Parens is uncomfortable
with the label that is usually attached to people like him, namely that of a
bioethicist, because bioethicists are often seen (and indeed behave) as if they
had all the answers. If you don’t know what’s right or wrong in a tricky moral
situation, ask a bioethicist and they will tell you. At least that is what we
have learned to expect from the profession. But ethics, including bioethics, is
not really about what is right or wrong, permissible or impermissible, what we
are obligated to do and what we are obligated not to do. Instead, the questions
that we actually ask when we engage in ethical reflection are much bigger and
less simple (or simple-minded) than that. What the inquiry is really about is
“the meaning of being human and about how we ought to live: questions about the
nature of persons and what makes them truly flourish, about the nature of the
various means we use to pursue our flourishing, about what if anything we owe
our fellow citizens when we seek our flourishing, and so forth.” (3-4)
In other words, it’s
complicated. There’s a lot to consider, and there are no simple,
straightforward answers that can claim to capture the truth of the matter.
There are always other sides to the issue, other perspectives to be considered,
and only if we do that can we hope to get an adequate understanding of what is
at stake when decisions have to be made that concern life and death and
generally the well-being of people.
This is also true for
human enhancement. The nature of the (academic) game often entices us to make a
clear stand for or against enhancement, or for or against a particular kind of
enhancement, although we actually know very well that it is hardly ever so
easy. Our position usually reflects some true insight, but so does the position
of our opponents, and it is important to be aware of the lop-sidedness of our
own view, the fact that it roots in our personal experience and our character,
which determines our individual perspective on life, and that we have no privileged
access to the truth. Even though our own view might strike us as perfectly
rational (and as the only truly rational view on the matter), it never is.
There’s always something important to be learned from listening to the other
and trying to understand where they come from and what is right and true about
their way of seeing things. This is why we should learn to embrace what Parens
calls binocularity, which he defines
as “a habit of remembering that my insights are partial, both in the sense that
they are always incomplete and in the sense that they reflect a stance toward
the world that feels congenial to me.” (10)
Adopting this habit of
thinking might even help us to discover that we and our opponents are actually
not so far away from each other as we thought. We may find that we actually
“share the same fundamental moral ideal but see it from such different stances
and through such different lenses” (50) that our agreement on a deeper level is
easy to overlook. Thus both those who think that human enhancement is generally
a good idea (the “enthusiasts”) and those who are rather suspicious of it (the
“critics”) seem to share the same moral ideal of authenticity. They just interpret it in different ways because the
former are more inclined to see human nature as essentially transformative and
progressive (thus adopting what we may call a “creativity stance”), whereas the
latter feel more inclined to emphasise the essential goodness of what we have
and are (thus adopting what we may call a “gratitude stance”). Accordingly,
staying ‘true to ourselves’ can mean very different things to us, neither of
which – and that is the important point to remember – is truer or more
appropriate than the other. Creativity and gratitude both have their place in a
well-lived life, and it would suit us well to remain aware of that.
The truth is that we
are always biased towards one thing or another. Enhancement critics have been
accused of suffering from a “status quo bias”, which may well be true, but the
enthusiasts suffer from their very own status quo bias because “they tend to be
biased in favor of accepting more of the same, where ever-expanding
technological intervention into our selves and the rest of the natural world is
the status quo.” (90) Bias comes natural to us, and complete objectivity is
impossible to achieve. All we can hope to achieve is a viewpoint that is
informed by the knowledge that we are biased and that the biases that other
people have often represent genuine insights that are likely to complement (rather
than refute) our own.
That is certainly a
lesson worth learning.
