Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (10 page)

Such egregious errors in reasoning are tellingly satirized in
Planet of the Apes
, when Zaius affirms that Taylor's use of language does not prove that a human has linguistic ability! What leaps to mind is the ancient account of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus's dictum that “You can't step into the same river twice.” His student, Cratylus, eager to go his master one better, resoundingly declared that “You can't step into the same river
once,
” which is of course utter nonsense! Proudly resting your position on the presence of pain on a confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions is as absurd as saying that a being who uses language is incapable of speech.

For most of human history, human superiority to the rest of the animal kingdom was assured by the alleged presence of an immortal soul in humans but not in animals. In the hands of Descartes, and through the present day, the uniqueness of
humans has been vested in the presence of language, now that belief in the soul is scientifically unacceptable. To this day, for much of the scientific community, attribution of thought or feeling to animals commits the career-killing fallacy of ‘anthropomorphism', though of late, the psychiatric community has begun inexplicably to seek animal models of psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia and depression, both of which are majorly defined in terms of subjective experiences.

The ability of too many scientists to deny that animals have thoughts and feelings, while quietly assuming in their research that animals do have thoughts and feelings, helps us understand how Zaius can be Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, for there is much in scientific ideology that is reminiscent of religious ideology. Consider the claim that only experientially verified judgments are scientifically admissible. Yet such judgments are built upon the observations of individual scientists, which are instances of their subjective experiences. If science is to describe an objective world independent of our subjective experiences, science cannot be based in reports of experiences by scientists, these experiences being inherently
subjective
. In other words, if extreme positivism is true, a science of the objective world is impossible. And this in turn begins to sound a good deal like religious ideology.

David Hume once remarked that, while the mistakes of religion are dangerous, the mistakes of philosophy are merely ridiculous. The mistakes of ideology—both scientific and religious—are both ridiculous and dangerous. The two mutually reinforcing components of scientific ideology, namely the notion that science is value-free and ethics-free, and that science must be agnostic about consciousness, taken together have caused incalculable damage to science, society, and human and nonhuman animals. Yet the powerful hold of scientific ideology upon its adherents remains largely invisible to scientific practitioners, and also to the general public except in cases where science fails to grapple with the ethical issues raised by its activities. In this regard,
Planet of the Apes
can serve as a valuable lens focusing light on the hitherto ignored.
¹

________

¹
Thanks to Sharon Cebula, Pete Weiss, George Reisch, and Joanna Trzeciak for helpful feedback.

M
ASSIMO
P
IGLIUCCI

“N
o!” The sudden and peremptory issuing of that simple command is one of the most startling moments in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
. Caesar, the genetically enhanced chimpanzee who resulted from the ethically questionable experiments stands up against one of his human tormentors and shouts “No!”

Should we do the same about the whole forthcoming enterprise of biological enhancement of the human race? Or should we instead embrace it to boldly go where no human or chimp has gone before?

One reason to lean toward banning enhancement may be that it is unnatural, even ungodly. The whole idea seems to violate what God or natural selection ordained for us, to be an exercise in the kind of hubris that the ancient Greeks constantly used as the underlying theme for their tragedies, of which
Rise
can be seen as a modern incarnation.

In the movie, Will Rodman, the charming scientist who works at the Gen-Sys company to develop the drug ALZ-112, is trying to cure Alzheimer's, one of the most devastating of human diseases, which he knows first-hand because his father is afflicted with it. But, just as in any good Greek tragedy, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Rodman's doings lead first to a revolt of a band of apes, then to death and destruction, and finally—in an obvious setup for the sequel—to the destruction of the entire human race by means of an out of control virus, originally designed by Rodman himself as a better delivery vehicle for the cure. Sophocles and Euripides would have been pleased!

The “God/natural selection didn't want this” objection, however, cuts very little philosophical ice these days. The reason's the same regardless of whether you're a religious believer or not. The history of human science, technology, and medicine is a history of defying whatever constraints have been imposed on us by gods or nature, so unless you're also willing to stop cooking your food, flying on airplanes, or taking advantage of vaccines, you do not have much of a philosophical leg to stand on.

That last example (vaccines) is particularly interesting from the point of view of discussions of biological enhancement. One of the more thoughtful objections raised to the idea of enhancement is that it is somehow more problematic—ethically or otherwise—than the standard business of medicine: curing diseases. But the difference between cure and enhancement may not be quite so straightforward. As Eric Juengst has pointed out in a 1997 issue of the
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
, getting vaccinated doesn't cure anything, it increases your chances of avoiding a future disease by enhancing the natural capacities of your immune system. Granted, this kind of enhancement—unlike Caesar's stunning intellectual abilities—is not passed to your offspring, who will have to acquire it anew by means of vaccination. But this is a distinction without much of an accompanying ethical difference.

Here is perhaps an even better way to appreciate the problem, this one proposed by Norman Daniels in his 1985 book
Just Health Care
. He compares the imaginary cases of two boys who are both destined to reach a very short physical stature as adults. In one case, let's say Peter's, this is because of a deficiency of human growth hormone, resulting from an otherwise benign brain tumor. In the second case, say Johnny's, the problem is instead caused by the fact that the boy simply has short parents, and has therefore inherited a genetic set that does not allow for much growth.

One way to look at the difference between Peter and Johnny is that solving Peter's problem requires curing a disease, in this case the tumor that is blocking the release of growth hormone. Johnny, however, will actually require a genetic engineering intervention that amounts to an enhancement, since there is no disease to cure. But there seems to be an inconsistency here:
in both cases what we are trying to achieve is a normal height for the boy in question. What difference does it make what is causing the abnormal growth? Whatever it is, we want to get rid of it to help both boys have a normal life. Whether we call it a cure or an enhancement seems to be verbal hair splitting, not a real issue.

Then again, just because one can imagine scenarios where there's no difference, or only a difference of degree, between cures and enhancements, that doesn't mean the point is moot. Consider this famous paradox, attributed to Eubulides (a contemporary, and harsh critic, of Aristotle): a man with a full head of hair is obviously not bald; losing a single hair will not turn him into a bald man; yet, if the process is reiterated a sufficiently high number of times (as unfortunately is the case for a lot of us), he will be bald.

We all acknowledge the difference between bald and non-bald men (don't we?), and yet we can't tell where exactly baldness begins or ends. The same could be true for the difference between cure and enhancement: the fact that such a difference is anything but obvious in the case of Peter and Johnny doesn't mean that the difference itself doesn't exist in principle, or that it does not matter in practice. For instance, should we one day be able to implant gills in a human being so that she can breathe underwater, there would be no disputing that the gills are a most definite example of enhancement, not any kind of cure.

As it turns out, our hero, Will, appears to be aware of the difference between cure and enhancement. In explaining his actions to his girlfriend, Caroline, he says “I designed [the procedure] for repair, but Caesar has gone way beyond that.” And later on to Gen-Sys CEO Steven Jacobs, in order to convince him to back his research again after an initial failure: “My father didn't just recover, he improved.” Indeed, while Will's father had been (temporarily, as it turns out) cured of the disease and then had gone beyond simple recovery, Caesar was, of course, not sick at all to begin with: genetic engineering, in his case, had made it possible for a chimpanzee to think, and eventually talk, in a way that no member of its species had ever been able to do before. Clearly a case of enhancement, if you believe that having the ability to think and talk is a good thing.

But, you could ask, what exactly is the problem with enhancing the human race? Having set aside concerns about violating divine or natural laws (because we do that all the time anyway), what reasonable objection can be raised?

Well, an obvious concern arises from several bits of dialogue in the movie. At one point, for instance, Jacobs, Gen-Sys's CEO, admonishes Will to “Keep your personal emotions out of it, these people invest in results, not dreams.” A bit later on, Robert Franklin, a compassionate technician who works with Rodman, brings up the issue of animal welfare, saying that “There are lives at stake here. These are animals with personality, with attachments.” To which Jacobs harshly responds: “Attachments? I run a business, not a petting zoo.”

Or remember this bit of patronizing explanation from Jacobs to his chief scientist: “I'll tell you exactly what we are dealing with here. We are dealing with a drug that is worth more than anything else we are developing, combined. You make history, I make money.” (I have to admit that it is therefore very satisfying to see, toward the end of the movie, one of the mistreated apes plunging Jacobs and the remains of his helicopter into San Francisco Bay from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.)

In other words, a major worry about giving free rein to research on human genetic enhancement is that it will likely be dominated by greed and industry secrecy. Well, that's just capitalism, we could reply, and the system has worked well enough for all sorts of products that have enhanced our lives, from cheap and durable cars to phones that appear to be smarter than some of their users.

Still, there are a number of philosophical reasons to worry about letting the free market run amok with altering our species's genome—other than the apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario hinted at toward the end of
Rise
. For instance, Michael Sandel, in his 2012 book,
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
, argues that we as a society ought to impose limits on what can and cannot be commercialized, perhaps including the manipulation of the human genetic heritage. While Sandel's claim may sound radical in this era of hyper
market liberalism (at least in the United States), a moment of reflection will show that we already do not allow for the sale of a number of things—votes and babies come to mind—on the sole ground that we think that commercializing those things is simply ethically unacceptable. It then becomes a matter of not whether there should be restrictions, but what they should apply to and how.

François Baylis and Jason S. Robert, in their 2004 article, “The Inevitability of Genetic Enhancement Technologies,” published in the journal
Bioethics
, provide an extensive list of additional objections that have been advanced against enhancement (the title of their article notwithstanding). These include: unacceptable risk of harm to human subjects (remember, in
Rise
, Rodman's father and lab tech die, and as of this writing, it's a safe prediction that there are plenty more casualties to come in the sequel,
Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes!); the possibility of a threat to genetic diversity (because everyone will end up wanting the same popular enhancements); the undermining of our genetic heritage (assuming one should really be concerned about such thing—though we're clearly preoccupied with preserving the genomes of other species to conserve biodiversity); counter-productive societal results (let's say we “cure” aging: how do we deal with the resulting population explosion, given that people will presumably still want to have babies?); the fact that enhancement may not be the best use of our resources (after all, we still have widespread famine and poverty throughout the globe); a widening of the already large gap between haves and have-nots (think of another sci-fi masterpiece:
Gattaca
); the resulting promotion of social conformity; the undermining of people's free choices (if most people are genetically engineering their children to be taller, your parents will be in a bind if they refuse to go along, since that puts you at a disadvantage); the moral worth of the means by which we achieve our goals (if all athletes are genetically engineered for top results, why give them medals, and why bother watching their performances?). As you can see, it is a long list, and although some of the items may pose less serious problems than others, it clearly shows that there are, indeed, problems to be reckoned with.