Against the static orientations to nature and institutions

Note. This text is meant to be provocative. It does not reflect the way my PhD is done nor are the points argued as my ‘true beliefs’. It is meant to provide a background of an ‘ideology’.

Today I’m hosting a workshop at Onnistamo 2012, the an event on Social Entrepreneurship at the Hub Helsinki. Due to some very unexpected challenges in my personal life, I have not had much time to prepare so I’m doing it now. The workshop is about a co-op company I’m trying to piece together but It has very little to do with my PhD so don’t think of this as a commercial thing. Why I’m writing about it here is because the underlying ‘philosophy’ me and some of my friends are developing is somewhat future and change oriented. It also involves some of the same questions transhumanism faces when political and societal issues concerning humanity is conceptualized.

I’m trying to argue that a) we are facing an uncertain future that will very likely bring about major threats to all life on earth, and b) we should focus on survival of humanity and c) to do this we need to get rid of the static thinking societal institutions and ‘harmony with nature’ entails.

The risks to our living are large. The first time I came to realize a concept of risk was in the writings of Ulrich Beck. He is the father of the idea of ‘risk society’. In short, a risk society is a world much like ours. The risks are no longer personal or limited but international and unlimited. This has very much to do with the development of technologies that destroy nature and perhaps even crush what is considered ‘human’. This pessimistic vision is something that has grown from the project of modernity and is seen as an ever increasing expansion of technological systems. In short, Beck famously puts it: “there is no way to test the safety of a nuclear plant, it’s too complex. We have to build one to see if in fact is safe to use”. This ‘risk consciousness’ is reflected as a feeling of uneasy about everyday living.

A prominent proponent of transhumanism, Nick Bostrom, has brought this discussion of ‘existential risks‘ in major focus. He is currently running the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford that focuses on the ‘foresight’ of different technological ‘extermination scenarios’. There are some quite utopian options out there as well as the more known, like the destruction of our living environment. Existential risks are risks that threaten the survival of our entire species and are hard to predict.

Now, we might be living in such a scenario when it comes to the destruction of our environment. There are also major species threatening risks that involve the use of biological weapons or nanotechnology. None of the possible futures can be predicted with certainty. The way I see it, is that taking in to serious consideration, there is a reasonable chance that this is right now happening in our world. This comes just short of being an ‘end times faith’, which I am against. We should not take the ‘precautionary principle’ too seriously. It is a technical way of addressing realistic risks and therefore the ‘strong program’ of it would cause us to stop everythinfg.

The biggest problem is when we become static. Too much emphasis on ‘danger’ makes only stand still while in reality nothing gets really stopped. The other sources of static behavior is the focusing on traditions or ‘institutions‘ or taking the stand that we should live in ‘harmony with nature’.

Institutions are static by nature. One way to define an institution is to claim that it is a social configuration that no one person can hope to change. Institutions do change over time, but very slowly. When I say that institutions are static by nature, it is important to note, that nature itself is in fact very much static. Evolution does occur but it takes millions or at least thousands of years to happen. Humans are only partly connected with nature. Yes, we are natural beings that are rooted in biology. But also, we are able to transgress these boundaries in our imagination – or ‘The Will‘ if you need a reference to philosophy of much of human history.

Nature through the idea of a ‘Gaian‘ system and institutions in form of culture are ways of not thinking in progressive terms. The other way to address the situation is to call the bluff. Nature is a constricting factor in human existence and culture is conservative by definition.

Some people say, that giving up on the belief in ‘bigger things’ life is devoid of meaning. This is sometimes referred as ‘postmodernism‘. I’m not going in to that here, since postmodern is a huge discussion in various sciences and it deserves a better handling than what I can give here.

Here is where my workshop begins. I claim, that we need a new breed of thinkers and activists, who can transgress the boundaries set to us by culture and nature. This does not lead to losing our values – completely the opposite is true. Once we focus on the human actor, we focus on the flesh and blood of existence. This is also where the influence of Alain Touraine becomes evident in my thinking. The transhuman concept of expanding the possibilities is, in my opinion, all about this.

Some of you readers might have realized that I am very much opposed to relativism. If we give up on tradition and stop believing in natural constrictions, do we then have to slide in to a relativistic way of thinking? No, because there is a universal human nature. This is also a big conversation that has certainly not started with transhumanism. It also deserves to be discussed in real detail and I will do that once my PhD gets there.

Here I’m just following on the lines set by an English philosopher Robert Scruton in his book Beauty. In the book there is much to debate about, but it also focuses in trying to find the experience of beauty. Beauty, according to Scruton, is objective and therefore a universal part of human nature. I would widen this definition and argue, that our sense of beauty is a way to sense things that are satisfactory and things that aren’t. There is a true risk of taking this argument to far, like the conservative thinker Leon Kass has shown in support of the ‘yack argument‘.

When we hear news about a famine in a far away country, we often struggle to care. It offends us in some sence, but the feeling does not manifest in a strong moral resentment. However, once we go there and get personally involved, we feel uneasy – we feel it is ugly.

The challenge for the new breed of thinkers and activists is to focus on creating beauty through their action.

And this is done by resisting the static forces in nature and in society. We need to start thinking about the ‘harmony with nature’ argument in another way. Nature is a restrictive force that subjucates us by our mental, psychical and existential borders. The reason to protect nature is not for it’s sake but for ours. I’m not against nature here, mind you that. I just see humans and nature forming a one system that is not our master but our partner.

We also need to resist conservative views when tackling questions of uncertain future. Here we would go against traditions, ethics, religions, political systems and economic ‘laws’. Again, nothing wrong with the mentioned, but we should not hold on to them if we are seeking new ways of thinking and acting.

In the light of the possibility of an extermination scenario of all life on earth, the stakes are high. Risks must be taken. The new thinkers I call Exeptional Challengers (written in an exceptional way in purpose) adhere to this ethics of exception.

The final point about ‘exeptionality’ is that it calls for sacrifice. Sacrifice of the old, our time and our resources – even our lives. This is difficult pitch to make in a world that has just had a few decades of economic growth well being (oh, this is actually not at all true if we look at the entire planet).

So, it comes down to this: we need to start considering what we should sacrifice for beauty in order to survive to the next millenia.

What if the thing we call ‘ethics’ does not exist?

My initial idea in doing this research was that I would focus on the ethical debates transhumanism sparks here and there. Especially I was interested in the field of bioethics, witch means applying philosphical ethics to the (new) genetics discussions. Very soon after I had read some articles and followed some debates about genetic engineering and the especially on proactionary principle, I started to see something started labeling as ‘cultural production of ethics’. I started thinking that these debates were mostly arguing within a discourse that defined ‘a human being’ or the concept of ‘health’.

In fact, I started to wonder if the whole ethos of bioethics was a construction of certain non-ethical principles that preceded the ‘the good ethical principles'[1]. As I researched more, It began to seem like I was right. Bioethics did not come out of thin air. It was formed in a history of ethical debates that concentrated on the assumed ‘rights’ of persons’. The prototype for this kind of thinking was introduced after the Second World War when the horrors of Nazi Germany became public. Especially the involvement of German doctors got the world thinking.

As a result of this a code of ethics was hatched that came to be know as the Nuremberg Code (1947). It stated the rights of a person as a patient and the constraints for the medical personnel. The ‘informed concent‘ was a direct relative of this thinking and it was first introduced in 1957 Later the code became a matter-of-fact and it was carried along in to the large ethical cosmos of ‘medical ethics‘. It became the bedrock of all medical ethics and such it still remains today. The ‘new’ field of bioethics is about applying these principals to the new medical practices that especially genetic engineering has made possible.

All this is in fact very good and such principles and ethical discussions are definitely needed to give guidance to medical personnel in the free world.

However, It also means that the ethical debates that the new (and yes, forthcoming) technologies get tangled in these predefined ways of ‘debating’. As a sociologist that was what got me thinking that perhaps this thing we call ‘ethics’ is in fact – at least to some extent – a specific set of ‘roles’ and ‘scripts’ we start acting out when an ‘ethical discussion’ starts.

But are ethical discussions only some convenient theater to organize ideas and practices to suite political, religious or ideological discourses?

This issue seems to have been discussed before and a quick search in to the archives of the journal for Sociology of Health and Illness uncovered an article by José López. The author writes:

“The disciplinary origins of bioethics in moral and analytical philosophy and theology has created a selectivity towards a formalistic, procedural, disembodied and universalistic way of identifying and resolving bioethical dilemmas”[2].

This is the ethnographic critique of bioethics and it follows on the lines of my argument and thus supports the idea that bioethics is actually producing an ethical view that is compatible with a common view of morality. Rather than discussing the ‘main topic’ of what is a human being and what do these new (genetic) technologies imply, the standard bioethics ‘discussion’ operates on preset standards.

Of course there is a way out. And it would mean that ethical discussions should be stripped of the ‘ethical’ element they harbor. In my view, this is done by reducing the argument. I’m not a big fan of relativism in ethical or political issues (because I am a firm believer in human rights) so the discussion should be anchored to some relevant empirical situation. Now, relevant situations is a concept not that easily defined, I agree. However, in order to engage in discussions and debates in medical issues, one has to agree on certain basic principles.

These principles don’t have anything to do with the technologies in question and perhaps not even the outcomes. The availability of a certain technology, like genetic engineering, sets the area of possibilities. Now, that does not cover the actual world so what will be the outcome of using certain technologies is a matter of much debate. If we put too much emphasis on ‘informed consent’ we create a situation that we really can’t be sure about the ‘informed’ part of the argument. There can never be so much information available that we know exactly what the outcome will be so if an individual will to use ‘radical’ medical technologies needs to be supported by factual outcomes, the it follows that no treatment decisions can be made based on the medical knowledge available.

This follows from the idea that there is no clear link between the ‘real world’ and the way science or technology presents that world. I discussed this in short in my last post. Bioethics should be based on arguments and López explains this process and defines three ways (here we present two) principals are created as concepts for argument.

“The rules for the formation of concepts have three dimensions. The first refers to the order of succession or relations between statements. In bioethics, we find rules for the derivation of general principles from a common morality, but also rules of philosophical analysis concerned with the development of deductive reasoning and the avoidance of contradiction, and rules for the employment of deontological and/or consequentialist reasoning. The second dimension establishes the types of statement which are accepted and those that are rejected; thus, statements that appeal to rational, calculable and universal criteria would be accepted whereas emotional, religious and idiosyncratic belief statements would be rejected” [2].

In the mentioned article López argues the importance of sociological research in to bioethics. That would be the way to get rid of other view that weigh in the arguments and tend to standardize moral control of the medical technologies. Although cultural meanings do affect the way we understand ethics, we should try to brake this barrier. But are we left with only the unlikely path to argue the matter only by reference to ‘technical’ or ‘practical’ problems. That would not yield any good outcomes. In stead the author asks us to consider the ‘history’ of bioethics itself to find out how we should weigh in the arguments.

“In this paper I have argued that the bioethics phenomenon should be of interest to sociologists because of the central role it plays in aligning core societal values. I have outlined the cognitive critique developed primarily by ethnographers, but have also argued that the cognitive critique, alone, is unlikely to secure a place for ethnography and sociology in the field of bioethics. This is because the legitimacy of bioethics, as a socially sanctioned knowledge, does not derive from the validity of its cognitive claims. I have drawn on Foucault’s concept of discursive formations to explore how the rules of discursive formation can be used to illustrate the sources of bioethics’ claims to legitimacy, and have also used this analysis to outline the challenges faced by sociologists and ethnographers. I have concluded by arguing that sociologists and ethnographers need to reflect on the ways in which they might democratically secure legitimacy for their own ethical object(s).” [2].

This is the issue transhumanism faces when arguing about genetic engineering and especially germ line engineering. It is radical, because it truly challenges the way ethics is understood. Only after the dissection of ethical concepts in use can we start arguing about issues concerning individual rights and the responsibilities (?) of social actors and institutions to prohibit or allow certain technologies.

[1] Pilnic, Alison (2002): Genetics and Society. An introduction. Philadelphia. Open University Press.

[2] López, Jóse (2004) “How Sociology Can Save Bioethics…maybe” in Sociology of Health and Illness: 2004/26 (875-896).