Dr. Michael Hanby argues IVF, since its 1978 debut, reshapes humanity by reducing children to "entities" and normalizing eugenic-like interventions—from disease resistance to altering traits like hair color or sexuality. He ties this to Elon Musk’s controversial gene-spreading ambitions and critiques modern tech-driven evolution, warning of Brave New World-style coercion where humanity’s actions outpace critical reflection. Unlike Bush’s bioethics panel, Hanby insists the solution lies in reclaiming humanistic reasoning and deeper education, not just policy, to resist dehumanization. [Automatically generated summary]
Technological Implications of Birth Technologies00:11:03
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Hanby, who writes on science and philosophy.
You know, I wanted to bring him on because so many important issues are facing us through different kind of birth technologies and genetic technologies.
In the 1950s, a very famous literary critic named Lionel Trilling wrote a book in which he said this.
He said, in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the only intellectual tradition.
It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.
The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated exceptions, express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures, which seek to resemble ideas.
I don't know if that was true in the 1950s, but I can tell you that it's true now of the left.
I really do not believe there are any ideas coming out of the left.
You know, when you talk about men can become women or, you know, they're trying to bring back some kind of socialism which has failed everywhere.
You're really talking about people who are fantasizing.
And like Trilling said, of conservatives in his day, there's just irritable mental gestures.
Be quiet.
You're a racist and all these things.
That means that the intellectual arguments on the right, if I can call it the right, or at least traditionalist and conservative ideas, are the only ideas in town.
And that makes it all the more important that we discuss the things that we disagree about.
And one of those things is about the future of transhumanism, of birth, of where, of genetics.
And Michael Hanby is an associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America.
And I've been reading his pieces, and he writes about these issues brilliantly.
So I wanted you to meet him and hear what he has to say.
Michael, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me on.
It's a real, real pleasure and honor to be here.
Well, you know, I was reading you.
I first discovered you in First Things, and you had written a piece there about IVF.
And I was reading this week in First Things an article about Elon Musk.
And they were talking about the fact that Elon Musk has babies out of wedlock because he's trying to spread his genes around because he thinks that, you know, the genes of someone as brilliant as his should be extended as far as possible.
And what's interesting to me about this is that the right is arguing about whether this is good or not.
There are people on the right who think, yes, yes, let's have the best genes possible.
And then there are a lot of people on the right saying, no, you should marry the woman that you have babies with and raise them and have them by natural means.
What do you think when you see something like that?
What goes through your mind when you hear a story like that?
Well, first of all, I haven't yet read that piece.
I've heard whisperings in the internet, I suppose, about this side of Musk.
And I don't know enough about him personally to want to sort of pronounce on his state of life in particular.
But as you've described, it represents about a 150-year-old sort of technological ambition that goes back to the turn of the 20th century to, in a sense, attempt to seize control and direct.
I mean, in fact, I would argue that it's inscribed in the origin of species and the descent of man in a pretty deep way.
But the idea that we could seize control and direct our own evolution in some ways.
And that we, you know, it's taken some time to arrive at the point where we think we might have the positive means of being able to affect that.
I mean, negative eugenics, so-called, simply, you know, preventing the so-called unfit from reproducing at a prolific rate has been with us for a long time.
Now, science seems to be placing into our hands capacities to tinker with ourselves as well as engineer those kinds of outcomes.
And so it wouldn't surprise me in general that somebody as deeply imbued with a technological outlook as Elon Musk is, in contrast to say, a more traditional or humanistic one, would think that way.
I mean, it fits logically.
But I don't know enough about his particular case.
I do think it's both very worrisome were that kind of attitude to take hold, and you could argue that it's present in, or the variations of it are present in much more subtle and nuanced ways, even built into our increasingly ordinary regime of pre and neonatal care.
That were this to really take hold, I think it would be worrisome both for the recognizably human shape of the human future.
It would represent a further submission of ourselves to technology, but I think it also has vast social and political implications that we tend not to think of because we tend to regard these things simply as matters of individual choice and not as a kind of aggregate social action.
The more children you have produced by technological means, the more they are produced by unusual combinations and circumstances, the more you have to both implicate the biomedical establishment and public health regime on the one hand and law on the other hand in the adjudication of all of this.
So it's an invitation, it seems to me.
I mean, we don't tend to think because we imagine ourselves as a kind of an 18th century image of liberal democracy, the constitution we would like to have rather than the one that we're actually governed by.
We don't tend to think that these kinds of decisions have political and social implications.
And I would suggest that they really do.
And so it would be deeply worrisome, I think, on both of those grounds.
Well, it's a really interesting point.
I mean, the things that we think of as deeply personal are also part of the social network and the political network.
You've written a lot about IVF and vitro fertilization, which is basically conceiving in a lab, right?
I mean, what exactly is IVF?
Well, I mean, I can only give you a kind of layman's description.
I'm not a scientist, but it is, I mean, you more or less captured it.
And there are actually a couple of different techniques for doing this.
I won't get into the technical differences between them, but it basically involves extracting women's eggs and then compelling, as it were, the fusion of gametes under laboratory conditions.
The embryos then are grown to a certain stage and then either implanted in the woman or in many instances where so-called spare embryos are created, frozen away for some kind of future use or perhaps no use at all.
So Donald Trump said we've got to protect IVF.
People want their babies.
We want more babies.
And I think we do want more babies, that's for sure.
But what do you think of this in terms, I mean, I get to ask this a lot and I really don't know how to answer.
What do you think about this in terms of the ethics of the process?
Yeah, well, I tend not to think of it so much in terms, first as an ethical problem, actually, as, you know, if I can use a somewhat large philosophical word on your podcast, as an ontological issue.
In other words, Embodied in these technologies, although often not explicitly stated, is a certain conception of human nature, actually, of what human beings are, and certain human archetypes.
And so, when you normalize this and treat it as interchangeable, which has been a process underway now since the perfection and the use of this technique in 1978, I think it was,
that you're effectively inscribing into our public consciousness and sometimes then into law, what I would argue is a kind of mechanistic or biotechnical conception of human nature that requires these technologies to bring them about.
And when I said earlier in response to your previous question, that we oftentimes don't think about the political and social implications of what we do.
One of my basic principles is that we know how to do things.
There's a structural discrepancy between our capacity to act.
Technology gives us this.
It's built in.
There's a structural discrepancy between our power to act and our ability to think, which means that we know how to do things to ourselves, to our children, to our children's children that we don't really know how to think about.
And we have all kinds of disincentives to thinking about them, both in our sort of structural form of public reason, but also the more these things become part of our normal way of life and kind of belong to an order of necessity.
Once every third or fourth person might have been conceived by IVF, it becomes a very difficult and delicate thing and painful thing to talk about.
And so we don't or to think about.
That becomes a disincentive to thinking about the full human and social meaning of having normalized and adopted these technologies.
And in the case of Trump's desire, and I saw this coming as soon as the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that formerly, that embryos were persons who could be harmed rather than simply property that could be damaged, that it would actually stimulate a cascade of Republican politicians falling over themselves to embrace IVF to show that we were still on board with this.
And I think that Trump's EO, which is very vague as I understand it, in what it proposes to do, to make it universally or more broadly available or more easily accessible, is probably the fruit of that political controversy.
And I think it's just ill thought.
It's ill considered because it doesn't take into account, I mean, it's odd given what I suggested previously about the biotechnical regime necessary to normalize this, that you would be trying on the one hand to reduce, limit, and gain control over the administrative state, while on the other hand, proposing something like universal accessibility or free, I don't, again, I don't know the specifics of the EO, but IVF.
I would suggest that those two things are not coherently related to each other.
And I doubt that the people in the Trump administration responsible for that have really thought through those implications.
Consequences of Dehumanization00:16:21
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Well, you know, first of all, that's a really interesting point that I completely agree with.
That not only do we not know how to think about these things, but we're discouraged from thinking about these things.
I mean, I think the minute you raise an issue, especially if it happens to be a spiritual issue, you're immediately surrounded by journalists showing you the tear running down the cheek of a woman who can't have children.
And you've already destroyed all her hopes and dreams, and you must be cast into exterior darkness or else you're destroying everything.
But on the other side of that, I do think we have to answer the question: if something is wrong with IVF, what is it?
What is the problem with a woman who can't have a baby saying, okay, let's do it this way?
Well, that's a multi-layered question.
And it seems to me that the gravity of what might be wrong with it increases probably the further you get away from the so-called, I'll say so-called for these purposes, the natural norm, right?
I mean, it's one thing to conceive of IVF as a remedy for infertility, right?
And that doesn't eliminate or the ambiguities, the moral ambiguities inherent in it, right?
Particularly when you stop to consider the fact that in this country, at least, it generally involves the creation of so-called spare embryos.
What's their status?
It also involves a kind of, insofar as the spare embryos go unused or are selected on the basis of their genetic profiles or the various tests, the sort of prenatal diagnoses that we can run to ensure that the healthiest ones.
I mean, there's something about presiding over the coming to be of your child in such a manner that is arguably structurally, not by matter of intent.
And I should say, I'll come back to this point about intent because it's very important, but is structurally despotic, you know, contrary to the nature of the being in question as a person.
You can't really regard the embryos that you're working on or selecting or testing in a laboratory as human beings at the point that you're treating them as something other or less or different than.
So there's that.
That's one dimension of it.
There's the question about we still don't know.
And I'm not a medical professional, so I'm not going to pronounce on this, but we still don't know.
And there are some, as I understand it, concerns about the long-term health effects of having been conceived this way.
We still don't know, and can't know in principle, couldn't know in principle, what those would be prior to having, you know, raised uh a generation of of such persons.
So there is also an experimental dimension to this um that would seem to be, you know, bioethically questionable um, um.
There are other aspects as well and and, of course, these technologies are not simply limited uh to a remedy for infertility, but they've made, in fact made possible um, all kinds of heretofore unseen combinations.
So, you know, it's a different level of question uh, when you start invoking things like uh, commercial surrogacy, for example yeah well, that is um, you know, and these these, these things beget each other.
They're very logic.
Now, I do want to go back and say something, lest I sound uncaring or insensitive or mean, which is, you know, an accusation that you inevitably invite when you start talking about this, which I'm not.
Which is that I know that, and I know quite well, that the struggle and the pain of infertility is crushing.
And I understand the desperation to have a child, and I understand how almost irresistible.
um the desire to, to to um, uh resort to these technologies are to to alleviate the problem, and I would certainly never ask ex post facto.
You know uh, and I mean, this is one of the impossible situations I think these existential situations these technologies create.
I mean, let's say there is something really grave about this.
But you've done it and now you have a child that you love more than your own life.
You know who would ever ask anyone to to regret that I wouldn't um.
So here again we have another profound disincentive um to to to thinking about this.
I, you know, I understand the desperation that makes this such an attractive possibility.
Um, I really do um, but there's the.
The thing about desperation is that it tends to blind right, it tends to blind.
You know, it puts blinders on us to the, to the full nature of our, of our deed, and a full nature which is arguably already hidden from us by the structural discrepancy that I mentioned before, by the fact that you know the implicit the, the downstream implications, not only for myself as an individual chooser, but for a society that that um, uh adopts this as uh, a normative, in fact, in some cases, preferential.
I mean, you can read plenty of of uh, of biotech futurists who argue that in the future, whether this is statistical or archetypal, it was a, you know it's an interesting question but that in the future um uh, traditional procreation will be viewed as the irresponsible option because you have no quality control right uh, whereas in in, in ivf, as our diagnostic capacities increase, you do, and so if you have the kind of ambition that you were describing before in the case of Elon Musk to,
you know produce um, not only you know, human beings from a superior genetic lineage, allegedly um, but also the, you know the best of the best within that lot right or to, or to be able to tweak it in such a way as to to, to produce other desirable characteristics, characteristics, then this will be the preferable mode.
So I may have drifted from your original question a bit, but you made the point that it's kind of a spectrum that once you start regarding babies as entities rather than as human beings, it's a long road, but it does kind of create this continuum that makes it very difficult to reason about from an ethical perspective in the sense that, well, if I can stop a child from being born, you know,
genetically prevent a child from being born with some terrible disease with spina bifida or something like that, should I do that?
But then should I also be able, going from there, should I also be able to make him blonde and blue-eyed?
Should I stop him from being homosexual?
Should I stop him from doing all kinds of things that, you know, being all kinds of things I don't want and make him what I do want, which does seem dehumanizing.
And yet you started with a technology that prevents some horrible disease.
Is there a point where you would say, yeah, go ahead and do that.
That's important.
Like, is it important that if you can raise, create a child who isn't susceptible to cancer?
Great.
You know, would you say, okay, with that?
I'm okay with that, or is that part of the continuum?
I would not be okay with that.
Really?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that for one thing, I mean, you know, Hans, first of all, it's an interesting question how you could, I'll use this language, you know, engineer a child who was impervious to or had an inbuilt capacity to resist certain cancers without affecting his epigenetic structure overall, because it's not as if there's just a gene for cancer that's unconnected to everything else.
It's impossible for us to know what the global phenotypic results of these kinds of interventions are.
I would argue something similar is almost certainly the case also, by the way, with the administration of sex hormones in so-called gender-affirming care.
There are global issues here that we tend to bracket out in undertaking these kinds of things.
But there are two issues here, it seems to me.
One is that, you know, well, there are many issues.
I mean, there's also the question of, and we're not at all adept of thinking about this in the modern world, is whether there are just intrinsic natures and goods and limits that themselves ought to be respected.
In other words, instead of arguing in terms of the possible consequences, is it simply the case that human beings are the kinds of beings who shouldn't be tampered with in this way, irrespective of the consequences?
And that then gets into both metaphysical questions about whether there is such a thing as human nature or whether human nature is just biochemical and mechanical well-functioning.
And it also ultimately gets into questions that are generally excluded from our public and political conversations about whether anything, whether the category of the sacred has any validity.
Well, you know, yeah.
But let me let me let me finish one more aspect of your question, though.
Back to the consequences.
A thinker who you're probably familiar with, given what I know of your own interests, who has influenced me greatly, Hans Jonas, who was one of the first and I think most profound people, one of the arguable founders of bioethics as a form of philosophical thought, made the observation that unlike what he called dead matter engineering, building a Ford F-150,
you can't recall scrap populations.
So once you've re-engineered people in this way and introduced them into the stream of life to live their lives and to propagate their results, You've lost control of the deed as soon as it leaves your hand.
This is part of that structural discrepancy that I mentioned before, is that we just can't, we're not in control of the actions that we commit on this scale.
And that's one of the things that we're sort of have a principled blindness to.
That would be another reason to be deeply cautious about this.
It would also be the case that the first children engineered to be cancer-free, let's say, or to be resistant to these kinds of chapters, would by definition be experiments.
And so, you know, is it ethically valid to live and to be conceived in a way as someone else's science experiment?
You know, I was reading a piece by you where you mentioned Brave New World, a dystopian novel that I find very, I find actually profound.
Most dystopian novels aren't, but Brave New World actually is.
One of the things I found profound about it, for those who haven't read it, it's about a future world in which babies are produced in test tubes, essentially, and they're genetically engineered to be in the right class to fill in the spaces that they need.
Sex has become a simple, meaningless exercise, and people are living lives fueled by dope, which makes them feel good, a drug that makes them feel soma, which makes them feel good.
And entertainments of various kinds.
Yes.
But the thing that was shocking about that book to me, and the thing that I love about that book is when they go back into the areas that have not been affected by these obviously horrifying perfections, they go back into what they call the savage lands.
They're awful.
I mean, they're just awful.
And you can suddenly understand why they took the steps they took to create this sterile, inhuman environment.
And so it was almost like they give you a choice between the horror of primitive life and the horror of futuristic life.
And so I wonder, I guess, is there, do you have a philosophy of moving forward in the world?
Because we are going to move forward.
Is there a way of deciding which roads to take into the future and which ones not to take?
How do we do that?
That's not an easy question by any stretch of the imagination.
And I don't have an answer to it.
I don't think, I don't know that I get this kind of question from my own students all the time, right?
What do we do?
And oftentimes what happens or what's presupposed in the question, and I'm not deconstructing your question here, but oftentimes what's presupposed is that technology and biotechnological possibilities lie before us outside us like so many sort of discrete things to choose about.
They're tools that are neutral in themselves that can be used for good or for ill.
And we have to decide and make judgments about, you know, is a little bit of IVF good, but not too much?
Or, you know, those kinds of things.
And, you know, there's no doubt that we do have to make those kinds of decisions because technology is faster, technological development happens faster than we can think.
But I don't think that picture adequately represents all that technology is for and to us, which is like now a second nature in the world in which we live and move and have our being and shapes us quite profoundly.
And going back to the Brave New World, which I also love, and it's interesting, you know, Huxley and Orwell had a kind of argument about who had the better depiction of the future.
Huxley, of course, thought he did.
And we may, in fact, be experiencing or having experienced in the last decade or so, something of a fusion of the two.
But one of the things that I find so interesting about The Brave New World is that The citizens, as it were, of it, of this technocracy, who are being conditioned to behave, not act, but behave in accordance with its norms, don't know, never even realize they're being coerced.
They don't know what they're missing.
The person who comes from the island, John the Savage, who wants God and sin and pain and all those things and Shakespeare and the Bible and wants to sort of prostrate himself before the eternal feminine of this poor woman who can't even understand the difference between love and light.
The only character I identified with, by the way.
Yeah, John the Savage.
John Savage's Despair00:02:23
Good for you.
You know, that what's interesting is the way that, and this is a persistent concern of mine, and it's a concern in the pieces that you've referenced, actually, that's something that I try and draw out.
Is this the implications of this relation, I call it the proportional relation between our power and our stupidity, or our capacity to act, the disproportion between our capacity to act and our capacity to think, which is they lose their capacity to see.
They lose their capacity to think and to understand what they're doing and what's being done to them.
And to answer your question, then to go circle back to your question about what we do or how to approach this, I'm not sure at the practical level, we can necessarily do much, right?
I mean, I think there's something about the direct, you know, there's something about the process of technological development as a social process and as our collective raison d'être that takes on a kind of life of its own that each of us individually is more or less powerless to do anything about.
How do we then prevent ourselves from being like the citizens of the brave new world who don't know what they're missing?
And to me, the answer is that we have to try and understand it, right?
I mean, we have to try and more deeply understand the nature of our situation, the nature of the powers that we possess, the way those same powers govern us.
And so, you know, that's an essentially, and I don't mean this in a sort of technical academic sense, but that's an essentially philosophical act or disposition.
We desperately need, to my mind, a kind of intellectual reawakening.
We need to reconceive the nature of education.
We need to recover despised humanistic forms of reasoning.
We need to rescue the humanities from critical theory and try and save our souls and perhaps liberate ourselves to whatever degree is possible from the machinations of the brave new world or the new Atlantis by contemplating them, by understanding them, by thinking more deeply about them.
That's at the very least, a necessary condition, if not a sufficient one.
Without that, there's no hope.
Reconceiving Education00:01:31
You know, that actually is a great answer.
We're out of time anyway, so I'm going to end it there, but that is a great answer because I think you wrote a piece about the fact that George W. Bush had a panel to talk about the ethics of bioethics, and that has been vanity.
It has vanished without a trace.
It's just been disassembled.
The high point.
I mean, if you read the volumes produced by that, this is kind of the conceit of that particular piece, but I'm convinced that 150 years from now, someone is going to look back at this and say, this was the high watermark of American government documents.
This was the point where they actually tried to think about what they were doing.
And they blew it.
But there was a moment there where they tried.
All right, we're talking to Michael Hanby, an associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America.
I found him in First Things, but you can find him online and read his pieces, which are beautifully written and really well considered.
It's been a delight talking to you, Michael.
Thank you for coming on.
I enjoyed myself tremendously.
Thank you very much for having me.
I hope we get to talk again.
Okay.
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
It's always nice to talk to somebody who's actually thinking about things and not just taking a side.
Again, that was Dr. Michael Hanby from the Catholic University of America in D.C. Beautiful, beautiful campus, really interesting college with a lot of good things to talk about and good people there.