John Gastil, Justin Reedy, Donald Braman & Dan M. Kahan · September 2008
76 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1478 (2008)
From birth control and abortion to in vitro fertilization and genetic enhancement, reproductive technologies are furnishing Americans not only with new modes of control over sexual and reproductive choice, but also with new sites for cultural conflict. The flare-up over the HPV vaccine provides a recent and typical example, with adversaries quickly and intuitively taking up sides in the debate.
The conventional representation of this conflict focuses on particular constituencies: the feminist community’s embrace of women’s right to maximize their reproductive options and Christian conservatives’ claims of Biblical prohibition against some of those same choices. Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood is a cornerstone in this argument, and it firmly established the feminist-Christian nexus as the key to understanding societal conflict over reproductive technology in the United States. Other works have followed in a similar vein, identifying particular social groups as framing or exploiting reproductive technology choices for their own rhetorical or moral purposes. This account—call it the traditional account—is one of open cultural combat between individuals with competing visions of the good society.
It is a good story, and there is undoubtedly a lot of truth to it; however, it is also missing something crucial. Alongside the explicit and conscious conflict over values is a subtler and more tenacious form of conflict, one that occurs without the participants even being aware of it. It is a conflict that emerges at the implicit level of cognition and serves to support and exacerbate the explicit considerations of competing values and moral worth. This subtler form of conflict is a product of what we call cultural cognition, a set of social and psychological processes that underwrite divergent factual beliefs on matters that implicate our diverse and often divergent values and cultural commitments. From gun control and pornography to nuclear power and global warming, cultural cognition pushes us to view the physical world of material consequence as consistent with our moral visions of the good society. Cultural cognition helps to explain not only why we believe that our preferred laws and policies are right and just, but also why they are good for the health and welfare of our fellow citizens.
This approach complicates how we think about what our conflicts are about and how to seek common ground. In a pluralistic society there is constant pressure to put aside sectarian values and to focus on neutral arguments about welfare based on the facts as we know them. The debate over the HPV vaccine—to take one example from the domain of reproductive technology—is not just a debate over whether it is morally acceptable to administer a vaccine to a child, but also over whether the vaccine will, all things considered, have positive or negative effects on the health and welfare on those who are vaccinated. Indeed, to the main participants in this debate, the welfare of those being vaccinated is what they care about most. This welfarist turn in the debate does not lead to convergence, however, because the phenomenon of cultural cognition leads the parties to strongly contrasting views of what the welfare effects of the vaccine are—views that are tightly correlated with their core cultural commitments and values. So even when individuals attempt to put their potentially illiberal sectarian values to the side and have a respectful debate over shared and supposedly neutral welfare concerns, they end up disagreeing just as vehemently.
Because cultural cognition can—and often does—result in this kind of cognitive illiberalism, those who believe that welfarist considerations have an important role to play in the debate over reproductive technologies stand to benefit from an investigation into cultural cognition’s effects on the debate. Understanding how cultural cognition has shaped and is likely to shape public reactions to emerging reproductive technologies can help those who are engaged in these policy discussions guard against the pull of cognitive illiberalism and help them clear effective paths to common ground that might otherwise have eluded them. Beginning that process is the goal of this Article.
We proceed in three parts. Part I introduces the key concepts and propositions in the cultural theory of mass opinion that we deploy in this analysis. Part II explores the cultural character of debates over reproductive technology. We explore theoretical relationships between cultural orientations and key aspects of reproductive technology conflicts, such as how different cultural worldviews approach science, innovation, religion, and women’s rights. To look at a specific case, we consider how arguments on genetic enhancement resonate with different cultural values, and we juxtapose these findings with a map of where the American public stands in general on cultural value questions. Part III adds a conception of public deliberation to the analysis and considers theoretical relationships between the features of deliberation and cultural orientations. Finally, Part IV brings this discussion back to the context of reproductive technology to consider briefly the potential for deliberative politics on these issues.
