Analysis

What to do with this blog? I hardly have time to write anything anything, not to mention anything of any value. Then again, this is basically written for myself as a document etc. on my PhD project. So, I’ll try to do just that in the future.

Right now I am preparing to give a small talk at the annual Sociology Days in Turku, Finland. My workshop group is focused on the sociology of knowledge and I’ll be talking about how I see Touraines analysis of social movements in connection with science and technology. I’ll post the damn thing here in English once it’s done.

Meanwhile I have gathered a good collection of books and other readings. For instance, yesterday I found Robert C Bannister’s Sociology and Scientism – the American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940. I’m also enjoying Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s A Social History of American Technology, and the superb Thomas Kuhn – A Philosophical History for Our Times by Steve Fuller.

This Fuller chap I’m going to keep my eye on. After reading Humanity 2.0 and (his PhD) Social Epistemology (see, wiki and Journal founded by Fuller) I was deeply convinced.

My own research is now going in a simple straight line. I’m deep inside data analysis and familiarizing myself with 19th century thinking on science and technology. I’ll blog about the talk at the sociology day later this month on some initial ideas and results.

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).