
“humans have been altering nature since they crawled out of the primordial ooze;
for better or worse, it is what we do, even as fish swim and birds fly” (p. 63). Of
course, this does not mean that we have remained intelligent or even commonsensi-
cal when altering the natural order of things; the ecological degradations and the
prices we might pay for our recklessness are becoming evermore apparent. It is
understandable to be resentful with the methods we have employed to transform
environments, but the act of transforming nature seems to be morally permissible.
When we act ecologically and socially irresponsible, are we acting immoral, per se?
For example, our building of roads and bridges, our domestication of animals and
plants, or just my breathing at this moment, all result in a change of the natural
elements. Human beings choosing reproductive partners is genetic manipulation in
some sense, but is this an act of “nature” or “culture”? Culture bleeds into nature;
it is indeed becoming nature. It seems unfounded, then, to argue against the genetic
manipulation of species because it is unnatural or somehow violates or alters
nature. Invoking the principle of the inviolability of nature to oppose genetic engi-
neering is undoubtedly a popular dialogical move, but is it one supported by a
convincing philosophical argument?
Some scholars (Smith 2003) disagree with the intrinsic wrongness of genetic
engineering, arguing that it is an impossible position to defend philosophically on
secular-nonconsequentialist grounds. Deontologists who want to make the case that
GMOs are universally immoral because they violate nature have a serious challenge
– one that puts them in a thorny situation of either deeming some fundamental,
time-tested human practices of other forms of genotype alteration as also inherently
immoral, or succumbing to the conclusion that biogenetic alteration is ethically
acceptable (albeit regulated, if desired). Kevin R. Smith denotes the crux of this
nonconsequentialist dilemma: