Oct 29 Trosko and Deb & Sarda

As wonderful as it may seem to build a moral code for humankind as I read Trosko to suggest, I think this is quite an unrealistic fantasy. He mentions religion extensively as it shapes the moral and ethical foundations of many people’s views. Yet, he suggests that because religious affiliation varies so widely across human-kind, we should abandon it as our guide to bioethics and adopt a new code for determining the moral values shaping the biological nature of humans. I think that the key products of religion are the moral and ethical beliefs which shape the nature of our actions. And furthermore, to suggest that simply because people participate in and practice a wide spectrum of religions indicates we ought to abandon these faiths for one unified human morality merely imposes a new sort of ‘religion’ upon society. The fact that many moral values across the diverse religions are the same or similar indicates we have already reached a point where most of humanity already agrees upon some general code of ethics so why would we need to create a new worldwide biological morality when we can just recognize the shared values and respectfully disagree with one another about our differences? To think that everyone will agree with a new ethical code is pure fantasy and to enforce it a potential infraction against one of the very codes of freedom it might seek to endorse.

Oct 27 Kass – Ch 5 (Cloning and the Posthuman Future)

I cannot help but wonder as to the scientific research on nature vs. nurture which could develop as a result of cloning. Kass mentioned it briefly in his discussion of people wanting to clone themselves or professional athletes, etc. I think it an odd sort of argument in favor of cloning to assume that we can scientifically reproduce an exact duplicate of another person. Even ‘identical’ twins are not the exact same person because they have different life experiences and interests. Cloning would do this to an even greater extent as time will have elapsed between the individual growing and developing and the clone being produced and beginning its growth and development. Suppose, for instance, that Magic Johnson wished to have a clone of himself. If this clone were not trained in the art of basketball as it developed, it would not learn the same skill set which distinguishes Magic Johnson as an exemplary basketball player and thereby not be anything like Magic Johnson despite sharing an exact replica of his DNA. I could continue with further examples, but I suppose that my point is clear enough; cloning could lead to many scientific studies about the nature of nurture.

Despite the previous paragraph, I agree one-hundred percent with Kass that cloning ought not be allowed throughout human society. As he lays forth the arguments for this quite well, I feel no need to repeat his work. I share his opinion primarily for religious reasons but acknowledge that others may need to hear convincing arguments which go beyond religion if they do not share my particularly faith-filled upbringing. Kass kindly provides such reasons as well while not failing to articulate the religious notions behind resistance to cloning. Should Kass present religious reasoning about scientific research though? Yes; as religion so significantly shapes morals and ethics, I feel some of Kass’ strongest arguments concerning bioethics will be those which appeal to religious ideals.

Oct 22 Kass - Ch 4 (Age of Genetic Technology Arrives); McGee – Ch 2 (Hope for Genetic Cures)

I really like Kass’ statement on page 133; “It turns out that even the more modest biogenetic engineers, whether they know it or not, are in the immortality business, proceeding on the basis of a quasi-religious faith that all innovation is by definition progress, no matter what is sacrificed to attain it.” I have mentioned before that I feel we are unduly striving to prolong life on earth when we should perhaps exert efforts elsewhere. If we find a cure to cancer, we will undoubtedly find some new malady killing us in turn. Humans are not meant to live forever here on earth. Biogenetic engineers are looking for ways to genetically alter individuals making them more fit for their environments and therefore prolonging their lives. While this would indeed be a feat, we must pause to ask whether it is truly a good idea to progress in such a manner or if the short-term benefits might be insignificant compared to the long-term effects of permanently altering a genetic sequence. One of the most controversial long-term possibilities is for genetics to spiral from recognizing and treating particular diseases to removing or repairing the genes for potential diseases or else destroying fetuses with ‘bad’ genes. As McGee points out on page 34, “proactiveness with genetic disease is not the same as maintaining a balanced diet. It is interventionist medicine, good old repair, only extended to diseases you do not yet have.” We have to keep technological advancement in check and question whether we should proceed for the sake of science or hold off on moral grounds. As Kass says on page 135, “everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral and political rule.” If we can manage to cautiously proceed with genetics technology, constantly questioning the ethical dilemmas of each advancement, I think we stand to benefit humanity while limiting potential for moral disaster.

Oct 20 Kass - Ch 3 (Meaning of Life—in the Laboratory)

Kass raises very important issues within this short chapter. I find his question of respecting life particularly interesting. If in respecting life we feel that human beings, or fetuses or blastocysts depending on their stage of development, should not be destroyed yet we also believe that using extra blastocysts for experimentation disrespects life, does it not stand to reason that either all blastocysts formed through in vitro fertilization processes must either be raised to fruition or not fertilized at all? In this regard, I believe I agree with Kass and morally go even further to discard in vitro fertilization altogether on the basis of not technologically orchestrating the glorious blessing of joining together an egg and sperm cell to form new life. Kass’ statements as to the moral questions arising from keeping all fertilized cells alive further drive me to this conclusion, especially those concerning women selling their bodies to grow the fetuses. As to supporting government funding of this controversial research, I again agree with Kass’ arguments about not using taxpayers money to fund something which they deem morally unethical. Of course, if this were the case, we should also significantly reduce military spending, etc. If a political leader or party has a clear platform on funding this type of research and they are voted into office, then according to our political ideology they have authority granted by their constituents to approve government funding for things many people may deem morally unethical. This brings us to minority rights though, because in the case of a majority, how are you to uphold the basic rights of those in the minority; if a majority of the population deems slavery acceptable, how are you to grant the minority opposing slavery their basic human rights to life and liberty? Clearly the system thus has some flaws which we must overcome. Kass tries to bring to light the inherent rights of in vitro blastocysts such that we might recognize some form of regulation to override majority rule and protect a minority which has absolutely no way to speak for itself. I agree that this is indeed a crucial issue and deserves the attention of our legislators.

Oct 8, 13, 15 Huxley - Brave New World

Oct 8 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 1 - 6)
Oct 13 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 7 - 11)
Oct 15 Huxley – Brave New World (Ch 12 - end)

In writing this blog, I fully intend to address issues, raise questions, and analyze concepts covered throughout all of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. As such, I am a day late for the October 8th blog posting and well ahead of schedule for the two following posts. I apologize for any inconvenience, but in beginning writing, I felt it best to just finish the novel as I had already passed the required portion for the first assignment. This should hopefully provide a more congruous approach to the work and will hopefully not lose aspects I would have addressed in breaking apart the blog into sections based on the assigned chapters.

First, a word on the notion behind this novel – The idea of creating an entire ‘civilization’ which reproduces based primarily upon cloning instead of sexual reproduction seems quite odd at first glance. However, after reading Ridley’s chapter on death, I realize that Huxley drew many comparisons between civil society and a human body. Just as cells must sacrifice for the good of the body and each play a designated role based on some environmental conditioning from surrounding cells, so too must Huxley’s citizens sacrifice certain freedoms for the good of society and accept their conditioning into roles as alphas, betas, deltas, etc. A liver cell has just as much potential to become a kidney cell based on DNA, but signals from the surrounding cells trigger it to carry out its role as a liver cell. Similarly, individuals of Huxley’s novel are all fertilized with the potential to become any normal human being, but through chemical injections and conditioning, the embryos and children develop according to environmental pressures to fill predetermined rolls as deltas or epsilons or gammas or what-have-you. Such may be the reason this fictional account challenges our ethics so strongly, because Huxley’s societal model is so readily seen in any multi-cellular living organism such as ourselves.

Is not the analogy often applied relating a community or civil society to a body; or perhaps this concept is just from my Catholic upbringing and references to the church community as the Body of Christ? What is it then that sets society apart from a human body? What makes people different than individual cells aside from sheer magnitude? Ridley tried to explain the difference in terms of ‘free will’ which he defined in describing how a person may choose when to eat based on their hunger or food availability, etc. but is constrained by a necessity to eat as a fundamental basis of sustaining life. Ridley states, “this interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.” (Ridley 2006, p.312) This is just the sort of ‘freedom’ that Huxley tries to create in his fictional civilization. People can choose with whom they sexually interact, how they socially entertain themselves outside of work, what clothes to wear (provided they follow the color coordination of their caste), but none of these decisions really affect their overall roles in society so long as they continue to do their jobs.

If this were the extent of his thoughts, I would have a bone to pick with Huxley, but he develops his ‘argument’ further in presenting characters such as Lenina, abnormally content with having only one man for months, Bernard, who abnormally enjoys being alone and thinking about philosophical matters, Helmholtz, who also abnormally seeks solitude and searches deeper emotions than basic sensory feelings. These characters are somehow not content with the social constraints of ‘civilization’ and as such, Huxley is suggesting there could be innately something more to human existence than ‘happiness’ and working for the good of society. The fact that they turn to soma whenever they feel the slightest form of discontent or unease and have their merry little drug trips to cope with unhappiness suggests happiness is merely the product of a false state of reality rather than being truly pleased with your conditions and Huxley uses the idea of retreat through soma to directly challenge contemporary society’s tendency to retreat from their unhappiness to drugs or alcohol or other means of escape from reality. If we continue using such vices, are we not risking falling into a trap similar to that of Brave New World?

Even beyond the suggestions of soma, Huxley challenges us to rise above conformity. John ‘Savage’ played a key part in this challenge. In his upbringing as a societal outcast on the reservation, he longed for conformity and membership in society, but when he reached ‘civilization’ he was disenchanted by its constant communal aspects and conformist upbringings. John’s argument with Mustapha Mond brought religion and emotion and history and passion to the table as one by one Mustapha Mond thrust these aside for the sake of society. If society is to have peace and happiness, his argument was to eliminate reasons for tension and sorrow. These are exactly what Lenina and Bernard and Helmholtz and John all intrinsically sought, even if they did not realize what they were seeking. In the end though, Bernard and Helmholtz head off to an island and Lenina is chased back into the crowd and John hangs himself. How is it then that we cannot equate Huxley’s society with a body – where it flushes out poisons to the liver and embeds abnormal cells amongst so many normal cells that you can barely find them and cancerous cells trying to be selfish turn on a self-destruct mechanism committing suicide just as John did? Herein lies Huxley’s challenge to his readers. It is precisely because of this factor that we must not let such strivings for conformity dictate our lives. We cannot remove ourselves to an island or retreat to the crowd or kill ourselves when we feel individuality, when we feel pain or sorrow, unhappiness; these are the very factors which separate us from cells of a body. Is it better to live in happiness and achieve peace through ultimate conformity or to suffer sorrow and pain and the ills of discontent but live to know the triumphs of joy and cooperation? I would argue for the latter, and I think Huxley’s Brave New World urges us to do likewise.

Oct 6 Ridley Ch 21, 22 (Eugenics, Free Will)

As my webpage for the class addresses the topic of our first chapter for today, I will leave only a link: http://sites.google.com/site/lb355wilson/. As for the chapter on free will, I find the philosophical discussion in this chapter quite stimulating. Hume’s Fork is particularly interesting in that it fails to recognize any third alternative aside from chaos and determinism. I think Ridley argues that the world in fact functions through a combination of the two. If we reflect back a few chapters on those concerning stress and personality, we will recall that Ridley had suggested a sort of inseparable connection between nature’s genetic ‘determinism’ and nurture’s environmental ‘chaos’ which only worked in conjunction with one another. In the chapter on free will, Ridley seems to just extend this same argument onto a broader spectrum, but I think it still applies. I would even suggest that he adequately addresses infusing a religious appeal with this concept of entwined chaos and determinism, nature and nurture, genes and environment. At this point I deem Ridley’s point well argued and have little to counter against it.

Oct 1 Ridley Ch 18, 19, 20 (Cures, Prevention, Politics)

At the very end of his chapter on using genetic testing to develop and administer cures, Ridley states, “Genetic diagnosis followed by conventional cure is probably the genome’s greatest boon to medicine.” (257) I think I have to agree with him here. At this time I cannot wholeheartedly say that I support using genetic engineering to modify humans so they are resistant to particular afflictions. The effects of genetically modified crops demonstrate why we should proceed with caution. As Ridley declares, “Roundup-resistant rape may be eco-unfriendly to the extent that it encourages herbicide use or spreads its resistance to weeds.” (253) I think most genetic engineering is just a short-term solution to one or two specific problems rather than looking at long-term alternatives. The effects of genetic engineering are still largely unknown, and even if you can make an organism resistant to one particular malady, that just exerts pressure for co-evolution of the parasite or virus or what-have-you such that you will only have another problem down the line. Ridley urges against conservative stances such as my own saying, “I believe we are in danger of being too squeamish and too cautious in using knowledge about the genes that influence both [coronary heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease], and we therefore stand at risk of committing the moral error of denying people access to life-saving research.” (259) To combat this front though, I again question Ridley – at what point do we draw the line? People are not meant to live forever. I think these are difficult questions indeed because on the one hand, we are ethically driven to care for one another and save lives, etc. At the same time though, we must acknowledge that all things eventually die. It is the natural order of life. Given reproduction, the world’s resources cannot sustain unlimited population growth if every organism suddenly has the ability to sustain life forever. Thus I return to my original claim in this post – we should use genetic diagnosis to adopt conventional cures, or treat the symptoms I might add. We should use extreme caution though, in adopting genetic engineering to modify organisms to make them resistant to a particular pathogen.