Inspired by her lifelong love of science fiction, with impressive erudition and in graceful prose, Eileen Hunt Botting carefully and thoughtfully examines “artificial life” in terms of several of the genre’s dystopian tropes: the end of humankind, the violation of the natural, and the elimination of love. The first one imagines a “future AI that might exhibit general intelligence, including, in its strongest form, consciousness” (p. 58), suddenly attacking its human creators. Botting rejects the motif as irrational apocalyptic thinking born of anthropomorphic biases. After all, superintelligence may “find it wiser to avoid conflict altogether” or “solve the problem of scarce resources differently than humans have,” or its ends may simply be “neutral with respect to ours” (p. 73). Mary Shelley subverts this first trope by demonstrating the “power of the imagination to craft problem-solving narratives that imbue hope rather than replicate fear” (p. 82). The third trope suggests that “technology causes the death of love and the demise of a prosocial morality”—or that a “lack of love spur[s] the development of technologies and practices of disconnection and brutality” (p. 19). It makes “simplistic distinctions between artificial and real,” “human and nonhuman” (p. 156), whereas someone who can “discern intelligence in a machine” can “feel emotion in relationship to it” and respond with “fellow-feeling” (p. 155). Botting’s thought-provoking alternative would have humans “strive to love, or least care for, those creatures for whom we are responsible” (p. 156). With limited space, in this review I focus on her book’s treatment of the second trope: what Botting calls “hacker literature,” applied to the ethics and politics of biotechnology.
The term bioethics first appeared in 1927. In the late 1960s the field itself emerged out of medical ethics for research and clinical practice. Today it examines normative issues generated by technical possibilities flowing from rapid developments in biology, medicine, and biotechnology. Botting’s reader may well wonder: Is Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, still the best belletristic treatment of current bioethical issues? The answer depends on how one reads Shelley and construes those issues. For Botting, “Frankenstein parses the possibility of devastating discrimination against a bioengineered child” (p. 112). In other words, the Creature, as a stand-in for genetically modified children, represents human subjectivity damaged above all by the absence of parental or guardian love and understanding—or children discriminated against because they have been modified genetically.
Botting does not address possible future developments in human genetic engineering; for example, with respect to intelligence, longevity, or athleticism. Her focus is narrow. It is on children today who have been engineered along one particular dimension: those made (as of 1997) from ooplasmic transfer, an early form of three-parent in-vitro fertilization (IVF). This procedure allows for selecting some of the embryo’s genetic traits before implantation in the womb toward preventing debilitating or deadly genetic disease in the future person but also of producing enhancements in appearance, capacities, or longevity.
Botting’s approach may then be read as a syllogism: (a) If the human child needs unconditional love if she is to have a chance at leading a healthy, flourishing life, and (b) if the Creature is comparable to genetically engineered children, then (c) we may read the Creature’s misery, leading to its murderous misdeeds, as a cautionary tale about the need for new rights for children produced through three-person IVF. Consider each of these propositions in turn.
(a) Inspired by Shelley’s perspective on her creation, Botting emphasizes normative issues of three-parent IVF from the recipient’s perspective (in the case of an embryo, the anticipated perspective of a future person). Growing up, that recipient is vulnerable to social, legal, and emotional exclusion. Botting also adopts Shelley’s standard of moral evaluation and social critique: the good parent practices “self-giving, life-engaging love” and, like a just society, “accept[s] the defects of self and other” (pp. 89–90). Most scholars in bioethics ask whether human genetic manipulation is ethical, whether it should be allowed at all, and, if so, to what ends and within what limits. Botting views the field of bioethics as biased systematically toward ethical concerns with the early embryo targeted for genetic manipulation and against ethical concerns with the genetically modified child. She argues that “Frankenstein and its literary progeny” encourages “an imaginative leap” required to correct this institutionalized bias (p. 102). She takes this leap by asking this question: How might political community (whether national, regional, or cosmopolitan) protect children, who had been manipulated as embryos by three-person IVF, from discrimination, neglect, and abuse by parents and by society, as Frankenstein can be read to have anticipated two centuries ago?
Yet Botting cites no reports of genetically modified children subjected to abuse or regarded as “unhuman or non-human” (p. 111). I know of none. Parents seeking the procedure presumably embrace the results that, in any case, lack the superficially repellent features of Shelley’s Creature. What the Creature signifies to Botting—the “idea that child abandonment and abuse is a miscarriage of justice of a fundamental order” (p. 87)—is not substantiated by the known experience of IVF children. In contrast, the standard of Botting’s critique would seem to be met in experience so far: parents and others connect with their “artificial creations,” materially and spiritually, “in the way that living parents share their children’s psychological and physical happiness as part of their own” (p. 130).
(b) How are infants and children like the Creature? Botting counts the ways. There are seven: young life, in a clinical setting, through science-guided biotechnical manipulation, using donor parts, toward improving one or more traits, rendered a chimera, and brought forth by assisted reproductive technology. According to Botting, the “50 to 100 children made by three-person IVF since 1997,” with the “DNA of three zygotes, with greater longevity due to the elimination of deadly or debilitating genetic diseases,” are genetic chimeras who, like the Creature, exist only as bioengineered life (p. 109).
But note two dissimilarities. Whereas the Creature’s characteristics are always clearly visible, the engineered children’s status as engineered is likely legally protected information. Further, that status is never apparent to the observer.
(c) The Creature itself describes what it takes to be its violated right: “to live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.” Victor Frankenstein’s denial of “this most basic right of the child” drives the Creature to behavior ever more monstrous (p. 87). Hence the Creature is not really the monster; the creator and the social environment are. In that spirit, Botting would extrapolate “the Creature’s cri de coeur” to a political right of the child heritably modified by three-parent IVF “to live, love, and flourish as such, between birth and adulthood, in conditions of nondiscrimination with regard to reproductive circumstances and genetic features” (p. 108). Botting imagines both a legislated domestic right and a human right.
Yet genetic modification that prevented debilitating or deadly genetic disease in a future person is not less eugenics because it is a humane form of eugenics. (And whether enhancements in appearance, capacities, or longevity constitute abuse is hardly self-evident.) Botting notes as much: there is no domestic, let alone international, agreement as to the moral status of the human fetus or embryo. For example, does personhood begin before birth? The ongoing project for human rights belief and practice provides no guidance. Does three-person IVF violate the future person’s “dignity and rights” (United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 1) or disregard familial entitlement to “protection by society and the State” (art. 16)? Does it satisfy conditions of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights of 1997? Article 12 specifies that the “applications of research, including applications in … genetics … shall seek to offer relief from suffering and improve the health of individuals.” Indeed, it urges that “benefits from advances in … genetics … be made available to all.”
But here it does not matter that terms from eugenics to human rights, from personhood to moral status, often are indeterminate in meaning and in practice. For Botting’s contribution to the debate lies along a different dimension: the “issue of the rights of the people already made” from reproductive interventions of “eugenics and genetic engineering” (p. 102). But given that genetically engineered children—those who are the issue of three-parent IVF—have not faced discrimination, her argument for the rights of genetically modified humans makes more sense as a proposal for possible future forms of artificial intelligence (a topic Botting discusses at length elsewhere in the book).
If AI could experience a sanction in the negative way intended by humans who impose it, should AI be legally subject to some of the regulations to which humans are now subject, such as fines or imprisonment? For the same reason, should it enjoy various rights? What of AI capable of morality and immorality and of AI committed to obeying the law? What if political communities had reason to accord AI a humanoid status because it was, say, capable of experiencing pain or suffering? Would it merit rights to physical integrity? Rights to be free from the infliction of suffering? In this context, Botting could deploy Frankenstein more effectively toward rights to protect intelligent, emotionally endowed digital machines from hostility and “devastating discrimination” (p. 112). For the Creature is better analogized to humanoid AI than to IVF children. And with that analogy, Botting’s insightful and learned approach might usefully anticipate possible forms of future abuse, indeed toward realizing her own project. Directly inspired both by Shelley and by Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, Botting develops that project in a coda: “to vindicate the rights of artificially formed beings who are ‘sensitive’ to the circumstances of their making” (p. 183).
