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February 22, 2006 Meeting Agenda
I. Book/Media Discussion – 6:00 – 6:10
o Our Posthuman Future, Francis Fukuyama
A review of developments in biotechnology and their social and ethical considerations. It is a fairly balanced presentation and not so much directed at generating fear than of promoting responsible management of the process through some level of regulation. His main point is that humans have natural rights because they have human nature and human nature is what is at risk.
o Rapture: How
Biotech Became the New Religion, Brian Alexander
Fiction meets reality as bioutopians seek a better world through biotechnology.
o Gattica, Sony Pictures, 2001
In a future time genetically engineered babies have replaced the natural conception and birth process. A new type of prejudice emerges, that of the superior genetically engineered known as Valids, to the inferior non genetically engineered called Invalids. Opportunities are only available for Valids. One invalid, Vincent, is determined to live his dream become an astronaut. Can he overcome a society arraigned against him? Can he compete against the Valids? Starring Ethan Hawke and Jude Law.
o Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Quote from the publisher as found on
the Barnes and Noble website.
o A new technology or treatment could backfire (side effects) or wear off.
o Example Antibiotics can lose effectiveness. A discussion ensued in which a person had read that that antibiotics do not lose effectiveness but that many people do not take them as required, i.e. the full prescription.
o Don’t give up, just keep working to make it better.
o Costs can be high.
o Technology can be very unevenly distributed with modern countries like US getting the lion’s share and third world countries getting very little.
o Need to continue research – scientists want to know.
o In the
o Can use of drugs by athletes be stopped?
o Genetic engineering brings home the Nature vs. Nurture question. What is caused by genetics and what is just learned behavior. In recent years, many causes of behavior are being sought in genetics.
o Are psychological disorders sometimes just behavior that in less common?
o If there is gene that causes criminal tendencies, can it be blamed for the crimes?
o Why do we see less desirable traits as abnormal but positive ones as normal, i.e. super intelligence is never classified as a disorder.
o Biotech can lead to over population. People live too long.
o Biotech is a mixed bag with a longer life but not necessarily one of high quality.
o What about historical cycles of death such as plagues, wars, pestilence? Could the recent disasters like the hurricanes in the south be such a cycle?
o Biotech can be an abuse of the natural order.
o Unpredictable consequences.
o A decision point is being reached in which we can no longer to consider life beyond a monetary cost. We can extend life indefinitely but is costs money can resources are limited so society must make life and death decisions.
o
o
Term: eugenics : the study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding (especially as applied to human mating) - Webster’s Dictionary
Putting things into Perspective
Benefits
of Modern Medicine including Psychiatry:
o Longer Life Expectancy and Better Quality of Life
o Innumerable treatments for diseases
o Reduce suffering due to pain medications
Benefits from Biotech
so far:
o Artificial aids
and organs such as the pacemaker and artificial heart
o Improved foods
o Aids to infertility
o Medical scanning equipment such as the CAT Scan and MRI
o Equipment to help the handicapped
Biotech – Brave New World or
Just Growing Pains
Aristotle said “All men by nature desire to
have knowledge. An indication of this is the delight we take
in the senses…We prefer sight to practically every other sense. It enables us to get to know things and it reveals a number of differences
between things.”
Many technological advancements have rough starts,
produce fear, and offer evil applications.
Promises of Biotechnology
Two
Extremes and the Middle Ground
- Stop it all, Let it develop as it will and Proceed responsibly with
eyes open.
Issues that Need to Be Addressed:
Nietzsche
o Predicted much of what we are facing. Playing God.
o “’According to nature’, you want to live? O you noble stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and considerations, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to this indifference.” Beyond Good and Evil, Section 9
o Holy Cruelty – A man who held a new born child in his hands approached a holy man. “What shall I do with this child?” he asked; “it is wretched, misshapen, and does not have life enough to die.” “Kill it!” shouted the holy man with a terrible voice; “and then hold it in your arms for three days and three nights to create a memory for yourself. Never again will you beget a child this way and when it is not time for you to beget. – When the man had heard this, he walked away disappointed , and many people reproached the holy man because he had counseled cruelty, for he had counseled the man to kill the child. “But is it not crueler to let it live?” asked the holy man. The Gay Science, Section 731
Martin Heidegger, The Question
Concerning Technology
http://www.iwm.at/publ-jvc/jc-16-01.pdf
o “The essence of something, Heidegger insists, is not the same
thing as the thing itself. In thinking of the essence of a tree “that
which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can
be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of
technology is by no means anything technological.”
o “Enframing is the summons which enjoins us and cannot be ignored,
that constrains us to “reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve.”
o All of nature
is to serve as a resource to humans. If you don’t like the way
nature is, just remake it. But humans are also part of nature.
Therefore, we can just break down and reshape humans like anything
else.
Science and Logical Positivism
Terms like sanctity remind me of animal rights. Who gave a dog a tight? The word right gets very dangerous. We have women’s rights, children’s rights; it goes on forever. And there’s the right of the salamander and the frog’s right. Its carried to the absurd.
I’d like to give up saying rights or sanctity. Instead, say that humans have needs, and we should try, as a social
species, to respond to human needs – like food or education or health
– and that’s the way we should work. To try and give it more
meaning than it deserves in some quasi-analytical way is for Steven
Spielberg or somebody like that. It’s just plain aura, up in
the sky – I mean its crap. Taken from “Our Posthuman Future”
by Francis Fukuyama, page 105.