Interview by Julian Baggini

We all know we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. But with Mary Warnock a further caution is needed: do not judge an author's interests by her book titles.

The last time I spoke to Warnock for TPM it was about her anthology on women philosophers and it transpired that she had little interest in the subject at all. She happily admitted, unlike countless authors who do the same, that she wrote it because she was asked to and she needed the money. Now she has a new book out: Making Babies: Is there a right to have children? But despite the question of the sub-title, she would rather people didn't talk in terms of rights at all.

The book's main theme - the ethics of reproductive technologies - has been a mainstay of Warnock's work for decades. She chaired the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, which was set up after the birth of the world's first "test-tube baby" in 1978. The advent of in vitro fertilisation had caught professional medical ethics napping and the committee was charged to look into what regulations should govern these new techniques and the moral status of the embryos they created. Since then, reproductive medicine has continued to forge ahead and Warnock has remained pre-eminent among those dealing with its ethical implications.

Warnock has generally welcomed advances in reproductive technology, recommending clear regulations that, in many people's view, draw a sensible line between the permissible and the unethical. Nevertheless, she has become increasingly concerned about an unwanted side-effect of the availability of these techniques.

"I think there is an increasing tendency for people to demand medical or remedial treatment as if it were a right," she explains. "People are prone to think that they can have whatever they want as a matter of right, and having a child is sometimes what they overwhelmingly want. There really seems to me to be no justification whatsoever for bringing in the concept of rights in this case."

Warnock believes the root of the problem is a failure to understand the relationship between rights and duties. "I do not think that it makes sense to say that you have a right unless someone has a duty to make sure you get what you claim. For example, if you have a right of way over my property then it's my duty to ensure that you've got a free passage. If somebody has a right then he is claiming someone else has a duty to supply him with what he is claiming. But this is not always possible and if it isn't possible I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about the right to have a child.

"This led me to draw the distinction between the right to have someone try to help one have a child and the right to have the child, because there are limits beyond which the doctor or the clinic cannot be said to have a duty."

Warnock is concerned that the mentality of rights is having a damaging effect on the relationship between doctor and patient, and more generally on how we view life's vicissitudes. It encourages us to think about things as being owed to us which previously we would have been grateful for or seen as opportunities.

"You see people now sue or threaten to sue their school for not having taught them properly," says Warnock, by way of example. "We used to think we were very grateful for the education we got, or else that it was lousy education and we wish it had been better. But the idea that someone had a positive legal duty to supply one with what one wanted seems to me very peculiar. Part of what it is, I think, is a confusion between what you are entitled to as of law and what you very much want. It's very easy to confuse those two things.

"It enters into all kinds of areas, such as personal relationships. People say things such as they have a right to be told the truth. Well you want to be told the truth but who gave you the right to be told the truth? It sees to me that the language is aggressive, self-centred and is in danger of destroying concepts such as loving relationships or compassion, for example. The concept of the good Samaritan has really disappeared. The good Samaritan acted out of pure altruism, love and all those things. The bloke in the ditch had no right to be picked up, but he was picked up out of charity. That's a concept which is going, I think."

To illustrate this point, Warnock considers the question of disability rights.

"I think that the rather aggressive disablement lobby, for example, suggests that one is not allowed to pity or try to make things better for somebody with a disability, but that they as of right must be treated as absolute equals with everybody else. So it becomes very difficult to reintroduce the idea of helping somebody who is in difficulty or trying to make life better for somebody who is suffering from a disability, because the disabled lobby jumps up and says that's a patronising view and you've got to treat this person as exactly equal to yourself. I find it extremely difficult to handle, because it's an attitude of denial that there is such a thing as disability."

Making Babies is about much more than the question of rights, however. In it Warnock discusses several ethical issues concerning reproductive technologies and makes some controversial claims. One of these concerns sperm or egg donor anonymity. In 1984 her committee agreed that donor anonymity had to be preserved, mainly because if it were not, the number of people willing to come forward as donors would decrease. Subsequent experience in Scandanavia, however, suggests this is not in fact what happens when anonymity is removed. Warnock now not only argues for an end to anonymity, she describes the keeping secret of a child's biological origins as an "evil". Warnock explains that she was always uneasy about the committee's conclusion.

"The reason why I was uneasy has now become more important to me, which is that it's perfectly possible for parents to try and deceive their child who was born by donation altogether, largely because on the birth certificate the name of the non-biological father is given as the name of the father. I think there's a very strong case for having on the birth certificate 'by donation' whether or not the name of donor is to be given. I think it is an evil to bring a child up under a false impression or train him up in a false belief when the parents know the truth and the child is deceived. I didn't understand at the time how frequently this deception is attempted in the case of donation and I think that is something that ought to be legally brought to an end. It's no good just urging people to tell the child - you've got to take some definite step to make it impossible to deceive the child."

The use of the term "evil" is extremely strong, especially for Warnock, who is known for the balance and moderation of her judgements. Why had she chosen such a strong word?

"Because it is deception of a very long-term kind," she explains. "There are two things. One is the strictly utilitarian objection to deception of this kind which is that the child is almost sure to suspect, find out, or have to be told and this will be a great shock and the cause of a loss of trust between parent and child. But secondly, on a more abstract level of morality, whether the child finds out or not it seems to me intrinsically wrong that anyone should be deceived in this radical way because it suggests that the child is being sacrificed, or at any rate his interests are being taken less seriously, than the interests of the parents. And what is the point of the deception? Only that the child may not know that his father was incapable of producing sperm or was in some way impotent."

Another controversial issue concerns homosexuals' right to access reproductive technologies. Facilitating the growth of homosexual families is in her view a kind of social experiment, although not one that is ever going to be on a scale to radically alter the structure of society. Warnock finds no reason to oppose this. This is perhaps surprising, since in her autobiography she describes herself as a natural conservative. But in this case she seems to be following Mill's liberal view that we should allow social experiments in living.

"It does sound like a sudden switch to believing in On Liberty, which I don't," she concedes. "I don't greatly admire that work, although I admire it one way in that it was very bold and ground-breaking. I'm not sure that the contrast between conservative and liberal is terribly useful. I'm conservative in the sense that I don't believe that one can understand what's going on now or what ought to go on next unless one's got a very strong sense of history, how things arose and how they got to where they are. I'm greatly against, therefore, overthrowing without examining things that have taken root. But I think the argument here is that we really have very little evidence about what the effect on the child would be, and you really can't form moral judgements until you know what the facts on the ground are. Here we really don't. So one ought to allow this kind of experiment, which indeed it is, on the grounds that we know nothing against it.

"The only thing we do know from long experience is that a child in care is almost certainly going to be a damaged child, whereas a child that is adopted into a loving homosexual family might well not be a damaged child. The same sort of argument would go to permit assisted birth for homosexuals: if chidren can flourish in that sort of situation then they should be allowed to. I know the parallel with adoption is not exact because the adopted child exists already. But if the parents want this child very much and if it proves that they can manage children of this kind then it seems to me there is very little against it, because I have nothing intrinsically against homosexuality."

A third controversy is that she argues that it may be acceptable to allow human cloning only in the case of total male infertility and only if the technology becomes safe to do so, which she thinks unlikely.

"My view is that it would be totally immoral to attempt human cloning as things are but if, almost inconceivably, the practical difficulties were overcome, then one would have to raise the question again: is there anything intrinsically awful about cloning? To which I replied, no, in certain circumstances. I think we may have to raise this question. In a way it's an evasion to say it's immoral because it's dangerous and people shouldn't experiment with other people, and also now it's illegal in this country so we have a kind of breathing space. I do think the question of whether it is intrinsically immoral will have to be faced very quickly because I believe that the earliest cases of human cloning will come from the Far East. I think that in China they're forging ahead with this kind of experimentation, but it's very difficult to find out anything that's going on in China. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, within a decade, there were claims at any rate that human clones had been formed by cell nuclear replacement."

Talking to Warnock and reading her works, it is striking how much of what she says is based on what the actual facts on the ground are in comparison to most works of moral philosophy. One little known fact she mentions in Making Babies is that artificially created clones are not one hundred per cent clones at all because of the small amount of DNA in the mitochondrial cells of the outer shell used to house the egg. Does this emphasis on facts mark an important difference between the role of the professional ethicist and the moral philosopher?

"I still maintain that even in academic moral philosophy it is extremely valuable to understand what the facts on the ground are," she replies. "There has been an increasing use of real moral examples, all the way through the last century, at any rate from the 1950s onwards. I remember Jean Austin - J L Austin's widow - and I used to run a joint seminar in the early 1960s where we simply took moral difficulties and got people to say how they'd set about solving them and then examine what arguments they were overtly or unacknowledgedly solving them with. That was a fairly new thing to do then but I think it's become much more common, and it does entail thinking about all the facts. It's situational ethics, if you'd like to give it a name."

This fits in with Warnock's wider view that the two hats she wears - the moral philosopher and the professional ethicist - conceal a deeper unity of purpose.

"I'd like to think that they were the same job in different contexts. I think there's a frightful danger in constantly bashing on in public about what ought or ought not to be the basis of legislation or whatnot, the kind of thing I do. There's a great danger that you tend to think that you never need go more deeply into the things that you're talking about. The combination of what would count as proper moral philosophy and what counts as this journalistic stuff is terribly difficult. I was very much interested in Onora O'Neill's two recent publications. One was the Reith Lectures and one was a book that came out just before, I think. She had addressed this very problem -how to combine accessibility with a decent degree of rigour and the answer of proper objections. It is a very hard act to combine these two things in proper proportion and I think that she manages it very well. But I'm not sure that I, out of laziness and old age, don't slither down into the journalism more often than I ought."

Suggested reading
Making Babies, Mary Warnock (Oxford University Press)
A Memoir: People and Places, Mary Warnock (Duckworth)

 

War knocks

During our conversation Warnock voiced her concerns over the war on terrorism and what was at the time the increasing expectation that the US and Britain would attack Iraq.

"I can't see that the fact that some human beings are being badly treated somewhere or other could possibly be a justification for war unless it became clear that everyone in the world thought this was the only thing to do. This is why the thought of a war against Iraq without the United Nations seems to me to be absolutely monstrous."

One concern she has is that the increased stress on the rights of citizens creates a perception that foreign powers have a duty or concomitant right to uphold them.

"When people talk about countries that have a bad human rights record that presumably means that the government of that country is failing in that duty to people who belong to that country. But it's very dangerous to then go ahead and say that we all have this duty because that's what leads to people saying we ought to invade Afghanistan or whatever it is."

"There's such a muddle in what's going on in Washington," she later adds. "It's partly that the people of Iraq are supposed to be suffering, their human rights are being invaded or neglected. It's partly, of course, that the Americans feel that their right to live in security and not be threatened has been overthrown and that the terrorists, whoever they may be, have neglected Americans' rights to live peacefully, and that's why they have to be taught a lesson, so to speak. I find the thinking behind this warmongering talk very confused but also very frightening."