If someone said they found interracial marriages or gay sex disgusting and believed it should be banned for this reason, would you take them seriously? I thought not, yet Eleanor Mills in The Sunday Times believes that a sensible way to handle the sensitive legal and ethical issues surrounding assisted reproduction is to base it on her own gut reaction to such practices.
Mills describes the recent revolutionary mother-daughter uterus transplants in Sweden as being "unsettling" before stating: "the idea of maternal 'womb service' is a step too far: it fails the yuck test, which measures one's instinctive reaction to such an ethical question and is often a good guide to what society will tolerate." She believes that the practice of commercial surrogacy also fails this "yuck test" and "seems profoundly wrong." But things that seem wrong to most of society sometimes turn out not to be when given more than a split-second of thought. Is a "yuck test" a good way to determine the ethical and legal permissibility of any given conduct?
Let's take the uterus transplant and surrogacy that Mills objects to. I have no problem either. Most of the problems linked to commercial surrogacy are caused by the legally confusing, messy and emotionally-draining battles resulting from a regulatory void we have in this country. As for womb transplants, although I agree with Mills that it might be more rational for these women to adopt or foster, provided the good outweighs the harm I fail to see what is wrong with it. Both practices pass my yuck test, yet fail Mills's. Unless one arrogantly believes that their opinion is correct merely because they are saying it, we need a way to resolve the problem of when different intuitive reactions come into conflict.
To do this we cannot resort to moral relativism and hold that there are no objective ethical principles and therefore we should respect all opposing views equally. It is simply incoherent to say that there are no moral truths and that it is an objective truth that we should respect opinions no matter what the content of them. Instead, the way to settle such clashes is through rational argument. There may be plenty of good moral arguments against implementing new reproductive technologies but if we resort to a "yuck test" instead of making them we will never know whether they might have radically improved our lives.
Indeed, organ transplants and the use of stem cells were both regarded as grotesque in some quarters (and still are today) but we do not believe lives should be sacrificed in order to pander to people's unfounded intuitions. If previous generations had discarded logic and a yuck test was able to fetter the realisation of new ideas and technologies then we would all have a much more wretched existence (Indeed, if medicine was that primitive, many of us would probably not exist at all). Yet despite inveighing against dumbing down in previous columns, Mills tries to make a virtue of ignorantly not thinking things through, even when the result of such thought processes justifies interferences with people's liberty and making their lives a misery.
Although some people might find it "creepy to have inside you the womb from whence you came", there are all sorts of things that we find distasteful, such as people sticking surgical instruments into their uretha or wearing Crocs, but are not necessarily morally wrong. As Professor John Harris has stated, "The difficulty is, of course, to know when one's sense of outrage is evidence of something morally disturbing and when it is simply an expression of bare prejudice or something even more shameful."
Until Mills is ready to construct an argument for why these particular assisted reproductive practices should not be permitted, she provides us with no reason for why her views should be accepted by anyone else. Rather than cherishing our unthought-through intuitions we should carefully consider the ethical arguments for given conduct before we even begin to attempt regulating it. But, then again, I would say that: kneejerk responses that discard logic and evidence always seem to fail my own personal yuck test.