Gregory E. Kaebnick on Nature and Moral Humility

Bioethics as a profession has a strong tendency to simplify things, to do away with the messiness of real-life situations, to escape from the fuzziness of real-life ethics. It seeks to impose order and rational structure onto the chaos of our moral life. Irreducible individuality, the uniqueness of the concrete, the uncertainty that comes with complexity, are its sworn enemies and cannot be tolerated. Because it is supposed to tell us how we ought to act, bioethics’ findings need to be easily applicable, and hence universalizable. That is why bioethicists are so fond of trolley problems and similar schematics. They make things appear simple and straightforward, whereas in reality they almost never are. That is also why the concepts that bioethicists prefer to use tend to be ones that can be clearly defined. What cannot be clearly defined is deemed to have no ethical relevance. Think of the concept of ‘potentiality’, or the concept of ‘dignity’. Pretty damn useless, both of them. Bioethics, rational bioethics, cannot afford to take moral intuitions into account that draw on those concepts. The same goes for the concept of ‘nature’, which many people appear to attach some normative significance to, but which is so vague and lacking in content that common appeals to what is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ can best be understood as the expression of a deep-seated, but entirely unreflected aversion to change. In other words, talk about nature and the natural and that both should be protected from human interference merely voices a (conservative) attitude, but not a (rational and therefore worth-considering) argument. Or so we are being trained to think by a bioethics that is largely liberal, progressivist, and most importantly result-oriented in its outlook.

Yet even though the concept of nature is without doubt difficult to apply in a coherent and consistent manner, we may not have to give it up entirely. At least that is what Gregory F. Kaebnick argues in his book Humans in Nature. The World as We Find It and the World as We Create It (Oxford University Press 2014).  Kaebnick is the editor of the Hastings Center Report and a research scholar at the Hastings Center, which describes itself on its website as a “nonpartisan research institution”, and nonpartisan is exactly what it is. Kaebnick’s work is, like that of his colleague Erik Parens[1], infused by the ethos of his institution and thus bears no traces of the self-assured dogmatism that too many professional bioethicists adopt as a matter of course when they set out to tell us what is right and wrong, morally permissible and morally obligatory, justified and unjustified, rational and irrational. Kaebnick is not interested in prescribing actions to his readers, and he certainly doesn’t want to persuade us to ‘do what is natural’ or to ‘protect nature’. Instead he explores with an open mind what, if any, moral significance the concept of nature has or can have in various different contexts, looking at the discourses in which the concept is used, and leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own practical conclusions from those discussions.

Kaebnick’s open-mindedness results from his neo-Humean ethical subjectivism (or maybe his ethical subjectivism results from his open-mindedness), which shies away from postulating the truth of certain moral judgements (and, as a corollary, the falsity of others). Because ethics is not about truth, but about positioning oneself in the world of human (and non-human) relations, we need to practice what Kaebnick calls “moral humility” (32). Ethics is about commitment. But commitments are personal. They are built on, or nourished by, individual ideals that cannot and should not be regarded as obligatory for everyone. “If moral standards are projections on the world of human attitudinal stances, then why not allow that, within the complex social web of moral standards, there arise some that are endorsed by individuals specially to guide their own lives?” (56) But the fact that those standards are not universally binding constitutes no good reason to take them less seriously: “If we are committed to our commitments, then we need not relinquish them just because somebody else disagrees with us.” (35) If we genuinely care about something, then knowing or believing that it is not objectively true that we ought to care gives us no reason at all to stop caring. That doesn’t mean that we should blindly follow our intuitions and initial emotional reactions. Reason is important to sort out our preferences and to understand and negotiate conflicting intuitions. It helps us figure out what we care about most and why. “The very point of morality, after all, is that it is about what matters most: therefore we must (and often will) try to get to the bottom of our values, to articulate them in their most general terms, and also to think about how seemingly competing considerations compare.” (41) However, a complete rationalisation of our moral outlook is not possible (and understanding this may well be part of what it means to be morally humble). This is no reason to resign ourselves to a brute-fact view of morality: “We will not be able to support our positions with arguments that are entirely noncircular: ultimately, our values form a closed system, since they are not grounded on analytic truths or objective features of the universe. But we should still be able to articulate, convey, and defend our views.” (43)

This articulation, however, is not always as easy as we may wish. Thus, if we want to protect ‘nature’ from human interference, be it as ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildlife’, as genetically unmodified animals and plants, as analytic rather than synthetic biology, or as human rather than posthuman biology (or post-biology?), we shouldn’t expect to be able to come up with a persuasive rationale for our concerns. “Concern for nature can be brute feature of our moral lives.” (181) Nor should we expect to be able to defend (before others as well as ourselves) an indiscriminate condemnation of all human interference in those areas. Instead we have to look at what exactly is being done or proposed and then decide whether this particular instance of, say, genetic modification or change of the human condition violates or undermines our shared or personal values.  A dogmatic stance on those issues cannot be justified given the interconnectedness of all things. While the subtitle of Kaebnick’s book (“the world as we find it and the world as we create it”) suggests that we can neatly distinguish between the natural (i.e. the world as we find it) and the artificial (the world as we create it), he makes it very clear that in practice there is no clear-cut distinction between the two. Instead, the world as we find it is already a world that we have created, and any world that we create does of course also have to be built out of the world that we have found. So the natural is never completely opposed to the artificial.

Yet despite the “ineradicable fuzziness” of the concept of nature (126), it has some heuristic value for us, functioning, if I understand Kaebnick correctly, as a comprehensive label for a group of concerns that have to do with the kind of relationship that we have to the non-human world. This relationship, Kaebnick believes, should ideally (and this may well be a personal ideal) be not one of domination, but more like a conversation: “What makes a food ‘natural’ (or ‘organic’) is not that humans did not produce it, but that its production reflects a kind of limited exchange with nature, one in which nature is not thoroughly dominated.” (126) One may say, of course, that this is not an argument, and indeed it is not. There is no persuasive argument in support of conversation rather than domination. Whether you favour the one or the other depends on your mind-set. I personally find the ideal of conversation much more appealing than the ideal of domination, and so, obviously, does Kaebnick, but I’m sure some other readers will not. That may also be the reason why I am often taken aback by the way many bioethicists practise their profession.

Talking about the difference between an “industrial paradigm” and an “ecological paradigm” in agriculture, Kaebnick suggests that the industrial paradigm, although

“featuring technological sophistication, (…) is really fundamentally about simplicity , about trying to iron out the irregularities of nature and ignoring the complexities that careful organic farming is based on. It is about control of nature, with practices that fly in the face of natural mechanisms and must be strenuously maintained over against nature, rather than about collaboration with nature. (…) With animals, too, industrial agriculture tends to depart from nature, at least in the sense that it encourages farmers to treat their animals in ways that have ever less to do with animal husbandry, with caring for animals, and more to do with productivity.” (125, my italics)

It seems to me that what Kaebnick says here about agriculture could also be said about bioethics. The dominant paradigm in bioethics today is industrial. It aims at what Kaebnick calls the “industrialization of life” (125). In contrast, the paradigm that Kaebnick himself follows with his style of conducting an ethical inquiry is ecological, i.e., far more willing to acknowledge the complexities (what I would call the ‘messiness’) of our ethical life. I for one would like to see more of that.

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[1] Last year Parens published Shaping our Selves: on Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking (Oxford UP 2014). Brian D. Earp and I have (sort of) reviewed the book for the American Journal of Bioethics, endorsing Parens’s defence of “binocularity”: https://www.academia.edu/16935197/Binocularity_in_Bioethics_-_and_beyond

Günther Anders on Promethean Shame (Part 2)

We used to think that we humans were free and the machines we constructed determined and unfree. But this is no longer so. Today, in a curious contortion, we are the ones who appear unfree, and the machines enjoy the freedom that we lack. Increasingly, we think of ourselves as being shackled by our own nature, which, we believe, has not changed very much, if at all, since the stone age. (And aren’t we indeed constantly being told by proponents of human enhancement that the forces of evolution have shaped us for a world that no longer exists and that in order to catch up with the world we have created we need to recreate ourselves?) It is our physical body that, in our own perception, makes us unfree, that ties us to the past and makes us unfit for the future (and indeed the present). From the perspective of the machines, human nature is nothing but a nuisance: “conservative, unprogressive, antiquated, irrevisable, a dead weight in the rise of the machines”. We could achieve so much more if it weren’t for us and our defective nature. We see ourselves, as Anders puts it, as the saboteurs of our own achievements, and we are no longer willing to put up with this. So something needs to be done: we have to find a way to become more machine-like, to mould ourselves as we now mould things to assimilate them to our needs and wants. Our Promethean shame makes us embrace and promote the idea of “human engineering”, which now appears as something that we owe both to our machines and to ourselves. After all, we wouldn’t want to be judged a disappointment by our betters. In relation to our machines we are like children, and growing up, in this new interpretation of Schiller’s “education of humankind”, means leaving behind our being human. (Compare Nick Bostrom’s “Why I Want to be Posthuman When I Grow Up”).

Machines are our heroes. We yearn to be like them. We see ourselves as “scandalous non-machines”. Yet machines always have a certain purpose. They are highly specialised. Human engineering aims at making the human more specialised, at perfecting a particular ability or capacity to which the human is a mere appendix, at best tolerated, but no longer of central importance. Thus the superhuman that human engineering is meant to create is at the same time a subhuman.

This sounds familiar. Similar concerns have been raised by Leon Kass. Yet Anders denies that he is what today we are used to call a bioconservative (he uses the term “metaphysical conservative”). The point is not that everything that is, is good simply because it is (or that human nature is good and should remain what it is simply because it is our nature) – which would be an untenable position –, but rather that we are willing to change ourselves for the sake of our machines, that we measure ourselves by their standards, instead of our own, and that, in doing this, we limit or even relinquish our own freedom. The aspiring human engineer may well suffer from hubris (as a common objection has it), but he also suffers from misplaced humility, which is not a contradiction. “The ‘human engineer is in fact both: arrogant and self-deprecating, hubristic and humble. His attitude is arrogated self-abasement and hubristic humility.”

So when we compare ourselves to machines, in what way exactly do we find ourselves wanting? One of the gravest defects seems to be our perishability. We grow old, we die. In comparison, the things that we create seem to be immortal, at least potentially so, because very often when they are not it is because we want them to stop working after a certain period of time (so that more products can be sold). But even those things are immortal in the sense that they can always be duplicated and replaced. Our products partake in a new version of immortality: “industrial re-incarnation”. They have a serial existence. This light bulb or washing machine may give up its ghost after a few years, but then we can easily get a new one that is exactly like the old one, or at least one that does exactly the same job, if not a better one. Their very reproducibility and replaceability guarantees their immortality. How lucky they are! We on the other hand, their creators, go bad very quickly and we cannot be replaced. How shameful that is, how unbearable! Again, something needs to be done. We feel that it cannot, it should not stay like this. (And indeed, isn’t that what some life extension enthusiasts imagine we will achieve in the future? Mind-uploading, for instance, to a computer or to a new body, is the achievement of immortality by making the body replaceable. Others envisage a periodical cleansing of the mind of all memories to prevent mental ageing and the boredom of an overly prolonged existence, which creates a different kind of serial existence.)

Anders’s great insight is that the human enhancement project is motivated by shame. We are ashamed of our body, our physical nature, our mere-humanness, our vulnerability and perishability, and not despite the fact that none of this is our fault, but precisely because it is (or has been for a long time) beyond our control and not the result of a conscious decision. It is the very givenness of our nature that we resent (which explains why Michael Sandel’s argument from giftedness is so often ridiculed and received with so much hostility by proponents of radical human enhancement.) It is the fact that we cannot do anything about it that we are ashamed of. It belies our claims of autonomy, freedom and control. That is also the reason why we tend to be ashamed of our sexuality. Sex is a “pudendum” precisely because it makes us lose control and voices our dependency. It shows us in the grip of nature, of that which lies beyond and before us, and reminds us that the “I” (the individual in control of herself) is a rather fragile construction on the back of a powerful “It” (the nature that controls the doings of the self). And we don’t like that one bit. So what we are trying to do is regain control over ourselves, and that means to gain control also, and perhaps even primarily, over our sexuality, without realising that the only thing we can hope to achieve by this is that we manage to replace one It by another: the natural It of the body by the artificial It of the machine.

Günther Anders on Promethean Shame (Part 1)

The first volume of Günther Anders’s Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man) was published more than fifty years ago, in 1956, and, strangely, has never been translated into English. The book is essentially about what machines, and our increasing reliance on them, do to us, or more precisely what they do to what Anders chooses to call our “soul”. Hence the book’s subtitle “On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution” - although Anders remarks that it would have been more accurate to call it “on the transformations of the soul in the age of the second industrial revolution”. Thus the question is how we are being changed by the machines we create and use, and the analysis that Anders provides in order to answer it, especially in the first part, entitled “On Promethean Shame”, strikes me as just as relevant today as it was half a century ago. In fact, I think that, given that we have now all but entered the age of human enhancement, it is today more relevant than ever.

The book starts with the observation that we have created a world in which we increasingly look like relics of an era that has long passed. We lounge around among our various appliances and machines like bewildered dinosaurs in a world that is no longer ours, that has moved on without us. We lag behind, without any real hope of catching up, and we know it. The machines that we produce are already so much more advanced and capable than we can ever hope to be. And they allow us to do things that go far beyond what we can imagine and emotionally cope with: “We can bomb to shreds hundreds of thousands, but we cannot mourn or regret them.” Anders calls this “the Promethean gap”, which is ultimately a gap between the human body (in which all the limitations of our imagination and emotions are rooted) and the machine (and the power that it bestows on us). Naturally we would want to close this gap to get rid of the feeling of disjointedness, and I think that is what we are witnessing today. Isn’t the human enhancement project that we currently engage in best understood as a concerted attempt to close this Promethean gap, to make us, as Persson and Savulescu put it, “fit for the future”, to bring us up to the advanced (or what is perceived as such) level of the machine? Perhaps today this no longer looks as impossible or unlikely to accomplish as it did fifty years ago.

The gap between the apparent perfection of the machines that we create and the apparent imperfection and deficiency of our own vulnerable, mortal and messy bodies (and accordingly, since we cannot detach ourselves from our bodies, of ourselves) is hard to accept. In fact, it is a permanent source of a particular kind of shame, which Anders calls “Promethean shame” and which he defines as the “shame for the embarrassingly high quality of the things we make”. It is the frustrating and humiliating recognition of our inferiority when compared to our products, and the fact that more than anything else seems to make us inferior is the fact that we have been born rather than made. We are ashamed that we owe our existence not to art and design, not to a conscious, deliberate and well-considered act of human creation, but rather to the accident of birth and the random sexual act that preceded it, neither of which can be seen as particularly dignified and both of which serve as a constant reminder that, ultimately, we are and remain mere animals. (Imagine a dialogue between a machine and a human, the machine boasting about all the forethought and the complex calculations that have given rise to its existence and then asking the human “And who made you?”, might we feel ashamed of having to admit that, alas, we weren’t made at all, but were simply born?)  

The perceived perfection of the machine makes us wish that we had been made too (and in order to spare our children the embarrassment of having to grow up in the knowledge that they were not designed and not made fit for purpose - that nobody really cared enough to make sure that they are as perfect as they could possibly be - we have now started to modernise our reproduction processes and become much more “selective” and “pro-active” when it comes to the making of children). Although we are the makers, that is no longer a reason to be proud, because the made is for some reason perceived as ontologically superior. We have started to look at ourselves as we imagine we must appear to one of our products. Looking at ourselves, we have adopted the perspective of the machine, and as the machine would despise us if it were conscious and could make the comparison, we are now ready to despise ourselves. So the maker, in order to keep up with his product and make himself less despicable, needs to find a way to become made himself. A sort of self-reification is required, a transformation of the human into a machine. The naked body that we are ashamed of is no longer the unclothed body, but instead the body that has not been worked on, not embellished or transformed in any way, unmodified and unenhanced. It is, as a product of a presumably blind and unthinking nature, a “faulty construction”, which as such is in urgent need of correction and amendment. But, as Anders rightly points out, “we can only conceive of the human as a construction, especially a faulty one, when we adopt the perspective of the machine. Only if this category is accepted as being both universally applicable and exhaustive can such a reinterpretation take place and can the unconstructed appear as the badly constructed.” (An excellent example of how pro-enhancement arguments can be driven by this kind of Promethean shame is Allen Buchanan’s book Beyond Humanity? Oxford University Press 2011. Buchanan basically argues that we are badly constructed machines and for this reason urgently need to enhance ourselves because, given our many defects, if we don’t give ourselves a better nature we will not be able to survive much longer.)

(to be continued)

Human Solitude

I just reread Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read first 25 years ago, when I was a student. Great book, but not exactly uplifting when we take the events in the book, which tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family somwhere in South America, to be a description of the human condition. There seems to be little room for human choice, with every single character firmly in the grips of fate, repeating the same mistakes that their ancestors have made, engaging in the same follies, driven by instincts rooted in a common family character, as if the family were a Schopenhauerian idea, and its members only so many appearances of that idea, somehow lost in the material world, the world of becoming, as if they already were the ghosts as which many of them return after their death.

Not very surprisingly, given the title, the main theme or even main protagonist of the book is solitude, which is mentioned over and over again in various contexts and attributed to virtually all characters in the book. One of them, Fernanda, who marries into the family as a young woman and who initially is strong and independent, eventually finds herself worn down, not by life, but by the memory of her lost youth and everything that could have been and never was. And then Marquez or his narrator says a remarkable thing: "The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude." How depressing is that! To suggest that what makes us human is not our reason, or our indeterminacy, or our moral sense, or the knowledge of our mortality, or any of the other traditional definitions of the human, but the existential condition of solitude. It suggests that we are always essentially alone, even when we're with others, even when we love and are being loved. That we were born alone and that we will die alone. And that we are deluding ourselves if we think that there is ever a time when we are not.

There is, of course, some truth in that. On the other hand, our human solitude is rooted in our apartness, our natural detachment from the world, which goes along with self-awareness, and it seems to me that the same detachment also allows us to love and befriend others, to feel compassion for and solidarity with them, to empathise. By virtue of our solitude we recognize each other for what we are. And perhaps it is that recognition that gives rise to what we call human dignity.

The Uncanny Valley

Earlier this week I attended a workshop where someone gave a talk about early animated films. The talk also included a reference to the so-called "Uncanny Valley" hypothesis. Since I had never heard of it before, I had to look it up, which is odd given that the hypothesis has been around for more than forty years now. In 1970 the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Moti published a paper, in which he suggested that our positive feelings towards a robot steadily increase the more human its appearance becomes, until, that is, we reach a point where the robot looks almost human, but not quite. Then sympathy quickly turns into revulsion, that is, the sympathy curve that up to this point had steadily risen falls suddenly below zero, before it rises again with equal suddenness when the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human. The term "uncanny valley" refers to the sudden dip in the sympathy curve. In 2007, Jamais Cascio speculated that we might experience a "second uncanny valley" once we have started to radically enhance human beings. The slightly more than human might be as uncanny as the slightly less than human, while we might be fine with sufficiently distant posthumans.

So if that is correct, then what exactly is it that provokes such a negative reaction to the almost-but-not-quite-human and the no-longer-quite-human? And which entities, aside from robots, are we talking about? The Wikipedia entry on the uncanny valley shows a graph which positions zombies and corpses in the uncanny valley. But I find this not very convincing. Surely zombies and corpses are not uncanny because they so closely resemble real (i.e. living) humans, but because they are dead, and they are rotting, and some of them want to eat you. Perhaps better examples would be the animal people in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, which the narrator Prendick, when he first encounters one of them, mistakes for human, though he feels that there's something odd about them that disturbs him. Or think of the aliens in Don Siegel's 1956 film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", which look quite human, except that all human emotion seems to have drained out of them, and they, too, come across as creepier than any monster could be. What is it that repulses us here? Is it the transition from the non-human to the human or from the human to the non-human? Is it the ambiguity? Lower down on the rising curve, before the sudden dip into the uncanny valley, we know that the entity is not human, and its efforts to look more human are seen as a kind of hommage paid to humanity. No ambiguity here. But an entity that looks almost human, but not quite, without being human, is like a pretender to the throne. An usurper. Perhaps it also reminds us of the fragility of humanness, which sometimes appears like a thin veneer rather than a deep-reaching and solid identity. It is also interesting that, if the hypothesis is correct, then an entity that, in its appearance, cannot be distinguished from a human, does no longer disturb us, even if we know that it is not human! Why should that be? Does it perhaps have something to do with the fact that we cannot think of someone who in its outward appearance (including the way it moves and acts) is really indistinguishable from a human, as anything other than human? Perhaps that is what we are for each other: animated bodies with a particular, characteristically human appearance.

Meet the Superhumans! Channel 4's Paralympics Marketing Campaign

The Olympic Games finally started last night with a huge hullabaloo, but its supposedly ugly little sister, the Paralympics, will not begin before the end of August. However, two weeks ago various TV channels already broadcast a 90-second video promo, produced by a Channel 4 team, advertising the event. There we see a number of disabled athletes, training hard, faces full of determination, visibly ready to kick ass, and get a glimpse of the events that caused them to be what they are today: terrible accidents, war, genetic defects. Yet the film is made in such a way that those athletes don't come across as disabled at all. On the contrary, they appear to be immensely abled, despite the fact that they have got a limb or two missing or are confined to a wheelchair. There's no weakness to be seen, nothing that is apt to arouse compassion, or worse, pity in us. What we feel instead, and are meant to feel, is admiration, or even more than that: something more akin to awe. This impression is reinforced by four lines of text superimposed over the pictures: "Forget everything you thought you knew about strength./ Forget everything you thought you knew about humans./ It's time to battle./ Meet the superhumans." It is thus suggested that we regard the athletes competing at the Paralympics not as disabled, but on the contrary as superabled, not as less than human, as deficient in some way, but as more than human. I find this utterly remarkable, because it turns the usual perspective on its head. Superhumans are normally pictured as gifted with special physical or cognitive abilities that allow them to do things that no mere human can do. They can fly or have X-Ray eyes or read minds or bend time or are indestructable, or what have you. This is the kind of fantasy that informs much of our current thinking about human enhancement. The radically enhanced human or posthuman that transhumanists and others envisage, is really not much different from a comic book superhero. Both are able to do things that mere humans cannot do for the simple reason that for them the boundaries that determine our human existence no longer exist. They have overcome those boundaries by making them disappear. What the Channel 4 video spot about the Paralympics suggests, though, is that real strength does not show itself in a limitless existence, in the creation of an environment that no longer presents any obstacles to the satisfaction of our will, that is, in other words, in virtual omnipotence. Rather, real strength consists in the spirit. Instead of leaving behind all boundaries, we become more than human by deciding to live with them, but at the same time refusing to let ourselves be bullied by them. We prove both our humanity and superhumanity by refusing to buckle, by putting up a good fight and by accomplishing great things despite our limitations. Thus it is not human enhancement, at least not the kind of human enhancement that is commonly discussed as such, that will make us superhuman. If anything, it is resolve, and courage, and related virtues of the mind and heart.