The discussion panel last Wednesday (19 Jan 2011) was interesting, providing different perspectives on the issue of human enhancement. The majority of the presentations seemed to be focused on the disability side of the issue, with two of the three speakers going into some detail about that subject. Dr. Scotch’s points about decisions having to be made in the health care arena was probably the most interesting to me, as it gave the discussion clear and present ramifications.
I know that several people in the audience seemed somewhat disappointed that more focus was not given to the pure enhancement (as opposed to rehabilitation) side of things. This is understandable, as rehab is not nearly as sexy an issue as the somehow more glamorous topic of enhancement, where words like “cyborg”, “transhuman”, and “superhuman” can get thrown around, but on the other hand, such things are simply not as practical as rehabilitation. Can society ethically go about making superhumans whilst simultaneously allowing traumatic diseases, malnourishment, etc to continue at alarmingly high rates? To a certain extent yes, but the latter issues are so much more important that they must dominate the former, and so more of the work needs to be focused there. Abstractly, of course, people in affluent societies may still clamour for the more futuristic-seeming advances, but if there is a human face on things – a family member or close friend caught in one of these problematic issues – I think even they would agree.
By far the most disturbing part of the night, though, was when Dr. Grinnell said something to the effect that Science was telling us that we can do all sorts of wonderful things, and society is essentially stopping us from doing that for societal reasons. It is somewhat of a semantic point, but the first part of the sentence is just wrong; Science tells us that we can do the things, but it cannot tell us that those things are wonderful. How wonderful they are is down to us to evaluate on other grounds – in my contention, ethical grounds. This is an important distinction because the argument as stated has a psychological trick of wording which gives his position a presumption of correctness. Of course this is not something to blame Dr. Grinnell for, as this is quite a natural thing to do, especially in persuasive argument, but it nevertheless betrays bias which was unsubstantiated during the evening (though this may have been simply due to a lack of time). But the big point to be made here is that he is holding these scientific breakthroughs (the idea of embryonic stem cell research was the particular issue on the table) were positive things for Dr. Grinnell, and there almost assuredly is reason for this – the ethical implications of being able to cure the diseases which this research has promise in doing would be positive indeed. But on the other hand, he paints the other side as somehow being anti-Science, which is personally troublesome to me for a couple of reasons. First, the other side is not anti-Science at all, they are merely looking at other implications of the research (besides the disease curing) and finding them to be unacceptable. Indeed, almost anyone who believes that the embryos destroyed in the process were human lives with as much value as yours or mine would agree with this point of view, just as they would find it unacceptable to kill a disabled person in order to harvest their organs to extend the lives of those with failing organs. Secondly, even if this was somehow an anti-Science argument, that would not make it intrinsically bad (as implied). Scientific values are only a small subset of the overall values that we hold individually and societally. They are not, cannot, and, most importantly, should not be taken as the be-all and end-all of values; these other societal values and ethical values must continue to dominate the decision making processes both of individuals and of society as a whole. So the big problem I had with his argument was that it tried to use the rhetoric of Science to promote his set of values, rather than arguing the values themselves. It is in the question of which values should be more valued than others that the real debate lies. (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be known that my own values are in a sharp disagreement with Dr. Grinnell’s, but that, in fairness, I do believe his position to be a tenable (albeit wrong) one which was somehow argued for incorrectly).