ABSTRACT
In 1995 the Banner Report of the Committee to Consider the Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies in the Breeding of Farm Animals, which had been appointed by the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was issued. The committee, while seeing no principle objections to the genetic modification of living beings, nonetheless set a remarkable example by acknowledging that there are some uses which are intrinsically objectionable, namely genetic modification of a type that ‘can be thought to constitute an attack on the animal’s essential nature’.1 The report does not tell us, though, how we should decide in which cases an animal’s nature is being attacked and in which cases not.2 Instead, an example of what is believed to be such an attack is given, namely using genetic engineering in order to decrease the sentience and responsiveness of pigs, so that they will move less and accordingly acquire weight more quickly. It is obvious that the committee did not think that the pigs in this case would suffer as a result of the operation performed in creating them. Rather, the rationale here is that the pigs now cannot do what they are, by their very nature, meant to do, that they cannot live the way they are, as pigs, meant to live. There is, in other words, a purpose somewhere, not in the individual pigs, that is, not consciously entertained by them, but notwithstanding in them, as part of their biological constitution which they share with other pigs. This constitution is conceived, not as something given, or static, but rather as a process directed to specific ends. When these ends are thwarted then the nature of the organism whose ends they are is said to be attacked. One could equally well say that the organism is forced to live in a way that is not appropriate to it, or a way that it, by its own intrinsic standards, should not live.
