Author: Pär Segerdahl (Page 36 of 44)

Characterizing reality

14 August, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Reality is on the move, and so are we. Therefore, we are continuously challenged to characterize it, and us, anew. What is it like today? What have we become?

I believe that Nietzsche made such a renewed characterization of reality, or of what we became in the nineteenth century, when he said: God is dead.

How does such a characterization work? Is it a statement of fact? Did Nietzsche go out into the backyard and found God lying dead on the ground, as one can discover a dead bird? Hardly, Nietzsche’s characterization of reality can be contested in a way that the death of a bird cannot.

Is it an ideological position, then, one that Nietzsche invented out of the blue and tried to impose on reality? Hardly, for it is connected with numerous factual features of nineteenth-century life, such as the steam-engine, newspapers, industry, exploration expeditions, science, democracy… I’m not enough of a historian to enumerate them all.

Taking the issue to our own times: Can you imagine a Bach writing music for the glory of God alone… living in a suburban row house area, with the car parked outside, just after shopping in the mall? It is difficult to imagine such a Bach, and Nietzsche’s statement could be said to characterize that difficulty.

If we accept Nietzsche’s statement as a striking characterization of the difficulty of imagining a modern suburban Bach, it appears almost factual. It is what reality is like; what we have become. And yet, someone could contest the characterization, and that reality, and see it as a degenerated frame of mind to resist.

So what do statements of Nietzsche’s kind do? Do they describe reality or do they merely express individual perspectives?

I find the task of characterizing our characterizations of reality as one of the most challenging philosophical problems. Its urgency is obvious in bioethics, which deals with realities that certainly are on the move. New biomedical practices continuously challenge our characterizations of embryos, of stem cells, of health and disease, of research participation…

As I indicated on The Ethics Blog last week, research participation is “on the move,” due to developments in biobanking. It no longer solely means participation in specific studies. It will more and more mean also contributing to biobank infrastructures that are constructed to support future, not yet specified studies.

Is that a fact or a position? I think we need a more nuanced characterization of our continuously renewed characterizations of reality!

Pär Segerdahl

The specific study misconception of biobank infrastructure

5 August, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

It is comprehensible that a patient who agrees to participate in a clinical trial expects to get access to a new effective therapy that will restore health. It is comprehensible that it is difficult to convey objective, dispassionate information that such an expectation is unrealistic, given randomization and other features of clinical trials.

Participation in biobank research ought to be simpler to understand. How can you expect to get healthy by giving a blood sample and allowing future research to combine the genetic data that can be obtained from the sample with data accumulating over time in health registries? The therapeutic misconception ought to be less tempting in biobank research, making the relationship between researchers and participants more straightforward.

For this reason, I was surprised to read on the Science Codex Blog about a study indicating difficulties to understand participation in biobank research; difficulties similar to those that more comprehensibly arise for participation in clinical trials.

What surprised me even more, however, was the discussion about this finding that was quoted on the blog. The fact that participants in biobank studies cannot expect a new and better therapy was presented as a shortcoming vis-à-vis clinical trials, as if such an expectation was not a misconception. Moreover, hopes were expressed that a change is underway:

“Some new models for biobank studies are more inclusive of the research subject, offering on-going contact and return of results that may impact their health, says Dr. McBride.”

I do not exclude that such models might work for some restricted biobank studies about specific diseases, which might require on-going contact with a particular patient group to get the research done.

But biobanking is more and more about building infrastructures where samples are stored indefinitely for future research that cannot be specified in advance. Making participation in such infrastructures more like participation in specific clinical trials – supporting the therapeutic misconception where it ought to be most distant! – appears fundamentally misguided.

The infrastructural nature of modern biobanking remains to be understood. It needs to be freed from what might be termed the specific study misconception.

Pär Segerdahl

Jumping over our own shadow

15 July, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

There are things that an educated human is supposed to know about the world. Like that the Earth is spherical and that it revolves around the sun.

But there are things we are supposed to know also about ourselves. Most prominently, we are supposed to know that we are animals, one of the primate species.

The question I’m pondering is this:

Can we have knowledge about ourselves in the same way that we have knowledge about the world?

I have noticed a tendency among those who straightforwardly answer this question in the affirmative. They marvel at the fact that evolution produced a species that understands the evolutionary process that produced that species.

It is as if the world finally bit its own human tail and thereby became closed as a natural world and nothing but that natural world.

And since the bite was achieved by the science that the human species produced, the closure of the world as nothing but a natural world is celebrated also as the closure of science. Science finally knows itself as a product of the world it knows.

Science is the world’s self-knowledge.

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger, who has a different kind of answer to the question under discussion. His answer is: yes and no, depending who “we” are; for there are two ways of being human.

In one way, human beings are among the living beings that inhabit the world, and they can be scientifically studied as such. Heidegger would hardly reject biological knowledge about life and about human beings as one of the animal species on Earth.

But does biology also reveal a more profound fact, namely, that the world is nothing but a natural world so that all the things we are supposed to know about the world must be reinterpreted as the world’s self-knowledge? – Reinterpreted by whom? By the world? Can the world think? Can it rethink science as its own self-knowledge?

“No one can jump over his own shadow,” Heidegger wrote (in a slightly different context). But that is the weird feat that is celebrated when the world finally is supposed to understand itself.

Heidegger reminds that we are not just one of the living beings on Earth. We are also the beings for whom there is world; for whom there is Earth and sky; and for whom there is science accumulating knowledge about the world. Talking about this nearest way of being human, he emphasizes not closures but openings.

The nearest human is the opening up of a world (with living beings that can be studied scientifically).

The alleged completion of the history of the universe through the world’s self-knowledge is not produced by evolution, or by the science that a product of evolution produced. It is produced by people who forget the simplest and nearest way of being human, and who thus are led to such old-fashioned metaphysical absurdities as “the world’s self-knowledge.”

– And yet, Heidegger’s “nearest” human being can hardly be purified as unaffected by the world, or by what is known about human beings as part of the world.

Heidegger identifies a vital problem, but I believe that the relation between the two ways of being human is messier than in Heidegger’s elegant philosophical poetry.

I do not quite recognize the connections with the world, and with the animals, in Heidegger’s attempt to uncover the authentic way of being human in the age of science.

Who dares a renewed attack on these messy relationships?

Pär Segerdahl

HandsOn: Biobanks 2013

20 June, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

The interactive conference, HandsOn: Biobanks, organized for the first time in Uppsala last year, attracted participants from 27 countries. The “movie version” of the event can be viewed on BBMRI.se.

This stimulating interactive concept will be repeated on 21-22 November 2013, in The Hague.

HandsOn: Biobanks focuses this year on the interaction between disciplines, and on questions like (quoting from the website):

“How to deal with issues that evolve from the connections with other disciplines? How do we strengthen and optimize these connections, so all communities will benefit?”

For information about the program and registration, visit HandsOn: Biobanks 2013.

Early bird registration is open!

Pär Segerdahl

An ape genius, or just an ordinary talking ape?

12 June, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

In 2001 I travelled to Atlanta, where Sue Savage-Rumbaugh then worked with the language-competent bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha. A question I travelled with concerned the linguistic tests that I had seen in a TV-documentary, Kanzi, an ape of genius.

In these tests, the ape responds to requests in spoken English, uttered by an experimenter who – to avoid cueing Kanzi through extra-linguistic assists like gestures and gazes – stands behind his back, or sits in an adjacent room speaking through a microphone, or covers her face with a welder’s mask. The aim of this experimental design is to distill Kanzi’s comprehension of vocabulary and syntax, the essence of language.

What I wondered was this: how did the experimenters get the ape into the test situation?

In the documentary, Kanzi appears miraculously as if he were nothing but a brilliant subject of scientific experimentation, an ape genius. Sitting on a chair wearing headphones, he picks up photos of grapes, keys, potatoes, people… He responds perfectly reliably, hearing the verbal requests, “Kanzi, give Sue the picture of grapes,” and so on.

How did Kanzi become that brilliant research subject? What happened before the camera was turned on? Does Kanzi spend his days on a chair wearing headphones, just waiting for an experimenter? Probably not, but then what is the relation between his ordinary life and the test situation? Is it irrelevant, since the conditioning anyhow took place in the same kind of scientific situation?

My first question to William M. Fields, who invited me to Atlanta, was: How do you get Kanzi into the experiment? The simplicity of his answer stunned me:

“We ask Kanzi if he wants to work.”

In contrast to his half-sister, Panbanisha, who typically refused to play the research subject role, Kanzi usually is willing to work. Then follows negotiations about the food he will have access to during work and which activities and meetings he’ll be granted later because he admits to work.

The filmed tests have a context, but the context isn’t more science. It is Kanzi’s life with other bonobos and with the speaking humans who co-reared young bonobos together with their bonobo mothers. Kanzi is an adult, but a point can be made by comparing him with children who participate in controlled psychological experiments. These children are not raised in a lab. They have a home. Only occasionally are they taken into the lab to participate in science. This often requires quite a bit of negotiation and instruction.

Child participation in psychological experimentation exhibits home/lab duality. The child’s language develops at home and is only tested in the lab. The science that charts the child’s linguistic development doesn’t reflect the more significant context outside of the lab, where the child becomes the speaking being that is being tested.

The child’s life at home is primal. Science plays the second fiddle and doesn’t recreate the vitality that made what is scientifically tested possible.

Animal science rarely exhibits home/lab duality. The animals are conditioned in the same type of controlled situations as those in which they are tested. If an animal picks up laminated photos of keys, it is because it was trained to pick up laminated photos of keys. It doesn’t have a life with doors, cabinets and keys, independently of its scientific disciplining. But Kanzi does.

Like a child whose parents decided to contribute to psychological science, Kanzi is not disciplined as a pure research subject. He became a speaking being at home, in ordinary ape-human ways of life (in an ape-human culture). Only occasionally is he talked and instructed into the lab, to participate in activities that don’t reflect the vibrant home situations in which he became who he is.

Kanzi is no aberrant ape genius. He is just an ordinary talking ape. Home/lab duality enabled him to become one.

(Want to read more? Here are some books.)

Pär Segerdahl

Standing up speaking, sitting down thinking

4 June, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Intellectual life overflows with regulated forms of discourse about all kinds of urgent matters. Sometimes they are called schools of thought; sometimes theories; sometimes ideologies or positions.

Philosophy could be viewed as the originator of the most prestigious and fundamental discourses about life, like

idealism
materialism
pragmatism
existentialism
structuralism
post-structuralism.

Although this to some extent is historically correct, such a view of philosophy stands in stark contrast to Socrates’ difficulties with speaking and acting publically. His inner voice, his daemon, caused him to hesitate and instead examine himself and his relation to such forms of discourse.

I can imagine Socrates suddenly pausing, torturing himself with questions like

why do I want to speak in this way?
couldn’t one say the opposite as well?
what led me to hold this view?
is this merely something I’ve learned to repeat, as a lesson learnt by heart?
am I wise, or do I only pretend I am?

My aim here is to draw attention to philosophy as engagement with the latter, self-examining questions. The importance of being sensitive to such questions derives from the fact that intellectual life resembles a marketplace for the former kinds of regulated discourse. Competing schools fight for dominance and accuse each other for neglecting the most decisive aspect of whatever is under discussion.

I want to highlight the importance of somtimes attacking oneself instead; the significance of asking if one is (perhaps) unjust, exaggerating… unwise.

Pursuing the latter questions, we as it were parenthesize our normal obedience to the rules of discourse and examine the extent to which we honestly can abide by them.

– But wouldn’t such questioning of oneself presuppose a discourse of pure self-examination within which the truth finally can be grounded – a discourse that, if it existed, immediately would achieve absolute dominance on the intellectual market?

The marketplace of ideas is attractive. It is the place where we can stand up, speak publically and influence the direction of the world (and achieve reputation). Not surprisingly, philosophers found it difficult to avoid presenting their self-examinations, especially if they found them successful, as being if not truth itself, then at least the right path to truth: as the the discourse that almost guarantees honesty!

To me, these temptations and pitfalls make it all the more important to emphasize the latter list of actually rather simple questions, by which any person can be haunted. Discourse that never is interrupted by pangs of intellectual conscience and consequent self-examinations soon runs amok.

Sometimes, one must sit down and think. Thinking in this sense is not a (silent) form of discourse. But we always compare it with one, and thus we constantly misunderstand philosophy as if it were the purest and most prestigious form of discourse.

Pär Segerdahl

Vaccine prioritization and the new Japanese pandemic law (by Yusuke Inoue)

22 May, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

For many years, balancing individual human rights against social benefits has been the standard theme for public health ethics. Here I would like to update you on a recent discussion in Japan.

Last month a new law was introduced in Japan. Originally the enactment was planned later, but it was speeded up because of the recent series of death cases from emerging bird flu in neighboring Asian countries. This new law is entitled,

Act in response to new flu strains and other diseases

Unlike existing laws, such as the Immunization Act and the Act on Infectious Diseases, this new law is clearly intended to empower national and areal authorities to take substantial action. For example, in order to,

“prevent the spread of a disease,”
“protect a citizen’s rights or health,” or
“avoid social and economic confusion,”

these authorities can close public spaces or meetings, take special actions to sustain infrastructures, and direct medical staff to treat patients. This law was mainly drafted by bureaucrats and passed lacking sufficient explanation and public debate on the draft.

Based on the act, a national plan for prioritizing vaccine has become a matter of discussion. There are more than one hundred million people living in Japan, and securing vaccine for them quickly has been regarded as difficult. Therefore, this topic can be understood as a matter of distributive justice, and various methods for achieving justice have been discussed.

According to the recent draft plan, medical and caring staff, public officers, and manpower to sustain infrastructure are included in the prioritized class. It is not surprising that the longer the discussion goes on, the more people insist that they should be included in this class. For example, food industry workers are also suggested to be added to the class. Until now the targeted population has already reached more than 20 million! There was a similar discussion during the A/H1N1 swine flu “pandemic” in 2009, and many groups argued that they should have priority getting immunized.

Discussion on vaccine allocation is not unique to Japan. Until now, various ways of rationing, such as utility-based or justice-based allocation, have been suggested, as recently summarized by Buccieri and Gaetz in Public Health Ethics.

The nature of virus complicates the problem. It is difficult to know the nature of each flu virus just after outbreak of the pandemic. At least we can say that the scientific validity of a vaccine rationing plan should be continually tested, and flexible and practical interpretation will be needed. Furthermore, whichever principle for rationing we chose, the principle has to be shared and understood by the society in order to be effective in a real situation. On this point, today’s planning concerning the “prioritized class” in Japan needs further transparency about the evidence of setting the class – for rational policy making.

I also consider that cooperation between northern and southern countries should be more in focus. We remember concerns shown by some southern countries that pandemic vaccine was mainly occupied by the developed countries, and it was difficult for them to secure vaccine for their own citizens. Some emerging flu viruses lead to fatal conditions in developing countries, but do not have so serious consequences in developed countries. Nevertheless, vaccine allocation has been independently coped with by many countries.

Considering the global context of pandemic flu, I think that rationing vaccine as a domestic matter cannot be morally justified from the “justice” or “utility” point of view.

We are not sure that a pandemic will come or what will it be like. Fickle viruses haunt our thinking and test core value of our civilized society and the way of justice.

Yusuke Inoue

Conference on global aspects of reproductive technology and surrogacy

13 May, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Reproductive technology and surrogacy often is a cross-border practice that raises several ethical issues concerning the rights not only of adult participants but also of the children involved.

Do the children have a right to know about their genetic parents and do they have a right to be recognized by the countries of their contractual parents? What are the rights of surrogate mothers?

These and related questions will be discussed at an upcoming conference,

organized by The Nordic Committee on Bioethics.

Participation is free of charge. Young researchers (mainly PhD students) are invited to submit an abstract no later than May 20.

More information about abstracts, programme and registration can be found on the website of the Nordic Committee on Bioethics.

If you want to participate, register no later than August 15.

Pär Segerdahl

The debate about after-birth abortion continues

8 May, 2013 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Last year the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article by two philosophers claiming that the same arguments that support abortion also support abortion of newborns.

The article provoked strong reactions and I too felt I had to comment on the article here on The Ethics Blog.

What’s so provocative? I’m not so sure it is the conclusion that if we allow abortion we also should allow abortion of newborns. The two philosophers actually never concluded with any practical recommendations. They only wanted to theoretically explore the logic in the arguments for abortion.

And maybe this is what’s so provocative, or rather tragi-comical: the spirit in which one approaches questions of life and death as an entrepreneur might use the annual report to consider his reasons for terminating a project that can become a burden for the company.

Recently, the same journal reissued the article; this time with two editorials and a number of comments by ethicists (here).

The reissuing of the article reaffirms the attitude that the burning hot questions of life and death should be discussed as a rational entrepreneur manages his firm.

Should we allow infanticide? We’ll have to postpone decision until we’ve received the annual report from the neuroscientists on neonates’ capacity for thought.

Pär Segerdahl

Author: Pär Segerdahl (Page 36 of 44)

Characterizing reality

Jumping over our own shadow

HandsOn: Biobanks 2013

An ape genius, or just an ordinary talking ape?

Standing up speaking, sitting down thinking

Vaccine prioritization and the new Japanese pandemic law (by Yusuke Inoue)

Conference on global aspects of reproductive technology and surrogacy

The debate about after-birth abortion continues

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