The development of in vitro fertilization methods may lead to (...) parents choosing their baby's sex, eye color, hair color, height, whether to endow it with genes of a genius or a serial killer. They will be just like the creator of the Frankenstein's monster. What is the Frankenstein's monster, a literary description of a creature brought into existence against nature, if not a premonition of in vitro? (...) Life created by in vitro fertilization is a result of artificial manipulation as opposed to forces of nature.There's nothing about this particular quote that made me want to write about it; I've chosen it as a simple example of something larger. I'm quite convinced that future generations will be viewing such quotes with utter horror and disbelief, not so much at the ethical proposition that the speaker is defending, but at the pathetically low quality of arguments he's using in its defense. It's almost as if Pieronek thought that there's no place for reasoning in ethics and so there's no need for a logically coherent argument.
Let me count the ways in which Pieronek's arguments are too dumb to even be a start of a productive discussion. First, the part in which he compares in vitro fertilization to creating the Frankenstein's monster is not even an argument. It's a base appeal to emotions, namely to the primal emotion of disgust. That's no coincidence, because the fact is that a lot of what people consider universal moral intuitions is triggered by simple disgust that is then rationalized into a moral norm. For example, a lot of people feel disgusted at the thought of homosexual sex, and that disgust drives them to invent reasons why homosexuals are morally inferior to heterosexuals. Rationalization of disgust is a very well-know and well-studied phenomenon. There even are brain imaging experiments that vividly show the process taking place. The problem is that the disgust reflex is a very bad basis for moral judgments. For one thing, different people are disgusted by different things. For another, there exist aesthetically disgusting things that nevertheless are an unquestionable moral good, for example surgeries. Someone with a degree in ethics, such as Pieronek, should be responsible to know all this and be extra careful not to make ethical appeals to disgust.
Moving on to the parts of his interview that do contain some semblance of reasoning, by my count Pieronek manages to commit three logical fallacies in just a handful of lines of text. First, he commits the naturalistic fallacy by arguing that in vitro fertilization is morally wrong because it's unnatural. Take a minute to think about what it would mean to society if we were to apply this rule consistently. Our entire medicine, for example, is unnatural, so by Pieronek's logic we should never help anyone who's sick or injured because that would be against the will of nature. Second, there's fallacious use of the slippery slope argument when he says that the possibility of parents' choosing their baby's sex will lead to some parents wanting to endow their kids with the "genes of a serial killer" (whatever those may be). And third, there's classic cherry picking: he says that allowing parents to choose their kids' genes would lead to bad outcomes but says nothing of the fact that it could lead to good ones as well, because nature can be incredibly cruel in her own gene-picking; genetically inherited disorders cause an immense amount of suffering in the world.
People do what's expected of them. The fact that a respected public figure with an ethical authority in the eyes of many people feels completely comfortable saying things so blatantly stupid indicates that most consumers of public debate do not demand logic and reason from ethicists. That's a horrendous though, but it's obviously true, and there's much more evidence of it that than intellectually lazy rantings of a priest.
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