04/24/2013
Tamara Kayali on Bioethics
Tamara Kayali completed her PhD at Cambridge University in 2011. Her PhD dissertation focused on issues of control, responsibility and the self in depression and used qualitative interviews with women to explore this topic. She completed a Bachelor's in Biotechnology from the Australian National University before studying Bioethics in her Honours year at the Unit […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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During our long hiatus, I received an email from one of our listeners who wrote me the following.
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I have been listening to your show for quite some time now.
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I had been trying for a long time to find a good philosophical podcast,
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an interesting phenomenon in itself, but had perpetually met with failure until.
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Love at first listen, I found entitled opinions.
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That's one way of defining entitled opinions, a show for those who otherwise meet with perpetual failure.
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When they search for a good philosophical podcast.
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We cover a lot more than philosophy around here as the brigade knows well.
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But whether the topic is literature, biology, cosmology, psychiatry,
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religion, evolution, or corporations, entitled opinions brings an insurgent,
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extracurricular philosophical reflection to bear on it.
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Trying to make it real compared to what?
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That's our spirit.
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They can eat their dinner on philosophy talk, eat their pork and beans.
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On entitled opinions, we eat more chicken any man ever seen.
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That's right, the band is at hand, the priest is at the feast, amor is at the door,
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what gets put on in the east gets taken off here in the west.
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So you just get here and we'll take care of the rest.
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My guest today turns out to be the person who wrote me the email in question.
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But before we engage her on the topic of bioethics, I would like to take a moment to clarify
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something I mentioned toward the end of the recent show we aired on Charles Darwin.
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And which I brought up again during our show with photographer Lena Herzog.
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It has to do with what I called nature's essayistic manner of going about the business of natural
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selection. A number of you were intrigued enough to ask me to clarify and elaborate exactly what I
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meant when I declared that if I were God and my intention were to create the most diversified,
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complex, wondrous, and beautiful biosphere possible, I could think of no better mechanism to put
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in place than the creative, albeit cruel process of natural selection.
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I define that mechanism as essayistic in the sense that at any given moment in the development of
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an individual species or biogroup, there exists an enormous overload of putulating genetic
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possibilities and random mutations, the vast majority of which are not selected successfully,
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but which nevertheless continue to get generated, discarded, and recombined in the great
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cauldron of the evolutionary process. Since only a tiny fraction of the proliferating possibilities gets
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realized, most of nature remains in a state of sheer potential, a potential for life rather than
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life itself. And if we could do an inventory of this near life, I don't know what else to call it,
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we would be astonished at how ingenious creative evolution actually is when it comes to monitoring
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the fierce struggles that take place on the boundary lines between possibility and actuality.
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The genius of nature is that it really does not know what it is doing when it evolves its species.
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Not if we conceive of knowledge, the way the Western tradition has tended to conceive of it.
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Aristotle, with his unparalleled common sense, declared that a craftsman must have four
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knowledge of what he intends to build if he hopes to bring it into being. Thus, the carpenter must
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know the form of a table must have in his mind a concept of table before he can go about making one
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out of the wood in his workshop. A house does not come into being by chance but by design.
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The ontotheological idea of God in the Western tradition is largely that of the ultimate craftsman
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in whose divine mind the design of creation pre-exists the act of creation.
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God produces the world through his foreknowledge of its species and his power to actualize them into
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being from out of the chaos of undifferentiated matter. Grasping the essence and totality of the
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whole beforehand God assigns its parts accordingly. This is more or less what Leibniz meant when he declared
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that we live in the best of all possible worlds, namely that God through his omniscience and goodness
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actualize the mayor, the moan, perceived the best of possible worlds and that he really had no choice
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in the matter. Nature does something similar but in a very different way, namely without necessity
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and without foreknowledge. What became clear with Darwin is that nature does not operate like a craftsman
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or what amounts to the same like the ontotheological God of creation. For nature does not know what
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it is doing does not foresee its creative evolution. Instead it has a surcharge of vital options that
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it casts into the arena of life and its surrounding ring of near life allowing those options to
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strive for self-realization or self-perpetuation by whatever means available. In other words,
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Nature assays. It attempts, experiments, tries and ventures the new, the variant, the possible and the
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unprecedented. Nature is through and through, possibleitarian, forever incubating, combining and
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assaying the range of possibilities. In the Western tradition nature has often been compared to a book
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But if nature is like a book, that book is more of a collection of essays than a systematic
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treatise or traditional novel. With this difference that its essays are writing themselves without
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understanding the sentences out of which they are composed. In the realm of nature, making comes first
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and knowledge if it comes about it all comes later. That's why here I would call on the authority
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of one of the great trustees who sits on the board of entitled opinions, Jambatista Vico. Vico wrote a
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century before Darwin, yet most of the modern science that came after him confirmed, Vico's
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epistemological principle that we only know what we ourselves make. Vero mitt factum convertum tuur,
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the true and the maid are convertible. First we make, then we come to know. Again, that is how
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natural selection operates. First it makes through trial and error, first it assays, and when one
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of its essays gets selected, it keeps a genetic code of its own blueprint for further replication.
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This is what I meant when I spoke about nature's essayistic el-an-vita.
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Now onto our show, the guest who joins me on entitled opinions today is Tamara Kiali. She is a post
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doctoral fellow in the novel tech ethics team at Dalhousie University up in Canada.
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She recently completed her PhD in the Department of Social Sciences at Cambridge University
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with a dissertation on issues of control, responsibility, and the self-indipression,
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using qualitative interviews with women to explore her topic.
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Tamara has lectured in bioethics at Sydney University and the Australian National University.
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She has a variety of research interests but is primarily interested in neuroethics
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and the ethics of reproduction. For example, questions such as what policy schools and universities
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should adopt on the use of cognitive enhancers to improve exam performance as well as issues related
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to the genetic engineering of children and embryo selection for non-medical reasons.
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Tamara joins me today to talk about bioethics. We've never done a show on bioethics before,
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and I for one am looking forward to our conversation, but I can't resist mentioning one other
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anecdote. In her email to me, Tamara informed me that after finishing her dissertation, she took a
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part-time job in one of the college libraries at Cambridge and that it was tedious work,
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work that involves scanning books into the computer system, but she could listen to her iPod
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while she worked and I'm quoting her again. I wanted to listen to something intellectual
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and stumbled upon entitled opinions and actually looked forward to work because of it.
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When I listen to it, I feel that I'm tuning into an underworld of kindred spirits.
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So here you are. Welcome to the underworld. Thanks very much. It feels unreal to actually be on
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the other side. Having already listened to a number of shows, Tamara, you know by now that I am
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extremely wary of what Martin Heidegger called "technicity," above all when it comes
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to forms of biotechnology. I mean things like genetic engineering of crops, which is a widespread
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practice these days, and one that raises for me a host of social, political, ecological,
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and ethical questions. I also mean things like the reproductive technologies that are in place
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today, the genetic engineering of children, cognitive enhancement, and embryo selection,
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but before we get into some of the controversial issues, could I ask you to please say a word about
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your discipline? Namely, bioethics. What exactly is bioethics in your view?
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So I understand bioethics to mean any ethical issues concerning biology,
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biological research and applications of biology as well as medicine,
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being the clinical practice, medical research, and medical technologies.
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So this is very wide, and if you think about it, actually, it's also very interdisciplinary,
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so it involves not just philosophers, but also sociologists, lawyers, medical practitioners,
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anthropologists, all of these sort of disciplines can weigh into bioethics. So it's quite for me,
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it's a wide definition. It can encapsulate practices such as abortion, euthanasia. These are
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quite old practices, and it can go all the way to IVF, that's in vitro fertilization,
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pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which is embryo selection, basically,
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and perhaps in the future genetic engineering of children, as we already said, genetic engineering of
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crops, and also neuroscientific advances. So you're describing here of biotechnologies,
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yes. About which bioethics has something to say, do you understand bioethics to be offering,
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or should it be offering a set of prescriptions or moral mandates, ethical imperatives,
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to regulate the development and dissemination of bio technologies, or do you understand bioethics to
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be something that does not presume to aim, at matters of principle, general, let's say,
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universal principle, but applies to local practices in their particular circumstance.
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And as you were mentioning, you're interested in the social context, as well as natural context,
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and the repercussions that certain bio technologies will have in particular environment.
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So... Yeah, I think it depends what kind of a bioethicist you are.
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If you're taking the case-based approach, which I tend to take, you will look at
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different bio technologies on a case-by-case basis, and look at often your intuitions and apply ethical
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ethical principles out from there, expanding out from what your particular intuitions are.
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I don't actually want to pin myself down to that particular approach, but
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I do often feeling client towards it. The other approach is a principleist approach, which, as you said,
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works from particular principles and flows out from that to apply those principles to
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different ethical problems and issues. And ideally bioethics is seeking answers to seeking
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to gain the most ethical solutions to problems that perplex us, and controversial
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technologies that people are worried about and what we should do with them.
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Well, let's take a few cases, if you don't mind. You talked about abortion and euthanasia as being
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classical. They do not directly associate with biotechnology, but they do have a lot to do with
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bioethics if you want to look at it that way. So let's take some traditional classical instances
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before we talk about the much more sinister for me, sinister cases of what I guess we're not
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calling novel tech. So abortion, for example. How do you approach an issue like that?
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So for me, I'll say upfront that I take somewhat different perspective on abortion to the way it's
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often debated in bioethics. So most people will be familiar with the debates on the moral status of
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the embryo and the fetus, and the rights of the mother versus the rights of the fetus,
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and various different very good philosophical arguments have been proposed about it.
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I will say upfront that I am pro-choice. I come from a feminist perspective, but at the same time,
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I have read some, I've done a bit of research on the sociological, the social context of abortion.
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Mainly, I was, what fueled this actually was questions around, well, since contraception is
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so widely available. Of course, it depends on which country you're in, but in many countries like
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the UK and Canada and Australia, which I'm most familiar with, it's relatively easy to
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get a hold of contraception, it's quite affordable, and yet why are there still so many
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unplanned pregnancies to begin with? And the answers that I found to that shocked me quite a bit,
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and what I found was that if you look at the demographics of abortion, what are the kinds of
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people that are requesting it? There was, I'll take as an example, one quite large study that was done
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in Australia of in 1996, there was close to 15,000 women aged between 18 and 23 that were surveyed.
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And the women who reported teenage terminations were more likely to be in a de facto relationship,
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less well educated, have no private health insurance. And these are things that you may well predict
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when I ask people what would you predict. They often come up with these things, but what I didn't
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expect was also that they are also more likely to have been a victim of partner violence.
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And the shocking stat on this was that partner violence is the strongest predictive factor
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of pregnancy termination among young Australian women. And women who had ever experienced partner
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violence were more than twice as likely to have had an abortion than those who had not experienced
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partner violence before. And that's actually probably an underestimation. So when I put that in the
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context of the debate, it looked to me quite shocking because I hadn't envisaged that partner
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violence would be such a strong predictive factor of abortion. And it's, it figures so little in
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the debates. So it started to become clear to me that maybe abortion is a little bit like a bandaid
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solution that yes, it probably prevents women from when we don't want women who have been the victims
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of partner violence to also then be forced to have a baby that they don't want.
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But what is the problem that we're trying to solve? If what's that issue here, if a big
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fueling factor is coercion and violence, that's fueling the need for this technology, if you will,
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then we're not really solving the root of the problem. And there's a more social problem that
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maybe we need to approach with different techniques in at the same time.
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Well, I don't understand why those who are in abusive relationships are less prone to take
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birth control than those who are not. I mean, if you're, if you say contraception is readily
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available, why are they getting more pregnant in abusive relationships and hence are having more
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abortions? I mean, that, but these are sociological statistical issues that I guess would be
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interesting to pursue if we're interested in the sociology of the bioethical issues here in this case.
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And I appreciate the fact that you want to deal with the particularities of cases. And in this case,
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you're bringing forward empirical evidence that actually you're right. It's not part of the usual
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discourse when you figure out that there's some other things going on in the case of people who
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do opt for these abortions. But that, again, is not a matter of principle. This is a matter of
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looking at the embeddedness of a certain practice of, let's say, abortion or euthanasia within
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in the larger social context. I guess I, my, the listeners of this program, the regular listeners
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know that I have some particular set of concerns that are less sociologically oriented and
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what can I say? Existentially oriented, politically oriented as well, and certainly philosophical in
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nature. And I guess I'm interested in pushing you a little bit in that direction. And so,
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do you, would you agree that there is a qualitative difference between what you call these
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classical, bioethical and biotechnical, technological issues like abortion and euthanasia,
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which you don't really need any biotechnology for, they've been practiced for millennia, it's not
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something that arises necessarily with our own modernity. There are more refined ways to achieve
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these results if you like. But that there's a qualitative difference between those and certain
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novel technologies that are being experimented with as we speak and which are seem destined to develop
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into ever more sophisticated forms of things like cognitive enhancement of
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offspring's, you know, their abilities or cloning, genetic engineering, and so forth.
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Is there, am I being naive to think that there's, that we're talking about a new sort of game here?
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Related to the old, for sure, with the new set of rules and that there's something that is far more
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worrisome going on? I think you're right in thinking that there is something on a different
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scale here. I think what we're trying to achieve is very similar to what we've always been trying
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to achieve. But by a novel by a text, I think up the ante, because splicing fish genes into a
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tomato-no amount of selective breeding is going to achieve that. So that is something unprecedented
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that we couldn't have achieved otherwise. Novel technologies to do with neuroscience
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are really moving quickly. They're fascinating, deep brain stimulation, and as we're going to talk about
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later on, FMRI, scanning and computer technologies, these are fields which are proposing to do things
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that really we only dreamed about before or were in sci-fi novels. So I think, yeah, we have to
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recognize what is similar. So when it comes to, for example, genetic engineering of children,
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which we can't currently do, but there's a lot of debate about what we might do in the future.
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And I think it is very worthwhile, recognizing where there are similarities between
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trying to engineer children, if you will, environmentally, say by using private school tuition,
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special classes, tennis lessons, music lessons, for example, which seem to have the same aim
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as say engineering a special musical or sporty gene.
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Right. That's the issue, isn't it? Because I agree, environmental engineering, you could say,
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is on the same order as genetic engineering because it brings about a similar set of results,
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if you're one of these ambitious parents who will do anything to get their child into Harvard
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or Stanford or what have you. And they, for me, are the problem, not just the parents, but those who
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will go to, will use any means necessary to achieve their own
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a venal objective. But here, I'm thinking now Francis Fukuyama's book, our post-human future,
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where he speaks about genetic engineering and cloning, but he says that the real problem facing us
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is psychopharmacology. Because, and I think if I remember correctly, he discusses the example of
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Ritalin, which is the drug that is prescribed massively for boys who have a kind of
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bongchous behavior and attention deficit disorder, another kind of fabricated medical condition
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that benefits the pharmaceutical industries that promote the drug. And that even the parents who
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are aware that they might be using a drug in order to suppress perfectly natural, healthy
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behavior in their children will do so nonetheless because it makes their own lives easier.
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Now, you can imagine that if they're willing to over prescribe Ritalin to their kids, that how
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much more ready will parents be to prescribe things that are not just going to make their lives
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easier, but are promoted that are going to make their children's the prospects for their children's
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future more bright and are going to make them more athletic and more intelligent and more beautiful.
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And where we're already starting to see a genetically engineered, so what really worries me is the
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consensus in the population at large. What happens in the laboratories is one thing. And the
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scientists and who are trying to make a name for themselves by advancing as far as they can,
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biotechnological advances, that's one thing. We could deal with them as a different kind of
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pathology. The pathology that worries me, and I think if I understand Fukuyama correctly, it
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worries someone I came to say, there is such a readiness on the part of this citizenry as a whole
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to wholly embrace mine in a mindless way, biotechnologies whose consequences for human society as a whole,
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and for our whole political system as a whole, cannot possibly be foreseen, controlled,
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or predicted at the moment in which one is adopting these things. So
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is I know that you've worked on cognitive enhancement from the psycho pharmaceuticals. Do you have a
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bioethical position or stance on this issue? Yeah, well, I would actually agree with you
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somewhat on your assessment of Ritalin. No doubt there is probably a small percentage of children,
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maybe that have some kind of a real problem of attention deficit, high-viractivity disorder.
|
| 00:29:06.080 |
But the stats on it show that countries like the US far outstrip any other country when it comes to
|
| 00:29:17.440 |
the consumption of Ritalin, the prescription of Ritalin for children. And it does seem like there's
|
| 00:29:26.480 |
a number of factors that converge in favor of this. So of course the pharmaceutical companies
|
| 00:29:33.760 |
have an interest in selling their drug. Teachers have an interest in keeping their children under
|
| 00:29:39.840 |
control and don't like dealing with problem children or children that are, as you said, too rambunctious,
|
| 00:29:47.360 |
and parents don't like feeling that maybe they're at fault, maybe they're not disciplining
|
| 00:29:53.120 |
their children enough. So it's easier to say, well, maybe my child has a problem that just needs to
|
| 00:29:59.600 |
be medicated. And so it's a number of factors all rolled into one. And of course the child can also
|
| 00:30:09.520 |
buy into this. I think the part of the problem with this over-medicalization of perhaps
|
| 00:30:19.520 |
behaviors that are quite normal and natural is what happens to the child's feelings of responsibility.
|
| 00:30:26.400 |
When they grow up, how long are they going to feel dependent on this medication in order to function?
|
| 00:30:33.440 |
And these kind of issues are issues that we find occur also in depression.
|
| 00:30:39.920 |
These issues of the self-control and responsibility that people grapple with when they take
|
| 00:30:53.120 |
psychopharmaceuticals and it's not even for enhancement. What we're talking about here is a
|
| 00:30:59.920 |
ostensibly treatment of depression and of ADHD. So what happens when we take these medications and
|
| 00:31:11.360 |
there seems to be nothing wrong with us? What we're trying to do is, for example,
|
| 00:31:16.160 |
there's a drug called Madaffinil, which is supposed to be prescribed for people who suffer from
|
| 00:31:23.760 |
narcolepsy over sleeping during the day, sleeping too much. But it can be taken by, say, truck drivers
|
| 00:31:31.200 |
who need to stay awake, nurses on night shifts, or even students. There might be students in
|
| 00:31:38.480 |
Stanford right now who are taking Madaffinil to stay awake and alert and perform better at exams
|
| 00:31:44.960 |
or their school performance. So if we start to become the field dependent on these kind of drugs,
|
| 00:31:54.080 |
I think we need to think about what's going to happen.
|
| 00:32:00.640 |
Well, that's great. Tamara, we can go on thinking about it and having hypotheticals.
|
| 00:32:08.480 |
Do you have a stance on, so, well, now you've raised the question in a different way,
|
| 00:32:16.160 |
if parents are so ready, a certain kind of bourgeois parent, I mean, bourgeois in the
|
| 00:32:24.400 |
Nietzsche-in-sense of the last man type, to risk their children's perhaps health as well as
|
| 00:32:33.840 |
psychic health by over prescription of riddle-in. And I don't think there's hardly
|
| 00:32:39.280 |
an intelligent parent that doesn't realize that there is a lot of risk, at least some risk involved.
|
| 00:32:44.560 |
If they're willing to take that risk, what will cause them to hesitate if given the option to remove
|
| 00:32:50.800 |
in the future the gay gene from their, the embryo of an unborn child? Or an alcoholic
|
| 00:33:03.680 |
gene? Or some, so already we're talking about this absolute sovereignty of the parent over the biological
|
| 00:33:12.960 |
social, psychological destiny of a parent, and that you're removing from all future generations
|
| 00:33:19.760 |
a genetic legacy that otherwise would have been active in the future progeny of that unborn child.
|
| 00:33:28.560 |
So the difference between psycho-pharmaceuticals and this intervention in the genetic makeup is that
|
| 00:33:39.120 |
there's something irreversible in the decision to remove if they were to find the gene for
|
| 00:33:47.440 |
homosexuality or the gene for, I'll call it, or any kind of deviant behavior that this sort of,
|
| 00:33:54.560 |
what Hannah Arendt calls acting into nature, where nature and the difference between action in the
|
| 00:34:01.120 |
world, in the human world to which action properly belongs, I'm entirely with Hannah Arendt on that,
|
| 00:34:08.080 |
and acting into nature where human action has no business extending itself into nature is that
|
| 00:34:13.920 |
in the human world what she calls promise and forgiveness are always open, whereas in the world of
|
| 00:34:23.600 |
nature is unforgiving, and you cannot make a promise, as human beings we cannot promise that something is
|
| 00:34:30.800 |
going to be fine before we act into nature and find that it's not fine after all. We cannot
|
| 00:34:38.400 |
hold that promise, we cannot honor that promise nor is nature forgiving of these kinds of
|
| 00:34:44.960 |
mistakes. In fact, it can lead to disasters. This is a bioethical issue that worries me a great deal
|
| 00:34:52.880 |
because we seem to be very close, as we speak, to these kinds of decisions being handed over to
|
| 00:35:02.560 |
individuals who have shown on record not to have much compunction when it comes to engineering
|
| 00:35:10.880 |
their own children's social outcome and their chances for success.
|
| 00:35:18.640 |
Yeah, I actually find myself agreeing with you here, on the in a sense that yes, these things are
|
| 00:35:27.120 |
potentially irreversible, so we better darn well know what we're doing when we do them.
|
| 00:35:34.400 |
My worry is not so much acting into nature just because it's nature and nature has rules
|
| 00:35:46.000 |
that we shouldn't be playing around or playing God with. And if I can fight on philosopher with another,
|
| 00:35:54.720 |
I might throw sat at an hour and sat says, "Ajron Polsach, that is, that we have to recognize that
|
| 00:36:06.400 |
we have a fear of freedom of our own freedom." Now, that doesn't give a carte blanche to do anything
|
| 00:36:14.800 |
that we want. I think we should recognize when we feel worried or scared about doing something and
|
| 00:36:25.200 |
try to tease out, and this I think is part of the job of a bioethicist, is to tease out exactly
|
| 00:36:32.320 |
why we're worried and the risks associated with it, with what it is that we're proposing to do,
|
| 00:36:43.520 |
but also not be afraid to question our current practices. So if we find that, well, let's say, for example,
|
| 00:36:53.920 |
genetic engineering of our children to become musical geniuses, has the same intention behind it as
|
| 00:37:04.560 |
making them and forcing them to play piano for hours and on end. If we feel that those two practices
|
| 00:37:13.520 |
have a lot in common, I don't think we should be afraid to question our current practices then.
|
| 00:37:19.280 |
And then in that case, it might be that new bi-technologies that come up when we debate them,
|
| 00:37:27.760 |
and then perhaps they shine a new lens on current practices that we weren't questioning,
|
| 00:37:35.600 |
that maybe we might say, well, maybe we need to rethink what our intentions are behind having
|
| 00:37:45.120 |
children in the first place and having, why do we want to have particular children? What is
|
| 00:37:50.160 |
fueling this need? And that is something I'm really interested in.
|
| 00:37:55.840 |
Well, I can appreciate that. I find that it's eminently reasonable. And yet, I also do not believe
|
| 00:38:06.000 |
that reason has a lot of compelling power when it comes to regulating or warning people
|
| 00:38:16.080 |
let alone the industries that promote these practices about the potential danger. So you speak
|
| 00:38:22.640 |
about Jean-Paul Sath and throw him at Hana-Au'in. Sath, yes, he did say that we have a fear of our own
|
| 00:38:30.400 |
freedom. Sath was the one who resisted any attempt at the naturalization of the human. He thought
|
| 00:38:38.560 |
that the human was an exception to the order of nature because precisely this unconditional freedom
|
| 00:38:45.360 |
of the self, which is not reducible to any of its natural determinations. He called for radical self
|
| 00:38:55.040 |
responsibility that we have to take responsibility for all, that we are the authors of our own lives,
|
| 00:39:00.880 |
and that we are the authors of our world. We have the world we deserve, he said.
|
| 00:39:05.440 |
Therefore, I agree that from a searching perspective, what he would call for is a radical assumption
|
| 00:39:13.680 |
of responsibility for our actions in this fear. And that means that we have to take full cognizance
|
| 00:39:22.400 |
of what it is we are bringing about. Now, if you can assure me that it is all possible
|
| 00:39:28.480 |
at the present moment to take full cognizance of what we are bringing about, then I will be persuaded
|
| 00:39:36.960 |
that we can apply with that we can take full Sartrean responsibility for what we are doing.
|
| 00:39:42.480 |
I happen to believe that there is such a huge mismatch between what biotechnology, what it has released
|
| 00:39:53.360 |
into the world in terms of possibilities for the alteration of natural processes and the alteration
|
| 00:40:02.960 |
of the human species itself, such a disconnect between that, and the absolute crude
|
| 00:40:09.760 |
primitiveness of our own consciousness and awareness that we are still the same extremely fallible
|
| 00:40:18.560 |
if not wretched and depraved creatures that we always were, that if you hand over to our own
|
| 00:40:25.360 |
desires and decisions, questions about the fate of the use of these biotechnology, I fear,
|
| 00:40:32.720 |
in fact, I'm almost certain that we're in for a heap of trouble because I think human motivation
|
| 00:40:39.040 |
is mostly profane and it doesn't think long term, it's objectives have proven to be extremely self-centered
|
| 00:40:52.480 |
and narrow and so forth. So I just worry about handing over to individuals' desires, these kind
|
| 00:41:01.280 |
of decisions because I don't think most people and even governments, if you want to go that far,
|
| 00:41:08.400 |
have shown that they're willing to step up to the responsibilities of this unconditional freedom
|
| 00:41:16.720 |
that Sartrean was talking about, especially in this area. I agree with you, I think Sartre
|
| 00:41:25.120 |
places a lot of emphasis on the responsibility that we have to take. I think there is a real
|
| 00:41:34.800 |
emphasis within bioethics on individual choice. That seems to reign supreme, at least it's the most
|
| 00:41:45.760 |
popular view that bioethics is take, is that if anything we should veer on the side of allowing
|
| 00:41:53.040 |
parents to decide what choices they make with technology, if this were to become available,
|
| 00:42:00.480 |
they should be able to decide under the banner of reproductive choice, reproductive freedom,
|
| 00:42:06.960 |
what children, how many children to have, if they want children and within that, what kinds of
|
| 00:42:17.200 |
children to have. I'm skeptical of this though, not just because I wonder whether parents are really
|
| 00:42:27.360 |
ready to take responsibility for the consequences, but also whether society is really equipped for
|
| 00:42:38.560 |
the consequences, and I think we need to look more not just at individual practices or likely
|
| 00:42:46.400 |
practices that individual parents are going to take, but the likely effects that these practices are going
|
| 00:42:54.080 |
to have for society, for example, if genetic engineering of children were to become available,
|
| 00:43:02.080 |
the way that society's structured right now means it will probably be quite expensive,
|
| 00:43:08.480 |
probably only available to the rich, and for that reason could just amplify the advantages that
|
| 00:43:15.920 |
the rich could have, and widen the gap even more between the rich and the poor. There could be a genetic
|
| 00:43:23.600 |
arms race in the sense that even if you don't particularly want to engineer your child,
|
| 00:43:29.680 |
because Joe Blow, next door, and everyone else is doing it, you feel your children might be at a
|
| 00:43:34.640 |
disadvantage if you don't do it. So I think-
|
| 00:43:39.280 |
Well, that's I agreed, but then again, I don't want to insist too much on Fukuyama, I'm not a Fukuyama
|
| 00:43:45.520 |
niece, as it were. However, he being a political scientist is interested in the political
|
| 00:43:51.680 |
response to the dangers of post-humanist biotechnologies, and he thinks it's necessary to have
|
| 00:44:00.080 |
governing bodies at the national and international level that would regulate and draw lines beyond
|
| 00:44:07.440 |
which you cannot go. So I'm thinking, for example, of bi analogy in the sports world about all this
|
| 00:44:13.600 |
kind of doping that we never hear the end of, these things, I mean, Lance Armstrong,
|
| 00:44:18.800 |
recently being stripped of all his titles, and then you read about the various kinds of
|
| 00:44:25.760 |
enhancements, physical enhancements that certain drugs and techniques could provide. But if
|
| 00:44:33.360 |
everyone in a particular sport, we saw that in baseball, if everyone in a particular sport is
|
| 00:44:38.240 |
abusing steroids or certain kind of enhancers, then if you want to play that game,
|
| 00:44:46.960 |
you're going to have to start using those enhancers yourself. Otherwise, you're just not going to be
|
| 00:44:54.880 |
able to play the game. And if you have what you call a genetic arms race, and if you have the
|
| 00:44:59.520 |
freedom where some people are allowed to engage in it, then it's going to force everyone else.
|
| 00:45:06.640 |
That's why I'm with Fukuyama and he says, what we need is to have proscriptions against certain
|
| 00:45:13.360 |
the adoption of certain technologies, just the way they do it in sports. So anabolic steroids
|
| 00:45:20.000 |
are not permissible, or cognitive enhancement at the genetic level or even through
|
| 00:45:25.360 |
former psychopharmaceuticals are just that, yes, that these kinds of regulation are absolutely necessary
|
| 00:45:33.200 |
at the collective level. Everyone has to play by the same set of rules. Otherwise,
|
| 00:45:38.400 |
yeah, we're going to turn into a race of immortals and mortals, the damned and the saved,
|
| 00:45:44.880 |
all belonging to the same species. If the human species remains a human species, because that's
|
| 00:45:53.200 |
something that Hannah Arendt already 50 years ago, I have a quote here from her. She was reflecting
|
| 00:46:03.120 |
on contemporary sciences, acting into nature. And she was thinking about things not every day
|
| 00:46:09.200 |
to the biotechnology as much as, for example, nuclear fission and fusion, which are events that in
|
| 00:46:15.200 |
nature take place only in remote stars and collapsing stars, but we have found a way on earth to
|
| 00:46:21.760 |
produce something that would never ever take place on earth through this acting into nature. And what
|
| 00:46:26.800 |
does it give us? It gives us the atomic bomb. Welcome to the new world is such. She says, quote, "All
|
| 00:46:35.600 |
are pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race."
|
| 00:46:42.240 |
As if she were sensing that a post-human future was at hand, and let me quote her again,
|
| 00:46:49.920 |
"The stature of man would not simply be lowered by the unearthly nature of contemporary science,
|
| 00:46:56.560 |
but have been destroyed altogether." So here is one of the dangers is not modifications within
|
| 00:47:07.280 |
the human realm, but such a transmutation, such a mutation of human nature itself that we can no longer
|
| 00:47:16.720 |
call ourselves human, at least not the way we've been human since our early prehistory.
|
| 00:47:22.720 |
Yeah, it's actually something I found an anthropologist that could probably,
|
| 00:47:36.000 |
I think she would agree with your sentiments here. And she, her name is Amber case,
|
| 00:47:47.200 |
and anthropologist who is interested in cyborgs. And she believes we're actually already cyborgs
|
| 00:47:54.640 |
because if you take the definition of cyborg to be an organism, the quote is, "To which
|
| 00:48:02.560 |
exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments."
|
| 00:48:08.800 |
So we can look at, say, spacesuits as being an example of one of those or
|
| 00:48:15.440 |
deep-sea divers who wear special suits to adapt to that environment. But-
|
| 00:48:21.760 |
The iPhone.
|
| 00:48:23.600 |
The exactly, well, she raises the iPhone and mobile phones and laptops as examples of
|
| 00:48:30.960 |
technology that is an extension of who we are, but less in the physical sense and more in the
|
| 00:48:38.000 |
mental sense, that it's an extent of our mental self now, not just our physical self, which is
|
| 00:48:46.320 |
challenging and changing the nature of humans and what we look like.
|
| 00:48:55.440 |
And she argues that online personality is like a second self, so your webpage, your Facebook,
|
| 00:49:05.840 |
is a second self presentation. So in that sense, I might agree with Hannah Arendt. I'm not
|
| 00:49:15.840 |
skeptical of technology per se, just simply because it's fiddling with nature. But I do worry when
|
| 00:49:26.320 |
we up the ante with doing things that are irreversible and doing things that
|
| 00:49:36.080 |
we might be doing prematurely before we know the full implications. And if we're still looking narrowly,
|
| 00:49:43.600 |
if we're not looking at the wider implications, not just for other human beings, but for
|
| 00:49:50.640 |
other animal species and for the biosphere.
|
| 00:49:54.400 |
Well, can you say something about this new
|
| 00:50:02.080 |
technology that you were telling me about before coming on air of mind reading,
|
| 00:50:08.000 |
what do you call it? There's an acronym for it. I don't remember what it is.
|
| 00:50:12.800 |
Actually, I'm not sure if there is an acronym for it. It uses fMRI imaging of the brain and
|
| 00:50:26.000 |
along with computers. And it is aimed to read your mind.
|
| 00:50:32.320 |
The thing that they've managed to do so far, they've done a couple of things. One of them is they've
|
| 00:50:42.000 |
got a bunch of volunteers, the scientists, and get them to watch a Hollywood trailer,
|
| 00:50:50.720 |
a movie, Hollywood movie trailer, and match up the images that they're seeing with the fMRI
|
| 00:51:00.400 |
images of their brains as they're seeing each image. And then they take away the Hollywood trailer
|
| 00:51:06.800 |
and they tell the participants, "Okay, now I want you to visualize some of the images that you just
|
| 00:51:13.600 |
saw." And what the scientists are able to do is just by looking at the fMRI scan of the brain,
|
| 00:51:22.880 |
they can tell what image that person is thinking of. So far, they can only do it for images that
|
| 00:51:32.880 |
the person's already seen and the computer has been able to match it up with. But of course,
|
| 00:51:38.080 |
they're looking into extending this to be able to just tell what images you're thinking of.
|
| 00:51:44.080 |
Well, you see for someone like me, this is horrifying to an unspeakable extent because
|
| 00:51:49.840 |
on the one hand, there's nature that one acts into nature and you can genetically modify crops and
|
| 00:51:56.240 |
so on. Then there's biotechnology that has to do with the body. And let's say enhancement or
|
| 00:52:03.440 |
even musical talents. But then as you said, now we're talking about what we are going to soon be
|
| 00:52:08.960 |
capable of doing when it comes to our minds and our mental life and that you have these prosthesis
|
| 00:52:15.920 |
which have to do with our mental selves, not our physical selves, the iPhone, the computer.
|
| 00:52:20.800 |
And when you talk about the cyborg, if you're getting to that point where now you can collapse
|
| 00:52:26.560 |
the boundary between a person's inner thoughts and the neighbors inner thoughts, that is the
|
| 00:52:33.280 |
board collective where now there is no more self. As Hannah Arent would say, the thinking self,
|
| 00:52:42.320 |
which is in a dialogue with itself in solitude, it's my dialogue with myself that takes place,
|
| 00:52:49.360 |
I don't want to say inside the brain, it's not, it's a mental space. But that space of solitude,
|
| 00:52:56.240 |
which is impenetrable by the other, requires that I meet my neighbor, my fellow citizen in a space
|
| 00:53:08.000 |
in the world that comes between men, as she says. And I do it through language, speech, deed,
|
| 00:53:16.080 |
action, and this is the world of appearance. If we are going to collapse that the space between
|
| 00:53:23.520 |
minds and have a board collective where now, then we are a synthetic and organic,
|
| 00:53:33.200 |
the synthetic is not just attached to the organic, it becomes the actual destiny of the organic.
|
| 00:53:40.800 |
And for those of us who are committed to preserving what is human about the human species,
|
| 00:53:48.080 |
that it is horrifying. Yeah, actually, that seems to resonate a lot with what the
|
| 00:53:55.120 |
anthropologist Amber Case is saying, that when we are needing to be constantly connected to people
|
| 00:54:04.320 |
on our mobile phones, and then we feel lost when we lose our mobile phone. And we feel this
|
| 00:54:11.520 |
constant need to be texting, interacting on the internet, and there is no space for self-reflection.
|
| 00:54:19.600 |
We seem to be increasingly afraid of just sitting there and thinking and being alone with our thoughts.
|
| 00:54:28.160 |
And the replacement of electronic communication for a person-to-person interaction
|
| 00:54:39.440 |
might have some really strange effects on getting to know your neighbor and as well as getting to know
|
| 00:54:45.120 |
yourself. So I do think that if we lose our or have less time for self-reflection, we have less time
|
| 00:54:56.080 |
for long-term planning, daydreaming, I think is important for long-term planning and our idealism.
|
| 00:55:05.920 |
Well, again, what terrifies me the most is not so much the technology. The existence of the
|
| 00:55:12.080 |
technology terrifies me to the extent that I'm sure there's a host of people and my neighbor or
|
| 00:55:18.400 |
my fellow citizen who are enthusiastic about the prospect of this kind of mind-reading technology,
|
| 00:55:24.320 |
and who would be more than happy to be able to download directly into their brains things from
|
| 00:55:29.920 |
the internet so that they only have to have the mediation of the computer. And as you were
|
| 00:55:33.360 |
telling me, if you could download a Spanish language program before you go to Spain, it's just right there,
|
| 00:55:39.200 |
the amount of people who would willingly and enthusiastically embrace it, I think that's where the
|
| 00:55:44.640 |
devil lies is in the, again, as I said at the beginning of the program,
|
| 00:55:49.600 |
it's the consumer. And the consumer's demand, if we allow the consumer's demand to dictate
|
| 00:56:02.480 |
the policies regarding these novel biotechnology's, then I think we're in a heap of trouble.
|
| 00:56:08.880 |
Yeah, exactly. I think the problem is that these are potentially really powerful tools that could be
|
| 00:56:17.760 |
used for good as well as bad. This mind-reading technology could potentially solve a lot of
|
| 00:56:26.800 |
issues. There are people, for example, who are completely paralyzed, but by the use of mind-reading
|
| 00:56:34.720 |
might be able to move robotic instruments to help them. But at the same time, you can obviously
|
| 00:56:43.440 |
envisage how it could be used for bad. And if we were, like I said, in the future, this hasn't been
|
| 00:56:48.080 |
developed yet, but if we were able to download software onto our brains just like, just like we can to
|
| 00:56:54.960 |
our computers, if this were to replace education, I think that would be very dangerous and scary.
|
| 00:57:03.200 |
We can see, obviously, the advantages of this kind of technology, but I think in the context of a
|
| 00:57:08.480 |
consumer's culture that has really overtaken the world. We need to look at how is it most likely
|
| 00:57:16.240 |
going to be used, not just how in principle will it be used? Well, it sounds to me like you are in the
|
| 00:57:22.880 |
most essential domain that is around there today, certainly in our academic worlds, which is
|
| 00:57:30.640 |
bioethics, because it's a whole new world that we're entering. And we didn't even talk about
|
| 00:57:36.560 |
the way bioethics is originally a concept about medicine in the biosphere as such, and that not
|
| 00:57:44.000 |
only is it's relation to animals, but with plant life and with all of life. So, yeah, sure, that was
|
| 00:57:50.800 |
one of the conceptions of it back in 1970 by a biochemist by the name of Potter, but it's since been
|
| 00:58:00.880 |
left aside, and I think it would be quite advantageous if we were to revisit that definition again.
|
| 00:58:07.760 |
Right. So, I am delighted that I was able to provoke some entitled opinions out of you on this
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topic, because I appreciate the way that you measure the judgments, because it does, it will require a
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discriminant form of judgment, and case by case sort of study looking in the details. I would
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probably be very bad in a kind of policymaking body because my extremism would probably
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cause most people to just kind of discount as not being within the ballpark of these things, but
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but it's so much fun to be extreme. Well, that's me. We can do it on the rate of good on entitled
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opinions. So, Tamara Kiali, thanks again for coming through to talk to entitled opinions. You are
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here from Dalhousie in Canada, and the next time you come through the Bay Area, let me know, because
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we have a lot to continue on this discussion. And let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with
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Tamara Kiali from Dalhousie, Ph.D. from Pecambridge, Bioethuses, Neuroethuses, and I am Robert Harrison for
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entitled opinions. Take care.
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