In Plato’s Republic, a dramatic turn takes place at the beginning of the fifth book. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates analogizes between the soul of a human being and a city, constructing a perfect “city in speech,” the Kallipolis. As a city has parts that must be in order to be just, so too with the soul. Having demonstrated, Socrates thinks, that justice is in reality about the proper order of the soul, how one orders one’s internal life rather than primarily about external action, Socrates declares he is ready to discuss deficient types of souls by comparison. His interlocutors resist. They want to hear more about this hypothetical city, this analogy to a just soul. What will its rulers be like? How will it be and remain perfect? The story is incomplete, their curiosity unsatisfied. 

Socrates also resists. He declares that he is being asked to move from the realm of knowledge into the realm of opinion—to speculate, in other words. His friends are immovable. Socrates relents, but not before warning his interlocutors that things are about to get very, very weird. First, Socrates says, the rulers of the city must live in absolute equality, judged only by their fitness to rule and not by their sex. This will require men and women to be educated together. To be educated together in this sense would be to be educated in both music (intellectual arts) and gymnastics (physical arts). That is, in the perfect city, men and women will be made to exercise together. This being ancient Greece, the implication is “exercise together nude.” 

This is, of course, shocking, but Socrates proceeds to the next proposal, which is shocking in a different way. In the perfect city, reproduction must be managed closely, not allowed to happen when people choose but carefully regulated for eugenic purposes. The right people must copulate at the right time to produce the right offspring; those offspring will then be raised in common by all members of the ruling class. In two radical proposals, Socrates has obliterated social and political distinctions on the basis of sex and nixed the traditional family structure, favouring instead scheduled sex and communal child care. The perfect city, it seems, must turn what were previously considered “private” matters into “public” ones. The scandal of Socrates’s Kallipolis is that it conflates the spheres of family and city by having the best city regulate the sexual and reproductive habits of its citizens, not just by generally applicable law but to the extent of geometric precision. 

If this proposal seems absurd in a serious philosophical dialogue, it should. It is intended to shock and provoke. Think of a similar policy that forms the comedic hook of Aristophanes’s comedy Assemblywomen. After sabotaging their husbands to keep them home from the work of legislating, and subsequently dressing in their husbands’ clothing, the wives of Athens take seats as legislators. The newly female-dominated legislative assembly immediately begins making coercive and intrusive sexual regulations designed to benefit neglected, older, ugly women, which then backfire tremendously in practice. 

Neither of these instructive ancient stories from different genres would quite make sense if the specific intervention of the polis into these matters weren’t, as a norm, viewed as transgressive of the boundary between private and public. In other words, since at least the ancient world, we have had some intuition about what is often called the “public-private distinction.” That there exists some sphere of life, some domain of existence, subject to less direct oversight from the coercive reach of government or the prying eyes of religious prudes is a truism often embraced, often referenced, but perhaps seldom understood or reasoned to its logical extent. 

Though it has roots in political thinking from time immemorial, the centrality of the distinction to liberal democratic theorizing and the precise boundaries of the distinction itself are of more recent stock. In a seminal paper for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Morton J. Horwitz locates the origin of the modern public-private distinction in “a double movement in modern political and legal thought,” whereby the “public realm” itself became a coherent thing, defined in law and practice, while a counterposed realm or sphere of the “private,” “free from the encroaching power of the state,” developed. While “one can find the origins of the idea of a distinctively private realm in the natural-rights liberalism of Locke and his successors,” Horwitz argues, the distinction was “brought to the center of the stage in American legal and political theory” in the nineteenth century. The pre-existing conceptual distinction, in Horwitz’s words, crystallized. Despite attempts by opponents of this distinction to undermine it for progressive causes in the 1920s and ’30s, Horwitz argues that at the time of his writing (1982) the public-private distinction was “alive and, if anything, growing in influence.” 

Still today, the persistent influence of the distinction is seen, heard, and felt any time discussion arises around bioethical and biotechnological issues, particularly those relating to reproductive matters, fertility treatments, embryo selection, and the like. How often in public policy discussions around abortion do we hear the phrase “That is between a woman and her doctor”? Think, too, of how often policy discussions around reproductive or sexual issues are framed as a certain party or religious institution wanting to “come into your bedroom.” For instance, a recent ad campaign designed to frighten young men with the possibility of Donald Trump banning their access to internet pornography shows an old, white, male, Republican congressman intruding on intimate moments. This rhetoric implies a fear of boundary transgression, a confusion of spheres, permitting someone with legitimate public authority, or perhaps limited ecclesial authority, to extend that authority illegitimately into the sanctified space of that we call “private.” The distinction, then, remains very much alive. 

This rhetoric has of late been employed, too, in the debates surrounding legalized assisted suicide, euphemistically called “euthanasia” or “medical assistance in dying” in different jurisdictions. What right has the state, some pundits ask, to interfere in the choice someone holds over their own life, to which they have a right? Is this not an improper intrusion of the public (the coercive power to legislate and the religious, moral condemnation of the act of suicide) into the private (a person’s most intimate moments surrounding their suffering, pain, likelihood of recovery, and death itself)? 

This intuition extends often to those biotechnological choices involving genetic and behavioural modification. I recall one vivid example. In graduate school, I attended a course on the ethics of biotechnology, a mixed course filled with upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. When we arrived at the point in the course where we discussed abortion, embryonic experimentation, and CRISPR gene editing, the professor had a remarkably difficult time convincing students to treat these as issues of ethical and political import. “Why should I care?” some students wondered aloud. “I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in ensoulment. So if the woman or the parents consent” (to either abortion or embryonic experimentation and modification), “what business is it of mine?” That these topics could have far-reaching ethical and political questions worthy of discussion by all citizens, not just the religious, was beyond the mental horizons of these students. The students held to a rigid yet unexamined distinction between what consenting adults do in private relationships with their sexual partners and doctors and what those same adults do in church or in public, political spaces. 

Can this sharp distinction between private and public spheres be maintained? The answer, it seems obvious, is no. 

Take first the example of legalizing assisted suicide, with the Canadian regime as a newsworthy exemplar. While proponents may frame the policy discussion in terms of privacy, the truth is that the voluntary death of medical patients remains of grave public concern. Canada has developed a system by which one may apply for eligibility on the basis of certain fixed criteria. If eligibility is acknowledged and permission granted, the patient may seek the services of a doctor who will administer a lethal dose of a drug cocktail that will end the patient’s life. In ordinary circumstances, such a doctor would be guilty of murder. In the Canadian regime, because the doctor has complied with the bureaucratic flow chart, they are absolved. 

As Canadian Christian philosophers George and Sheila Grant put it powerfully in the 1980s in their essay “The Language of Euthanasia,” 

Defenders of the Canadian policies will undoubtably object here that it is the patient, not the state or the doctor or anyone else, who decides when and whether their life is worth living. No one is doing the “judging” except the suffering patient. 

But even a permissive euthanasia regime is not merely allowing those who wish to end their lives to do so, implementing a hands-off approach by a laissez-faire government permitting free choice in the private realm. Instead, it is actively approving a set of circumstances within which ordinary laws surrounding ending the life of another human being are waived, and extreme alternatives applied. Permitting medically assisted suicide in this or that case is neither a negative policy decision nor the absence of a decision but instead a positive choice, one in which the state maintains a heavy hand and a great interest. The options are not “maintain a distinction between private and public” or “improperly let the government meddle in private affairs on the basis of moral qualms.” Instead, those with authority over the “public” realm are tasked to determine which kind and quality of intervention into the private the public will be making: one that permits actively causing the death of another, or one that forbids and punishes it. Even the language of “euthanasia” euphemistically masks the true nature of this choice, Grant and Grant argue. It connotes that one is being passively “permitted” to die “well,” but it actually denotes being actively killed by a medical professional. The contemporary turn toward the language of “assisted dying” as a replacement for “euthanasia” in certain jurisdictions commits a similar euphemistic error, connoting the easing of the dying process rather than the reality of active killing. 

So much for so-called euthanasia. What of other medical and biotechnological developments? What, for instance, are we to think of the ability to modify our children, and thus future generations, through the use of neuropharmacological interventions or more extensive interventions such as gene-editing technologies? Francis Fukuyama treats these issues quite helpfully and at length in his prescient 2003 book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. 

Fukuyama’s work builds in part on an earlier famous articulation of this argument by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, the themes of which are explored in fictional form in his Ransom trilogy, particularly the trilogy’s conclusion, That Hideous Strength. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that our intuitions about technology often mislead us. We think of humanity’s use of technology as a means to conquer nature, to put it under “our” subjugation as a species, to capture its resources for our use. In the words of Francis Bacon in his essay The Advancement of Learning, “knowledge is a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” Scientific knowledge gives us the resources to improve the lot of mankind materially, through new developments in medicine and other arts. Or, as Bacon puts it in his fiction The New Atlantis, the goal of the scientific project generally is “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” 

But are the benefits Bacon speaks of equally distributed? Are all people equally beneficiaries of the pursuit to effect all things possible? Are all people’s “estates” equivalently relieved in our new techno-utopia? The answer, Lewis argues and Fukuyama follows, is no. In Lewis’s words, “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as their instrument.” 

This inequality of power is most obviously true in the gene editing of embryos. In this case, both the parents and the doctor exercise direct control over the life and future of the embryo on which they experiment. The child is no mere beneficiary of “man’s power over nature” but is an unwitting subject of that power, exercised by some men over others. The only “men” who matter in this scenario are the consenting parents and the doctors and researchers doing their bidding. As Jiankui He, the Chinese doctor famously prosecuted for his embryonic genetic modification, recently tweeted, “I will apologize for the gene edited baby experiment, only if their parents have requested it. However, they are happy with the results now.” No moral or political argument can change He’s mind, only the parents’ withdrawal of their consent. 

This problem is compounded, Lewis thinks, by the extensive population-level consequences of such interventions. At scale, genetic modification of future generations means that a small handful of scientists and doctors today exercise control over millions and billions of people in the far future. 

But suppose we think such widespread use of CRISPR is far off, or perhaps at least closed off for the time being by restrictive public policy. Suppose we are optimistic that, save for a few rogue actors, designer babies are a science fantasy, not our likely future. Fukuyama retorts that we are already modifying human lives, brains, and behaviour in a way that threaten the human equality on which liberal democracies are based. As he puts it, “Even if [widespread human] genetic engineering never materializes, the first three stages of development in biotechnology—greater knowledge about genetic causation, neuropharmacology, and the prolongation of life—will all have important consequences for the politics of the twenty-first century.” 

So, even setting aside moral and ethical problems posed by a future of precise genetic modification, we are still left with pressing questions: How much blame do we place on those we determine to have genetic predispositions for certain mental or behavioural characteristics? Which sorts of behaviours will we modify or attempt to modify with new mind-altering drugs? Who, if anyone, will be a beneficiary of radical anti-aging technologies? How will a combination of behavioural and neurochemical modification with direct genetic engineering change the conditions of equality in the future? These questions are ultimately political and cannot be engaged with productively as purely private matters. 

Suppose, though, one does worry, along with Fukuyama and Lewis, about a future in which humankind is intimately bound up with genetic engineering, that what is here and controversial today will be widespread and normalized tomorrow—and that this is a problem. Fukuyama argues that “there are basically three categories of possible objections [to widespread human genetic engineering]: (1) those based on religion; (2) those based on utilitarian considerations; and (3) those based on, for lack of a better term, philosophical principles.” For his part, Fukuyama’s objections are primarily housed in the third category. Arguing from a kind of modified liberal Aristotelianism, Fukuyama says that, ethics being derived from our conception of human nature, modification of human nature presents serious ethical risks. Namely, if our politics and our ethics in liberal democracies have developed out of a moral and legal claim of human equality, tampering with the fact of human equality threatens the foundation of both our ethics and our politics. 

Fukuyama’s argument, in short, is that the historical development of politics toward the liberal democratic ends and institutions that so many people hold dear was premised on ideas of human equality and natural right. Both are premised on some idea of a shared human nature that made the peasant and the aristocrat alike in a substantive sense separate from their visible distinctions of class, age, sex, nationality, and so on. What is at risk, Fukuyama argues, as we hurtle toward a new biotechnological revolution is that very equality. As we move toward an ostensible ability to alter “human nature,” we are really gaining the ability to potentially entrench distinctions of class and kind at the genetic level, distinctions we had previously rejected at the moral and political level in our theories of equality. 

In such an environment, with such risks on the table, a clean line of separation between the public and the private cannot hold. My choices with regard to new biotechnologies have, like it or not, public effects that go far beyond my private use of them. If, like Fukuyama, one has liberal sympathies, one cannot fail to notice that these new technologies threaten the foundational conceit of liberal equality. If, like Lewis and Fukuyama both, one has some intuition that nature and ethics are intimately linked, one must recognize that our meddling with nature cannot but be consequential for our ethics and our politics. 

The public-private distinction is and has been useful for many people in their fight to be protected from improper, coercive intrusion in matters in which citizens are best left to conscience and freedom. But the questions of “Left alone for what, to what purposes, and with what consequences?” will never fail to be ethically and politically relevant. These questions are made more salient by the far-reaching consequences of our new technologies. In the fight to maintain a sacrosanct sphere of the “private,” we must remain mindful that such a sphere is eroded not just by the intrusion of state and corporate actors with prying eyes, data dragnets, targeted ads, and social credit scores. The sphere can also be eroded from the inside, when the matters we jealously guard as private have public consequences that we are ill-equipped to handle. In short, Christians and others with ethical concerns about new biotechnology ought not to be frightened out of political engagement and policy argument by invocations of the public-private distinction, which collapses in its usefulness when applied to medical and biological technologies that transcend that very distinction.