Biological Ethics

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Chapter 7. Science and human life in the technological society.

A. Llano

The discussion of questions about the meaning, scope and limits of the experimental sciences must be an interdisciplinary task, in which cultivators of various specialities must participate. It would seem that the philosopher would be the weaker party in this dialogue, insofar as in today's sociology of knowledge, in today's factual status of scientific knowledge, Philosophy is not the most prestigious. But there is a growing conviction among scientists and technicians that they, too, have to deal with the question of the "ought to be" of science. And this question cannot be answered without going to some extent to Philosophy.

At the beginning of the last century, Kant said that the "Philosophy in the worldly sense" - not the Philosophy that is taught, but the one that is lived - poses four fundamental questions: What can I know? This question is answered by the Theory of knowledge. What can I expect? This question is answered by the Philosophy of religion. What should I do? This question is answered by Ethics. And finally, what is man? This last question would encompass the other four, and answering it would be the task of Anthropology.

These four questions have a lot to do with the issue at hand, although it is specifically the third one that affects us the most. At least implicitly, all scientists ask themselves this subject set of questions. As a testimony to this is the interesting book graduate "The challenge of Rationality: Science and Technology versus Culture", which compiles the conference proceedings, commented by Ladriére, of a symposium held by UNESCO in 1974, on the topic "Science, Ethics and Aesthetics". One of the passages of the conference proceedings reads as follows: "After the Second World War, but especially in the last dozen years or so, the ambivalence - whether it is good or bad, to what extent it is positive or negative - of science and technology has become more radical to the point of leading to a real rethinking of the whole of the historical project of science and technology. The use of atomic energy for destructive purposes, which ended the Second World War, had a truly traumatic effect on scientists, public opinion and political decision-makers. It became clear that science could be of no benefit whatsoever and could even lead to catastrophes. Since then, this realisation has been continually reinforced. The potential for nuclear destruction has been constantly reinforced, creating a permanent danger for the survival of a large part of the human species. Biological research has reached a stage where one can begin to fear a fatal limit. There is a danger of unintentionally producing ultra-resistant bacteria that no known antibiotic substance can combat. The development of scientific medicine, and in particular of preventive medicine, has accumulated, i.e. rendered the mechanisms of natural selection largely inoperative, and, on the other hand, a regular increase in the rate of genetic anomalies in the human species. Finally, the intensive development of scientific and some technological applications, in particular Chemistry, compromise the ecological balance, to the point of creating a serious problem in the relationship between man and the environment".

Since 1974, when this dialogue between scientists and philosophers took place, the problem has become even more acute and constitutes the spiritual or cultural core topic of the present time. In a society shaped by science and technology, what is the human meaning of science and technology, what is the basic orientation, the "must be" of science and technology?

There is no doubt that technical progress - arising from scientific discoveries - has helped and is helping man to solve such serious problems as nutrition, energy, the fight against disease, and so on. As a result of technology, the conditions of human life on earth have undergone an extraordinary change and have successively improved.

At the same time, however, technology has often been used without control, regardless of its possible dangerous consequences, and has been placed at the blind service of certain economic or political interests. As a result, a series of threats have arisen for man, who is today the victim of great fear, as if he were threatened by what he himself has created, by the results of his own work and by the use he can make of them. There is now talk of "the terrors of the year 2000".

(a) Nature of the technique

This deep historical unease is closely linked to the awareness of an overflow of human technology.

Human technique is very different from what we can call "animal technique". Man has the capacity to objectify, a trait that cannot be found in animals. Man is able to deal with his environment, not simply as a living environment, but as a set of objects, as realities distinct from himself. All ethologists, even the most reluctant to emphasise the specificity of human behaviour, Lorenz, for example, point to man's ability to objectify, to consider a stimulus not as it affects him, but in its own reality. This fact opens up a world of possibilities for action. An animal is able to use a tool, even to modify it, but what it is never able to do is to make a tool out of other tools, precisely because it cannot establish an objective relationship between them, because it is not able to objectify. The animal lives in a closed environment, biunivocally related to its biological Structures . Man opens himself to a world of objective realities, which he can modify independently.

That is to say, man not only has the capacity to work with objects one by one - which many animal species do -, establishing a biologically immediate "longitudinal" relationship with the objects, but he can also use these objects to create others: at this point, there is technical capacity and there is a human mind.

This transversal relationship with the series of objects constitutes a progressive chain: each instrument, each new object, opens up possibilities for making others - for example, the tool as an instrument for creating others - which makes this series, in principle, indefinite. The technical products become part of the world and determine to a large extent the channels of future progress. In this way, technology has been accurately defined as a "system of objectified products with determining power".

When modern technology invents the machine, in which there is already a dynamism of its own, and, in a second stage, produces cybernetic ingenuity, these objects attain a growing functional autonomy. Therefore, this process becomes more and more complete and autonomous, and becomes independent of the subjects that originated it.

Naturally, all of this is a great advantage for man, but there is a tremendous risk: that man will be trapped by this objective chain. As the highly complicated technical machinery develops further, it seems that the action of the individual subject becomes less relevant, to the extent that he becomes just another object in the chain. Man becomes merely an instrument of production; he himself is transformed by this process of technical possibilities and loses the specificity of his own nature. What does it matter what he thinks, feels or says? The only thing that counts is the function he plays in the process of objective production. Man as a subject, as a unique and unrepeatable person, no longer counts for anything.

From this perspective, the conflict between humanism and technology - so often treated superficially - appears in all its crudeness. Indeed, the system of technical products imposes its own demands, subject to value parameters of a material and quantitative nature. The qualitative aims of man himself seem to be powerless in comparison with the relentless sequence of technical progress. The decisive question of the meaning of man, of his destiny staff, becomes evanescent if we stick only to these demands of the technically shaped environment. In the technological society, the real, concrete human being - with his own culture, experiences and aspirations, inner sufferings and legitimate hopes - finds himself in the cold open, lost, uprooted. He no longer knows what is happening or what he should want. He sees himself as a cog in the great machine, which can drive him anywhere.

The "new phenomenon", somewhat characteristic of our present-day civilisation, which has come to be known as "Sunday neurosis", fits perfectly into this status . Men and women, definitively subjected to the demands of industrial society, periodically find themselves faced with empty hours, in which the absence of meaning in their lives is clearly manifested when the activity that had lulled them to sleep during the rest of the week ceases. In this respect, a revealing fact is the higher percentage of suicides recorded on these non-working days.

b) Scientism and counterculture

Although recent criticisms of positivism have been forceful, an attitude that can be described as "scientism" persists in broad academic and social sectors. Scientism is the absolutism of positive science, which is a degeneration of the true scientific spirit. All objectivity is reduced to the - largely conventional and constructed - objectivity of experimental knowledge. It is not realised that the natural-scientific knowledge is only one part of the total human knowledge . The scientismist argues, if at all, on the grounds of precision and efficiency, while branding everything that is not "scientific" as vague and arbitrary.

The pragmatic version of scientism is technocracy, prevalent in both the countries of the Western area and the Eastern bloc. Decisions of collective scope are predominantly taken on the basis of economic performance parameters, marginalising value dimensions.

What happens when all possible rigorous knowledge is limited to the experimental sciences? There are, then, a series of questions that remain unanswered, since science does not explain what things are, but how they work. Questions relating to the meaning of science, to the purpose of human life, and - at final- to man himself are left out of rigorous knowledge.

Science teaches us how genes are replicated, how the structural units of macromolecules are assembled and the process of photoreceptor stimulation. However, it is incapable of explaining what life is, a question that cannot be given up. Because if we do not know what life is, or do not try to know it, we will not be able to speak meaningfully, with any basis, of its value.

The mere functioning, the simple analytical explanation does not tell us what the value of life is. Why then speak of respect for life? Why is human life always untouchable? Why, in order to save many sick people, are we not allowed to experiment live on a single man? Why, as Rousseau said, can I not press a button and let a mandarin die in China, unknown to almost the whole world, if a great good is to be derived from it for the whole of mankind? It is not easy to answer these questions, but they certainly cannot be charged to the account of positive Science, because they fall outside its method. Science alone cannot give an answer to the problem of the ultimate meaning of things; this does not fall within the scope of the scientific process.

The rationalist and technocratic answer to this problem will be to say that science and technology have led us to an undesirable status , because they have not been well programmed; they have not been subjected to relentless programming. Scientific activity has been left to the arbitrariness of researchers, and this has led to dysfunction in society; all scientific activity must be subjected to a social and political purpose; it is up to the State and its planners to assign, at any given moment, a place to each subject of research: it is necessary to rationalise research. To a certain extent, this is an acceptable approach : indeed, resources should not be wasted, there may be harmful research and a certain amount of programming is necessary. But this raises an additional and perhaps more serious problem: that of the relationship between freedom and science. A problem of great ethical content, because if we accept that all scientific research must be subject to the programming of technocrats, of politicians, where is the freedom of researcher? Might not the dysfunction be even greater? Might it not be that - by this route - we are heading towards the kind of "brave new world" predicted by Aldous Huxley? Or, more realistically, to that rather wretched, but equally deprived of freedom, world described by Orwell in his impressive novel "1984". A very serious problem is posed, but what is more serious is not having the necessary instruments of thought to solve it, precisely because, if we try to respond from Science itself, from Technology, we find that the conceptual or comprehension instruments we possess are insufficient; they deal with the object being studied, but the meaning of scientific activity cannot be thematised.

In 1936, Husserl, the German philosopher and initiator of phenomenology, published a very important book entitled "The Crisis of the European Sciences" at degree scroll . He discussed the status crisis in which scientific knowledge in Europe found itself. A kind of stagnation had been reached after the spectacular progress that the positive sciences, especially theoretical physics, had experienced in the first third of the century. The crisis of the European sciences refers to the crisis of European humanity. What is happening is that European humanity, the people of Europe in 1936, do not know what to do, how to use, what meaning to give to a positive science. The basic question is one of scepticism about truth. We have reached an intellectual and spiritual status in which we do not know what truth means, nor which path leads to it. Science has become disconnected from the world of life, from the basic certainties of the human subject who does science.

Ortega said, at that time, that "what happens to us is that we don't know what happens to us". What happens to us is that we do a series of things and we don't know what they are for; we don't have enough conceptual instruments to ask ourselves the question of purpose and, therefore, the questions about meaning.

Faced with the limitations of positive Science, thus considered, all the philosophical currents of existential subject arise, precedents of the current countercultural positions: Science does not provide us with the meaning of life; Science is a very defective way of facing the reality of individual life, of one's own experiences; this, rather than knowing it, one must feel it; Science cannot speak to us about it.

Thus, in the face of the coldness and pretended asepsis of technocratic scientism, of the mechanical conception of reality, in which man is dissolved in his environment, movements of rejection of rationalist instrumentalism, movements that have come to be generically called "counterculture", have been registered at all levels of intellectual and social life: resurgence of libertarian attitudes in politics; subjective proclamations in art; methodological anarchism in epistemology; environmentalism; anti-psychiatry; bodily techniques and "transcendental meditation"; search for artificial paradises, "hippie", "punk", "pasotas" movements, etc. It is a question of returning to the immediacy of life, of returning to the warmer dimensions of individual existence - imagination, spontaneity, communication staff, intuition, affectivity, tenderness -, of the refusal to integrate oneself into a relentless and dehumanised functionality. And, in fact, one cannot ignore the authentic strength that lies behind some of these attitudes, in their rejection of the negative features of technological society. But this position has - from entrance- a sociological limitation: the subjective individualistic and therefore often arbitrary character of its approaches; they refer only to the individual conscience; instead of a value valid for all, what is valid for oneself, what seems good to me, is advocated.

From the above, it would seem to follow that the technocratic attitude is opposed to the arbitrariness of the existentialist or subjectivist movements. And yet, as Husserl noted, both positions have a common root. Moreover, scientistic totalitarianism and countercultural dispersion go together perfectly, both from a social and a theoretical point of view.

Indeed, from both positions it is theoretically assumed that rigour and objectivity are the monopoly of positive science: outside it there is only irrationality. The difference between them - like two sides of the same coin - lies in the fact that scientism despises obscure irrationality, while countercultural movements revel in it. But in both cases, Withdrawal seeks to introduce a principle of clarity and order into the vast field of human realities and actions.

A kind of division of territory emerges: in the technostructure, strict rationality reigns; in what we conventionally call "culture", on the other hand, impressionistic subjectivism reigns supreme. It is a balance of contradictions: the tensions are cushioned in a hedonistic conformism.

The socio-political configuration of Western countries is quite well adapted to this dichotomy, often acquiring the outline of "permissive stateism". The sphere of what is considered important - the techno-economic system - is tightly controlled by the state bureaucracy or multinational corporations, giving individuals, as compensation, the playful fickleness of hedonism and the conformist tranquillity of "social security". The human subject that is generated is characteristic of the current stage of the technological society. It is no longer the promoter of initiatives, typical of capitalist morality, or the political activist promoted by socialism. Now it is the citizen who expects gratification and security from the state: a docile, resigned, sceptical, earthbound individual or, in Polin's words, "a society made up of human domestic animals, well cared for and fattened by the state-providence".

Countercultural movements have the appeal of apparent global rejection, but they also officiate at the ceremony of conformity. Those who indulge in them rarely realise that the "system" immediately integrates them: rebellion is commercialised, the protest industry is born. Rebels are tolerated and counted on, as long as they protest in the way that industrial society intends.

On the other hand, permissivism, which presents itself as offering total liberation, actually tolerates the domination of the weakest by the strongest. The weaker party - the unborn, the children, the elderly, the spectator - are left helpless when abortion, divorce, euthanasia or pornography are "liberalised".

c) Scope and limits of science

If it is admitted that there is objectivity only in Science, nothing and nobody can give a reason for the problems and questions of existential interest. As Unamuno said, "there is only one single question: the human question"; what will become of me, of my individual consciousness, once I die and my biological course is exhausted? Neither science nor technology can answer this question. The subjectivists or existentialists assume that this is something that can only be answered in the context of individual existence.

However, the solution we seek cannot come by way of an emulsion or compromise between the imperialism of science and counterculture, between bureaucracy and permissiveness.

From these two positions we cannot solve the problem of the meaning of science, the problem of the crisis of the European sciences, which in turn refers to the crisis of European humanity. To do so, it is necessary to consider that scientific objectivity is only one part of the total human knowledge , that it is not the only objectivity that man can achieve.

Developing this idea, one can consider that there are three fields of knowledge, more or less rigorous, to which correspond three levels of objectivity: Objectivity 1, which corresponds to the pre-scientific level; objectivity 2, to the scientific level; and objectivity 3, to the meta-scientific level.

Pre-scientific experience is prior to science; it is proper to everyday existence and to those cultures that have not reached what would be called a scientific "status". It must be pointed out that objectivity already exists there, that there is the possibility of communicable knowledge. If this were not the case, everyday existence would be unviable and the cultures of primitive peoples would not have developed; cultures that can only be described as inferior through a "European-centric" vision, because they do not shape their lives according to a scientific and technical image. From scientific objectivity it is not possible to know whether these cultures are inferior or superior. What is clear is that it is another way of thinking, which is not lacking in rigour or objectivity.

Scientific experience is based on pre-scientific experience. No matter how sophisticated the scientific research is, no matter how refined its instruments, it always ultimately refers back to the observation corresponding to pre-scientific experience. However complex an electron microscope may be, observing with it the ultra-structural transformation of a lymphocyte after the arrival of an antigen is, in the end, the act of looking and the experience thus obtained is, at final, the same as looking at a car in the street.

Moreover, it can be considered that there is continuity between the pre-scientific level and the strictly scientific level, because at both levels the knowledge constitutes itself and progresses by the same method: essay-error. The fundamental difference between the two levels is that in science the errors of scientific models are consciously sought. In pre-scientific experience, the errors appear on their own, they show themselves to us without our looking for them.

Therefore, scientific praxis does not constitute a closed and completely autonomous and self-sufficient sphere, but is a field that is open "from below" to the objectivity of the vital world, of immediate experiences, of everyday experience. Furthermore, the scientific knowledge appeals to a higher level of intelligibility, which we could call "Meta-science". It is the reflection on the true nature of reality, which seeks the ultimate meaning of everything, especially that of human existence; only from this level can moral questions be rigorously posed and, in particular, an ethics of scientific activity, a scientific ethics, be developed.

Objectivity 1 is, to a large extent, a given objectivity: we encounter it, it is in the world, in the midst of life. Objectivity 2, on the other hand, is largely built on the first, it is a formalised, selective objectivity. Finally, objectivity 3, which encompasses Ethics, is an objectivity neither given, nor constructed, but sought. The meaning of science, of our life, etc., are questions covered. It is an objectivity to be discovered, a transcendent, non-immediate objectivity.

In the interplay of these three levels lies the core topic to think through the meaning of experimental science and technology. If, as scientism does, objectivity 2 is absolutised and the objectivity of knowledge is exclusively limited to it, if its extra-scientific roots and its supra-scientific openness are ignored, then the problem of the human and social meaning of science cannot be solved.

d) Science and ethics

Although in today's society there is talk of a "crisis of legitimisation of science", the right of science must be affirmed, because science is also, among other things, a path to the true: the knowledge of truth - recognition of truth as a human good - carries its own meaning, its own justification.

The problem arises, as has been pointed out above, when scientific thought is absolutised, which inevitably leads to the crisis of the individual and of society, the profound malaise of contemporary man.

knowledge It is obvious that the scientific knowledge can be used for good as well as for evil: if the effects of a poison are investigated, it can be used to save or to kill; the point of reference letter must be perfectly clear to distinguish good from evil. Technical science, oriented towards the transformation of the world, is justified by its service to man and humanity. It is therefore necessary to have a moral and ethical criterion that allows man to benefit from the practical applications of scientific research . A scientific ethics is necessary.

Technology without ethics is in grave danger of leading man where he does not want to go. This is what happens when, in a unilateral progress, technology is applied to war, hegemony and conquest, where man kills man, and one nation destroys another, depriving it of freedom or the right to exist. Science and Technology then become the slaves of a tyrannical political or economic "lust for power", instead of resolutely and systematically orienting themselves, with truly effective means, towards eliminating from our world the areas of hunger, misery, underdevelopment, disease, illiteracy, exploitation, economic and political dependence, or the various forms of neo-colonialism, among other obviously unjust situations.

To give science a human meaning, it is not enough to know how the phenomena studied work, but what they are in themselves. It is essential to go beyond the intra-scientific sphere and open up to reflection, to contemplation, to what Heidegger called "meditative thinking". It is necessary to discover why man - whoever he may be - has an extraordinary dignity; that man - born or unborn, old or full-aged, lucid or oligophrenic - is untouchable, cannot be manipulated, can never be treated only as a means, but always also as an end. In order to affirm this, there is no functional subject reason on which to base it. There is no utilitarian, technical explanation that can equate an embryo of a few millimetres, a man full of creative power and a mentally ill person absolutely dependent on those around him; there has to be another subject of reflection that affects what man is; not only how he appears or how he functions, but what he is. A humanist way of thinking must place technology in its rightful place and appeal to the inexhaustible resource of intelligence and the creative force of freedom. In this way it will perhaps be possible for the people of our subject to learn to "master their own domain" and to resolve to orient technical progress in a non-regressive direction: towards an end that does not detract from human dignity.

Without the conviction of human dignity, the current positive movement in defence of such rights remains empty rhetoric, compatible with the hurtful and continuous offences against the dignity staff of millions of men. Whoever knows what man is, knows why he should be treated as an untouchable "res sacra", as Seneca considered him. On the other hand, those who consider him as a fragment of the cosmos, a mere sociological factor or a factor of economic profitability, will end up behaving in a humanly regressive way and will end up returning to the most primitive barbarism.

In many cases, all of this amounts - without being pejorative to science - to setting limits. The question of limits has been raised in a very crude way by various researchers and organisations, including UNESCO. What are the inner limits of scientific activity, what research - especially human experimentation - is ethically unacceptable, what cannot be done, what dangers arise from the enormous technical achievements of 20th century man?

These questions must be approached from outside the specific science itself, but with its support: in other words, technology without ethics is blind; but ethics without technology is empty, ineffective, and runs the risk of remaining moralising rhetoric, good wishes. For Ethics to become operative, it is necessary to achieve its link with the technological system in order to "master our own domain" (Marcel).

Criticism of technology is not enough. There has always been and always will be technology: but it is necessary that, in using it, man does not lose the natural habit of asking himself about the simplest things: What is this? What are we? Man can do more and more and better, but he must stop and ask himself: What is the purpose of this doing? And this, even if only in germ, is already a philosophical question.

The great challenge challenge facing new generations of scientists is precisely to propose a new meaning for science, to rediscover its connection with and purpose for the human person. The current complexity of our knowledge makes this a long and difficult task, which must be undertaken in the framework of a broad interdisciplinary communication. The university is the most appropriate place for this dialogue. The ethical and social rehabilitation of science requires the rehabilitation of human knowledge - theoretical and practical - that is open to the full breadth and depth of reality.