The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Category: Musings (Page 15 of 18)

Human and inhuman

8 January, 2014 / / 0 Comments

PÄR SEGERDAHL Associate Professor of Philosophy and editor of The Ethics BlogThe words “human” and “inhuman” are often used as moral judgments. For example: reasoning is (brilliantly) human; violence is (terribly) inhuman.

Such forms of speech are perfectly in order. Yet, we easily go astray if we use the same forms of speech in attempts to diagnose war and conflict, or the path to peace. (Which is extremely tempting, especially for sensible people.)

The human is purified as rational being. Violence and conflict are understood as results of inhuman interference with human reason. Can such idealized analysis illuminate real problems?

What occasions these thoughts is a review in the Guardian, which in terms of blogging was published ages ago. Stuff worth thinking about was written already in 2006. The British philosopher John N. Gray then reviewed Amartya Sen’s book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny.

Sen explains violence between groups as caused by inhuman interference with what is properly human. A proper human makes rational choices in a plurality of group belongings. But ill-disposed propagandists make gullible people think that their human identity already is fixed through a singular group belonging. This short-circuits reason and causes them to blast car bombs and commit genocide against people with other narrowly defined identities.

Without denying the reality of identity-driven violence or the danger of propaganda, Gray questions the innocent intellectualism of Sen’s diagnosis. Sen makes it sound as if people resort to violence because a false theory of human nature was drummed into them. He presents violence as if it were caused by inhuman factors disturbing human nature.

But people hardly lynch each other because of “erroneous beliefs.” And the fear, despair and cruelty of their actions are only too deep-rooted human traits, Gray observes grimly.

It is difficult to think clearly about the human. Perhaps even Gray, in spite of his clear-sightedness, occasionally starts out from a moral delimitation of the human: a more disillusioned one that prefers blaming rather than exalting the human.

(Gray’s own new book, The Silence of Animals, was reviewed last summer by Thomas Nagel.)

Pär Segerdahl

Minding our language - the Ethics Blog

Share this post

What are absolute borders made of?

17 December, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I return to the question in my previous post. I was wondering why biotechnological developments repeatedly invite moral responses in terms of borders that shouldn’t be transgressed by humans. (Think of stem cell research using human embryos.)

What is fundamental in these responses? Is it the absolute border? Do people already have stable notions of borders that shouldn’t be transgressed by humans, as part of semi-metaphysical views of life? Do they respond, “Controversial!”, because they deem some new practice to be transgressing a border that already is in place within their view of life?

Or is the notion of the border itself part of the reaction? Is “the absolute border” reactive rather than the source of the reaction?

I’m inclined to say that the “absolute border” arises with and through the reaction. Let’s call it the intellectual part of the reaction. It is how the reaction presents itself as legitimate; it is how the reaction transforms itself into a reason against the new developments.

The notion of an “absolute border” is how the reaction translates itself into the “space of reasons.”

If so, the recurrent reaction is almost bound to misunderstand itself in accordance with my first suggestion: the border will be perceived as basic, and the reaction will present itself as rational verdict: “The absolute border is being transgressed here; therefore, a moral response is in order!”

We must not forget that entire views of life can be reactive. Even when they are beautiful and admirable human achievements, their function can be that of digesting reactions and providing them with meaning.

My conclusion is that if we want to understand these recurrent reactions, we must not be fooled by how they spontaneously translate themselves into “the space of reasons.” We need a practice of back-translation.

We seem bound to repeatedly misunderstand ourselves. Our much praised faculty of understanding easily becomes a faculty of misunderstanding.

Pär Segerdahl

We challenge habits of thought : the Ethics Blog

Share this post

Uniquely controversial: why is new biotechnology often so extraordinarily upsetting?

11 December, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Artificial insemination, genetically modified organisms, and attempts in synthetic biology to create artificial life have this in common: they tend to provoke moral responses in terms of borders that should not be transgressed.

A recent article by Thomas Douglas, Russell Powell, and Julian Savulescu discusses synthetic biology from this point of view:

They analyze arguments that claim that producing artificial organisms from non-living components is morally significant in the sense that it constitutes “the” ultimate transgression of the border that should not be transgressed.

They quite successfully show that the arguments fail. Certainly, producing artificial life can in some cases instantiate attitudes of hubris; it can produce environmental risks; it can encourage problematic reductionism; and it does produce organisms that, since they lack evolutionary history, have unclear moral status within biocentric accounts of moral status.

But: hubris and environmental risks can characterize other endeavors as well, and there is no reason to assume that creating organisms from non-living components is more likely to sustain hubris or pose environmental threats than modifying existing organisms. Moreover, reductionism is rejected by most biologists, and there is no reason to assume that synthetic biology is uniquely capable of encouraging reductionism. Finally, the fact that artificial organisms have unclear moral status in biocentric accounts is irrelevant, since what really matters for moral status “is not origin, but mental capacity.”

What the article less successfully addresses, though, is the question why people repeatedly want to say: this is an extraordinary activity, it transgresses a border that should not be transgressed. For it has been said before, about other forms of biotechnology. Synthetic biology is not unique in this respect.

The sense of extraordinary transgression is translated in the article into an intellectual claim that synthetic biology is the extraordinary transgression. By turning the recurrent sense of extraordinary transgression into such a specific claim about synthetic biology, the article in my view makes it too easy for itself. It fails to address the original sense of extraordinary transgression.

The question in my headline still awaits its answer.

Pär Segerdahl

We think about bioethics : www.ethicsblog.crb.uu.se

Share this post

Disciplined behavior and original sin

13 November, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This is a follow-up on my earlier post, Questionable questionnaires. In the article that I blogged about, Kevin P. Weinfurt provided two cautions to empirical bioethicists who are using questionnaires. I summarize them:

  1. Egocentrism: the all-too-human self-centeredness of the bioethicist who spent years thinking about particular ethical issues in particular ways, and who designs questionnaires as if these issues basically were real in the same way also for patients, doctors, nurses, research participants, donors…
  2. Literal-mindedness: partly because scholars have disciplined their linguistic habits, they easily overlook the possibility that people do other things with their words than literally describe what they think (e.g., when asked how they consider their chance of benefit from an experimental therapy, they may express hope or loyalty with the care team).

Today I want to highlight this remark in the article:

  • “These cautions are not in themselves new types of methodological missteps, but rather two potential underlying causes of frequently encountered missteps.”

Egocentrism and literal-mindedness are sources of methodological missteps, not further missteps. They are “pernicious habits of mind that plague all of us who are trying to understand patients, physicians, research participants, and others.”

I found this remark interesting, because it puts the emphasis on the researcher as a living person rather than on researcher behavior.

Poor sample selection, invalid inferences and other missteps occur in the behavior of researchers. Methodological rules address missteps on the same behavioral level: do this rather than that, and you’ll enter the secure path of science.

The two cautions are different. They challenge us to work on our habits of mind, on our self-awareness. Merely adopting other behaviors as researchers, which methodology typically aims towards, will not be sufficient if we refuse to face the persistent sources of the missteps within us.

It is no coincidence that the cautions are derived from the work of two philosophers, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophy is a self-searching activity.

I take Weinfurt’s article to be saying that there is no methodologically secured path of science, and certainly not if methodology is understood only in terms of disciplining researcher behavior.

Good and honest scientific work needs to include also exercises of human self-awareness. For researchers will continue to exist as living persons, not only as disciplined performers of more or less correct behaviors.

In a sense, one might say that the two cautions are reminders of original sin.

Pär Segerdahl

We think about bioethics : www.ethicsblog.crb.uu.se

Share this post

Humorous and comical thinkers

5 November, 2013 / / 0 Comments

In my philosophical reading experience it is striking that some thinkers crack really good jokes. They are humorous and I laugh with them. Others are comical in their unyielding seriousness: difficult not to make jokes of.

Humor is not exactly what you think of when you think of philosophy. Hardly anyone reads philosophy to get a good laugh, and neither do I. But when philosophizing, joking surprisingly often lies just around the corner.

Those unexpected jokes often pinpoint the really sensitive issues.

Philosophy approaches you with such extreme demands. Demands for absolute certainty; demands for complete universality: demands for vantage points so primordial that they don’t even belong to life, but “precede” all tying of shoelaces and other trivialities that people are busy doing without reflecting.

The need to joke arises under the pressure of these demands.

The contrast between the absolute demands and the life that you nonetheless live becomes comical. You can then either persist in making the demands even more rigorously, becoming a comical thinker, or you can become a humorous thinker who cracks jokes under the pressure of the demands – to return you to life.

In this spirit, Derrida made the following joke of the absolutely certain human vantage point that Descartes thought he found in his cogito ergo sum:

  • “I breathe therefore I am,” as such, does not produce any certainty. By contrast, “I think that I am breathing” is always certain and indubitable, even if I am mistaken. And therefore I can deduce “therefore I am” from “I think that I am breathing.”

“Even if I am mistaken”: even if I am dead. Derrida’s joke opens up Cartesian certainty to doubt. Absolute certainty about my human essence that is compatible with my no longer being alive: how can it be “what I am”!?

Wittgenstein said that he could imagine a serious and good philosophical work that consisted entirely of jokes. I could imagine such a work beginning with Derrida’s joke.

The need to think can be a need to joke!

Pär Segerdahl

The Ethics Blog - Thinking about thinking

Share this post

Save humanity from the human

22 August, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We must enhance the human; or else humanity will come to an end. Thus dramatically one could summarize the bioethicist Julian Savulescu’s TEDx-talk in Barcelona in July.

The talk lasts fifteen minutes; you can watch and listen to it yourself: The Need for Moral Enhancement.

The idea is that we urgently need medicine and technology to enhance our moral skills; otherwise we will not be able to handle the global threats that we ourselves created: climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, starvation, escalating violence.

Globalization, in short, created a world with dimensions to which our hunter-gatherer morality isn’t adapted. Only a moral pill can save us now.

Listening to the talk, I’m struck by how archaic it sounds, despite references to modern medicine and technology. Thus fire-and-brimstone preachers always made people feel the proximity of the end of the world. Thus fire-and-brimstone preachers always made people feel that the cause of the despicable state of the world is their own moral failure. Thus preachers always forced a new awakening:

  • “You’re on the wrong path; I can show you the way!”

The difference is the use of what could be termed the modern rhetoric of empirical justification, in which all claims must be supported by evidence… that is to say, by PowerPoint slides. The rhetoric seems to direct the use of evidence, however, for evidence pointing in undesired directions isn’t cited.

Neither does Savulescu explore alternative ways of thinking. Has globalization really produced a world so big that we cannot handle it? Couldn’t one just as well claim that globalization created a world so miserably tiny and manageable that one might grieve for the death of all that is great?

In the talk, the most archaic form of moralizing is provided with a modernized rhetorical façade, in order to persuade us that only conversion to a biomedically perfected morality can save us now. It is slightly paradoxical.

No wonder the audience looks dejected.

Pär Segerdahl

The temptation of rhetoric - the ethics blog

Share this post

Characterizing reality

14 August, 2013 / / 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

We like real-life ethics : www.ethicsblog.crb.uu.se

Share this post

Jumping over our own shadow

15 July, 2013 / / 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

The Ethics Blog - Thinking about thinking

Share this post

An ape genius, or just an ordinary talking ape?

12 June, 2013 / / 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

Understanding enculturated apes - the ethics blog

Share this post

Standing up speaking, sitting down thinking

4 June, 2013 / / 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

The Ethics Blog - Thinking about thinking

Share this post
« Older posts Newer posts »