Common Sense Must Tame the Science Genie : In the embryo dispute, scientific rationality is not our only source of knowledge.
President Clinton deserves credit for the leadership he displayed in unilaterally prohibiting federal funds for the creation of human research embryos. The President’s decision was issued on the same day that a federal advisory panel to the National Institutes of Health had voted to fund such research under some circumstances. Clinton’s action publicly overrode the prestige of the scientific research community in the name of citizen common sense.
Of course the recent election results played a role in stiffening the President’s spine. But he rose to the occasion and in the process illustrated the crucial importance of leadership.
The difficulty arises from the unquestioned authority enjoyed by science and scientists in contemporary society. This is one of the inevitable consequences of their central role in providing many of the tangible improvements in human life that we have come to enjoy and expect. But it carries a cost. When even the benefits of human life itself are to be determined by science, it is the ultimate case of the tail wagging the dog.
This is a pressure to which we are all more or less subject, for we have been brought up in a society that recognized only one definitive and unquestioned source of knowledge--science. It is difficult for even a President to take the lead in resisting what the particular scientific community declares to be necessary. Such resistance is bound to appear reactionary, a concession to brute political prejudice or an outburst of sheer irrational fear. The perception cannot be otherwise so long as we continue to recognize science as the one unchallenged source of knowledge, the only impartial font of reason. Disputes over the creation of experimental human embryos and other biomedical horrors will never be resolved until we recognize that scientific rationality is not the only source of knowledge available to us.
Science, even for scientists, is only a part of human life. It is a way of investigating reality through analysis and experimentation that yields insights and results of impressive reliability. As such, it occurs within the larger context of human life, which is structured by a common-sense understanding of who we are and what we owe one another. The benefits we expect to obtain from scientific knowledge make sense only in relation to this pre-scientific community of human life. Science does not create the human beings it purports to serve. If it loses sight of that context, then even science itself begins to lose its frame of reference.
Science itself makes sense, in other words, only within a human world that is already given. It is not the task of science to fundamentally create or shape that world; it must make its contribution to the existing reality of human beings. That means that science must recognize limits, moral and common-sense limits. Our difficulty as a society is that such limits cannot be justified by science and we have not granted comparable status to any other source of knowledge. The result is the confusion we witness in which science proposes to create some human beings in order to destroy them for the benefit of other human beings.
At root, the problem is not one of science but of politics. We must find a way of taming the genie of science, but it must be by virtue of an authority that claims intellectual priority, not merely a raw exercise of political power. In our society, political power can be sustained only if it is recognized as legitimate and reasonable. The limitation of science must be reasonable. What, then, can sustain the rationality of the President’s decision if it is cut off from the support of science itself?
If he and we wish to see such courageous decisions sustained, then two things must be explained. First is the necessity of eliminating the monopolistic status of science as a claim to knowledge; we have other sources of knowledge that are prior and more embracing and more inescapable. Second is to emphasize that the principal alternative form of knowledge available to us is common sense, including common-sense morality. Without it, we lose that instinctual cautiousness that has enabled generations of human beings to survive. We would become like the rats that are specially bred for laboratory experiments. For no naturally occurring species can be counted on to so incautiously and recklessly press levers, wander through mazes and suck on tubes as part of experiments in which they rightly suspect they will eventually be expended.
The value of such public controversies as this one over experimental embryos is that they remind us that humans are never merely components of the laboratory of science. Science must serve man, not the reverse.
