Category: Musings (Page 17 of 18)

What is philosophy?

17 August, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Someone asked me what philosophy is. I answered by trying to pinpoint the most frequently used word when one philosophizes.

What does a philosopher most often say? I believe he or she most often says, “But…”:

“But is that really true?”
“But shouldn’t then…?”
“But can’t one imagine that…?”
“But how can anyone know such a thing?”
Etc.

Always some unexpected obstacle! Just at the moment when your reasoning seems entirely spotless, an annoying “but…?” knocks you to the ground and you have to start all over again.

Confronted with our spontaneous reasoning, a philosopher’s head soon fills with objections. Perplexing questions lead into unknown territory. Maps must be drawn the need of which we never anticipated. A persistently repeated “but…?” reveals challenges for which we lack preparedness.

But the goal is not that of interminably objecting. Objecting and being perplexed are not intrinsic values.

Rather the contrary. The accumulation of objections is a precondition to there being a goal with philosophizing: that of putting an END to the annoying objections.

Philosophy is a fight with one’s own objections; the goal is to silence them.

But if that is so, what point can philosophy have? An activity that first raises annoying objections, and then tries to silence them: what’s that good for!?

Try to reason about what “consent to future research” means. Then you’ll probably notice that you soon start repeating “but…?” with regard to your own attempts to reason well. Your objections will annoy you and spur you to think even more clearly. You will draw maps the need of which you had not anticipated.

Even if we prefer that we never went astray, we do go astray. It pertains to being human. THEN we see the point with persistently asking “but…?”; THEN we see the purpose with crisscrossing confusing aspects of life until we survey them, haunted by objections from an unyielding form of sincerity.

When we finally manage to silence our irritating objections, philosophy has made itself as superfluous as a map would be when we cross our own street…

…until we go astray again.

Pär Segerdahl

Who, or what, becomes human?

31 July, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Our long childhood and dependence on parental care seem to leave no doubt about it: we are not born as humans, we become human.

I want to highlight a particularly tempting metaphor for this process of “becoming human” – the metaphor of:

“Order out of chaos.”

According to this metaphor, human infancy is abundantly rich in possibilities; so abundant, in fact, that it is a formless chaos – a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James characterized the infant’s experience of being alive.

To acquire recognizable human form, the child’s inner chaos must be tamed through the disciplining efforts of parents and society at large (the metaphor suggests). The child’s formlessly rich inner life must me narrowed down, hardened, made boring… until, finally, it becomes another obedient member of society.

Society does not acknowledge a real human subject until the norms of “being human” are confidently repeated: as if the child easily would slip back into its more original state of blooming, buzzing confusion, the moment the reiteration of the social norms of humanity terminates.

The “order out of chaos” metaphor makes life and growth look like death and atrophy. To become human means aborting limitless possibilities and gradually turning into that tragic effect of social forces that we know as “the mature adult.”

Perhaps the intriguing topic of the “deconstruction of the subject” is nothing but rigorous faithfulness to the logic of this tempting metaphor? If becoming human is anything like what the metaphor presents it as, then “no one” becomes human, strictly speaking, for before the disciplined human is formed, there is nameless chaos and no recognizable human subject.

But how can the proto-human chaos – I mean, the child – be so responsive to its non-chaotic parents that it reduces its inner chaos and becomes… human? Isn’t that responsiveness already a form of life, a way of being human?

Dare we entertain the hypothesis that the newborn already is active, and that her metamorphoses throughout life require her own creative participation?

I believe we need another understanding of human becoming than that of “order out of chaos.” – Or is human life really a form of colonization of the child?

Pär Segerdahl

Neither innate nor learned

11 July, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

A child begins to speak; to say that it is hungry, or does not want to sleep. Where was the child’s language hiding before it began to speak? Did the child invent it?

Certainly not, experts on language development would insist. A child cannot create language. Language exists before the child starts to speak. All that is happening during language development is that language is being transported to the child.

The big question is: transported from where? There seem to be only two alternatives:

Language is innate. It is prepared in our neural structures. When the child hears its parents speak, these structures are stimulated and soon start supporting the child’s own speech.
Language is learned. It exists in society. Children have social learning skills; through these skills, language is transported from the social environment to the young pupil, soon supporting the child’s own speech.

These are the alternatives, then. Language is either inside or outside the newborn. Language development is either a process of “externalization” or a process of “internalization” of language. There can be no third alternative.

I have written about the ape Kanzi, who was raised by a human mother. I’ve written about him both on The Ethics Blog and in the book, Kanzi’s Primal Language. This bonobo and his half-sister Panbanisha developed language in a manner that does not clearly correspond to any of these two alternatives.

Since it is hardly credible that human language is innate in apes, ape language researchers typically try to teach apes language. These attempts fail.

Kanzi’s human mother, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, avoided teaching Kanzi. Instead, she simply spoke to him, as parents do, in a shared Pan/Homo culture. As a result of this humanlike cultural rearing, he developed language as nativists believe only human children do: spontaneously, without the parent having to play the social role of a teacher.

The humble purpose of this blog post is to introduce the idea we have to think more carefully about human changeability than we have done so far. We tend to think that human changes are either lying dormant in our nature or are being taught to us by the society.

Kanzi entices us to think differently.

Spontaneous language development in a nonhuman suggests that being reared in culture is more than simply a matter of internalizing social norms. Being reared in culture means participating in the culture: a more creative and masterful role than that of a mere pupil.

I believe we are caught in an adult/child dichotomy. The creative role of the child becomes invisible because the dichotomy categorically portrays her as a novice, as a pupil, as a learner… as a vacuous not-yet-adult-human.

Perhaps, if we manage to liberate us from this dichotomy, we can see the possibility that language – together with much else in human life – is neither innate nor learned.

Pär Segerdahl

Absolute limits of a modern world?

21 June, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

A certain form of ethical thinking would like to draw absolute limits to human activity. The limits are often said to be natural: nature is replacing God as ultimate moral authority.

Nature is what we believe we still can believe in, when we no longer believe in God.

God thus moves into the human embryo. As its nature, as its potential to develop into a complete human being, he continues to lay down new holy commandments.

The irony is that this attempt to formulate nature’s commandments relies on the same forms of human activity that one wants to delimit. Without human embryo research, no one would know of the existence of the embryo: no one could speculate about its “moral status” and derive moral commandments from it.

This dependence on modern research activities threatens the attempt to discover absolute moral authority in nature. Modern research has disassociated itself from the old speculative ambition to stabilize scientific knowledge as a system. Our present notion of “the embryo” will be outdated tomorrow.

Anyone attempting to speculate about the nature of the embryo – inevitably relying on the existence of embryo research – will have to acknowledge the possibility that these speculations already are obsolete.

The changeability of the modern world thus haunts and destabilizes the tendency to find absolute moral authority in nature.

Pär Segerdahl

I want to contribute to research, not subscribe to genetic information

31 May, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

What do researchers owe participants in biobank research?

One answer is that researchers should share relevant incidental findings about participants with these helpful individuals. Returning such information could support a sense of partnership and acknowledge participants’ extremely valuable contribution to research.

I’m doubtful about this answer, however. I’m inclined to think that return of information might estrange participants from the research to which they want to contribute.

Certainly, if researchers discover a tumor but don’t identify and contact the participant, that would be problematic. But incidental findings in biobank research typically concern difficult to interpret genetic risk factors. Should these elusive figures be communicated to participants?

Samples may moreover be reused many times in different biobank projects. A relevant incidental finding about me may not be made until a decade after I gave the sample. By then I may have forgotten that I gave it.

Do I want to be seen as a biobank partner that long after I gave the sample? Do I want my contribution to research to be acknowledged years afterwards in the form of percentages concerning increased disease risks? Wasn’t it sufficient with the attention and the health information that I received when I gave the sample: when I actually MADE my contribution?

Personally, I’m willing to contribute to research by giving blood samples, answering questions, and undergoing health examinations. But if that means also getting a lifelong subscription to genetic information about me, I’m beginning to hesitate.

That’s not what I wanted, when I wanted to contribute to research.

Realizing that my blood sample rendered a lifelong subscription to genetic information would estrange me from what I thought I was doing. Can’t one simply contribute to research?

But other participants might want the information. Should biobank research then offer them subscription services?

Pär Segerdahl

Can neuroscience modernize human self-understanding?

17 May, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones on the basis of modern science and technology – we are constantly doing it in our cities. But can similar ambitions to get rid of the old, to modernize, be realized even more thoroughly, with regard to us and the human condition?

Can we tear down “traditional” human self-understanding – the language we use when we reflect on life in literature, in philosophy, and in the humanities – and replace it by new neuroscientific terms?

Earlier this spring, the philosopher Roger Scruton published an essay in the Spectator where he eloquently attacks claims that neuroscience can and should replace the humanities by a set of brave new “neuro”-disciplines, like neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, and neuromusicology.

Not only will these purported new “sciences” fail to create the understanding that traditional ethics, aesthetics, and musicology, helped us towards (for example, of Bach’s music). They will even fail to achieve the scientific explanations that would justify the brave new “neuro”-prefix.

In order for there to be explanations at all, there must first of all be questions. What characterizes the purported “neuro”-sciences, however, is their lack of questions, Scruton remarks.

“Neuro-explanation” typically is no more than translation into neuro-jargon. The aim is neither understanding nor explanation, but the ideological one of replacing the traditional by the new, at any cost.

The result of these extreme modernization ambitions running amok in human self-understanding, Scruton claims, and I agree with him, is nonsense: neurononsense.

Yet, something worries me in Scruton’s essay. He almost seems to purify human self-understanding, or the human condition, as if it were a higher sphere that should not be affected by changing times, at least not if they are modern.

I agree that neuroscience cannot explain the human condition. I agree that it cannot replace human self-understanding. But it can change the human condition and challenge our self-understanding. It already does.

Science and technology cannot be abstracted from the human condition. We are continually becoming “modernized” by, for example, neuroscientific developments. These changing conditions are real, and not merely nonsense or jargon. They occur everywhere, not merely among intellectuals or academics. And they reach all the way to our language.

Neuroscience certainly cannot replace the humanities. But it can challenge the humanities to reflect on changed human conditions.

When attempts in the human sciences to understand modern human conditions focus on neuroscience, the prefix “neuro-” could denote a more responsible form of intellectual work than the one Scruton rightly criticizes. It could denote work that feels the challenge of neuroscientific developments and takes it seriously.

Here at CRB, Kathinka Evers works to develop such a responsible form of neuroethics: one that does not translate ethics into neuro-jargon, but sees neuroscientific findings about the brain as a philosophical challenge to understand and clarify, very often in opposition to the temptation of jargon.

Pär Segerdahl

Research with my data, but not about me

3 May, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 3 Comments

It is perplexing how the websites of large internet companies continuously adapt to me. It looks like the entire business activity of Amazon was about the musical artists I listened to yesterday.

These companies evidently collect data about what I search out on their websites and automatically adapt to my computer, making the presentation of products as attractive as possible to me.

It is rather annoying to get one’s own internet history in the face like that.

The example illustrates a common property of personal data. When data about me are collected, the data sooner or later return to me: in the form of an adapted website; in the form of a demand to pay tax arrears; or in the form of more expensive insurance premiums.

No one would bother to collect my data if they did not intend to return to me on the basis of the data.

Me, me, me: my data are about me. Sooner or later they come back to me.

There is, however, one brilliant exception from my data’s stubborn tendency to return to me: research. When researchers collect my blood sample or ask questions about my health, they are not interested in my person. My data will not return to me in any form.

Researchers are interested in general patterns that can be discerned in data from thousands of people. If researchers should return to participants, it is to collect further data that (for example) can make the patterns of ageing appear.

Patterns, patterns, patterns: research is about patterns. It is not about any one of us who supplied the data.

I’m therefore inclined to see research registers as categorically distinct from the tax authorities’ data about my incomes. Researchers launch my data up into a depersonalized scientific space. Up there, my data hover weightlessly and my person cannot attract them back to me. They do research with my data. But it is not about me.

I don’t primarily have in mind the fact that researchers code my data so that the connection to me is obscured. I’m thinking of the elementary fact that they collect my data without any intention of returning to me on the basis of the data.

When the integrity of research participants is debated, it is important to keep this unique status of research registers in mind. The purpose of collecting scientific data about me is not at all about me. The purpose “scientific research” disentangles me from my own data.

Biobank research here encounters a difficulty.

Suppose that researchers discover in my blood sample a genetic disposition for a disease that can be prevented if measures are taken in advance. Should they then take down my data from their depersonalized orbit in scientific space, and inform me about the disposition?

It may seem obvious that they should inform me. But it would simultaneously be a departure from how science typically treats personal data without intention of returning to participants on the basis of the data.

How should biobank researchers handle discoveries about individual participants that may save their future health? This important and difficult question will be investigated in the dissertation work of our most recent doctoral student at CRB, Jennifer Viberg.

I’m certain that the Ethics Blog will return many times to Jennifer’s work on incidental findings in biobank research.

Pär Segerdahl

Political ambitions threaten the intellectual integrity of bioethics

3 April, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Is there a need to enhance the way bioethicists discuss enhancement?

Contemporary ethical debates on human enhancement sometimes resemble bitter political debates in a city council. Implicit or explicit political agendas are expressed as normative claims and are passed as “moral” arguments because they serve “the right cause.”

Consider, for instance, James Watson who said that “we’ve got to go ahead and not worry whether we’re going to offend some fundamentalist from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

Another example is James Hughes, who almost ridicules moral worries about enhancement by reducing them to some sort of semi-religious “irrational” technophobia.

Liberal proponents of enhancement stress the value of individual autonomy and the freedom too choose one’s lifestyle. In this perspective, any attempt to prohibit enhancement is considered to encroach upon political liberty, hence as being unjust.

Opponents to enhancement, on the other hand, stressing values such as fairness and social justice, argue that without implementing regulations and proper measures, human enhancement will widen the already existing social divide and create a further gap between those who have the means to enhance themselves and those who don’t.

Thus, what drives both parties in the ethical debate on enhancement are more general political conceptions of what social justice is or ought to be.

Human enhancement admittedly raises many important political questions. Concerns about social justice will certainly continue to play a major part in debates on enhancement. Moreover, the political and the ethical spheres admittedly may, to some extent, overlap.

However, here I wish to raise the question whether political concerns fully exhaust what one may call genuine ethical reflection upon the phenomenon of human enhancement, and to what extent political agendas are to be allowed to determine the direction of ethical debates.

What is worrying is a situation where moral philosophical debates on enhancement reach some kind of deadlock position where bioethicists, acting as mouthpieces for rigid political perspectives, simply block their ears and shout at each other as loud as they can.

Arguably, what we may understand as genuine philosophical reflection also includes hearing the other and, more importantly, critically questioning rigid perspectives which limit the ethical horizon.

Indeed, the phenomenon of human enhancement provides a platform for doing so. Human enhancement will not only transform our lives but also necessitate a continuous re-formulation of key philosophical conceptions such as autonomy, freedom, and human nature.

In this regard, the dimension of unpredictability involved in new scientific and technological innovations challenges intellectual habits and requires development of new ways of doing ethics that would enable us to cope with these rapid transformations and perhaps even to foresee upcoming issues.

Reflecting on enhancement beyond the horizon of political ideologies would be a good starting point in this direction.

Ashkan Atry

Introspective genomics and the significance of one

28 March, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

As a philosopher, I am familiar with the image of the solitary thinker who studies the human mind though introspective study of his own. A recent article in the journal Cell reminds me of that image, but in unexpected “genomic” guise.

To achieve statistical significance, medical researchers typically engage large numbers of research subjects. The paper in Cell, however, has only one research subject: the lead author of the paper, Michael Snyder.

Snyder and colleagues studied how his body functioned molecularly and genetically over a 14-month period. Samples from Snyder were taken on 20 separate occasions. A personal “omics profile” was made by integrating information about his genomic sequence with other molecular patterns gathered from the samples, as these patterns changed over time.

Early results indicated that Snyder was genetically disposed to type 2 diabetes. Strangely enough, the disease began to develop during the course of the study. Snyder could follow in detail how two virus infections and the diabetes developed molecularly and genetically in his body.

Snyder changed his life style to handle his diabetes. When he informed his life-insurance company about the disease, however, his premiums became dramatically more expensive.

The introspective paper illustrates the potential usefulness, as well as the risks, of what has been dubbed “personalized medicine.” Here I want speculate, though, on how this new paradigm in medicine challenges scientific and intellectual ideals.

When philosophers introspectively studied the human mind, they took for granted that what they found within themselves was shared by all humans. The general could be found completely instantiated in the particular.

The particular was for philosophers no more than a mirror of the general. What they saw in the mirror was not the individual mirror (it was intellectually invisible). What they saw in the mirror was a reflection of the general (and only the general was intellectually visible).

That simple image of the relation between the particular and the general was discarded with Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. A species has no essence shared by all individuals. Therefore, to achieve scientific generality about what is human, you cannot rely on one human subject only. You need many subjects, and statistics, to achieve intellectual vison of general facts.

A noteworthy feature of the paper under discussion is that we seem partly to have returned to the era of introspective research. We return to it, however, without the discarded notion of the particular as mirror of the general.

New molecular techniques seem to open up for study of what previously were simply individual cases without significance in themselves. For personalized medicine, each subject unfolds as a universe; as a world full of significant processes.

By studying the “genomic universe” of one person and following it over a period of time time, Snyder and colleagues could discern processes that would have been invisible if they had superimposed data from several distinct research subjects.

This new significance of the particular is fascinating and novel from an intellectual perspective. Has the traditional contempt for the particular case been overcome in personalized medicine?

Speaking personally as a philosopher, I cannot avoid seeing this aspect of personalized medicine as congenial with certain philosophical tendencies.

I am thinking of tendencies to investigate (and compare) particular cases without magnifying them on a wall of philosophical abstraction, as if only the general was intellectually visible. I am thinking of serious attempts to overcome the traditional contempt for the particular case.

We seem to have arrived at a new conception of one and many; at a new conception of the particular case as visible and worthy of study.

Pär Segerdahl

Bioethics is not a community of interests

21 March, 2012 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

There is a persistent image of bioethics as being in symbiosis with the powerful interests of medical research and the pharmaceutical industry.

Examples that could confirm such suspicions multiply, unfortunately, since pharmaceutical companies have begun to hire bioethicists as consultants. After critique, Glenn McGee, the former editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, recently resigned from a Texas based stem-cell company.

There obviously is a real risk that bioethicists end up representing powerful interests. Everyone who claims to be a bioethicist should be attentive to this question:

“Has my thinking become unjust and partial?”

In their academic setting, however, bioethicists not only can but should be driven by this question of truthfulness. You not only can but should weigh a multitude of values and perspectives against each other. You not only can change your mind, but should always consider the need to do so.

Openness strengthens you as a bioethicist.

This would not be the case if you represented a company, an organization, or an authority. In such positions, it is predetermined which views, which interests and which regulations you have a professional duty to look after. If you don’t disseminate the right views or look after the right interests, you are disloyal to your organization and should consider quitting.

It is the other way round with bioethics as an academic activity. If you protect privileged views as if you belonged to a community of interests, if you reason one-dimensionally without allowing opposed perspectives to be seen – then you should consider quitting.

If the functionary of an organization asks, with a pounding heart, “Have I become disloyal?”, the ethicist’s worrying question is, “Have I become loyal?”

If bioethics is vulnerable to accusations of partiality, then, it is because ethical thinking presupposes an openness that typically is absent within communities of interest (and they abound).

This ethical openness, paradoxically, may lay behind some of the accusations that bioethics legitimizes power. For ethical openness hardly is politically radical or ideologically rigid.

Where political organizations protect certain interests and work towards particular goals, ethical thinking has a responsibility to highlight other values that might be undermined if the organization got all the power it hopes to attain.

There seems to be certain tension between ethical openness and political radicalness. Ethics might seem to maintain status quo… from the point of view of various forms of political activism. Ethics might seem to protect power… from the point of view of communities of interest that strive to achieve commendable but limited goals.

There are so many good causes. There are so many groups with commendable interests. Dare I add that even industry and research have values that can deserve our attention?

My own belief is that the open-mindedness with which the best forms of bioethics can be associated – the difficult art of doing justice to many possibilities where there is a temptation to defend a rigid position – can have a profound democratic function.

Voices that strive to be impartial are important.

Pär Segerdahl

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Category: Musings (Page 17 of 18)

Who, or what, becomes human?

Neither innate nor learned

Absolute limits of a modern world?

Can neuroscience modernize human self-understanding?

Research with my data, but not about me

Political ambitions threaten the intellectual integrity of bioethics

Introspective genomics and the significance of one

Bioethics is not a community of interests

Welcome to the Ethics Blog!

Meet the editor

Follow the Ethics Blog via e-mail

Search this site

Recent posts

Interested in the Swedish debate?

Recent Comments

Welcome to the Ethics Blog!

Meet the editor

Follow the Ethics Blog via e-mail

Search this site

Recent posts

Interested in the Swedish debate?

Keywords in this blog

Recent Comments