Replacing Nature

by Thomas Scarborough

Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Cape Town

The 2017 film Blade Runner 49 was ‘visually amazing’, receiving eight nominations and two awards at the 71st British Academy Film Awards, among other important accolades. But beyond the visuals, there was some serious philosophy. Blade Runner 49 portrays a world which, according to Laura Holt of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, cuts the ‘umbilical cord’ which connects human survival with the biosphere.

Today, this cutting of the umbilical cord would seem to be a slow but relentless process. The more organised we become, the more there is to go wrong. The more there is to go wrong, the more we need to insure life against it. The ‘progress’ of the Enlightenment has become the progress of human domination. This has come at the cost, according to the World Wildlife Fund, of the massive retreat of nature: an average 68% drop in biodiversity since 1970.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before his execution by the Nazi regime in 1945, wrote a synopsis of an enivsaged book. His notes were published posthumously in English in 1953, in Prisoner of God. Since these were abbreviated, I paraphrase here (the original translation appears below):

‘The Coming of Age of Humanity.

‘Humanity will seek to insure life against accident and ill-fortune. If the elimination of danger proves to be impossible, they will seek at least to minimise it. Insurance, while it thrives upon accidents, seeks also to mitigate their effects. This is a Western phenomenon. The goal is ultimately to be independent of nature. Our immediate environment is destined, not to be nature as before, but organisation. Yet this immunity from nature will produce a new crop of dangers, which is the very organisation.’

This was a prescient observation by a man who wrote nearly eighty years ago. At a glance, one might suppose that he was speaking of totalitarianism. It is, however, not the totalinarianism of the state, but what we now call ‘the science of scarcity’. How to provide more, and more, with less, across all lands and seas, for a global population.

Apart from being a relentless process, this becomes more and more dangerous to human stability. Close to my home in Cape Town, there is a nuclear power station. On some days, its twin domes rise hauntingly above the mists on the shore. In 2006, apparently, a single bolt broke loose in a generator, so disabling half the nuclear plant. It went into a controlled shutdown, and could not be raised to life for months. The reason for this was that replacement parts needed to be imported from France.

The incident showed how perilously close human organisation may sometimes be to disintegration. Fuel distribution, desalination plants, food production, transportation, communications, and any number of things besides, may be laid lame through fairly small and localised problems. The war in Ukraine, while not small, has revealed how a localised catastrophe can now destabilise the whole world. Too often, where we engineer things to create a more predictable and dependable world than nature provides, we come another step closer to the edge.

While we have applied much attention to the problems, we seem to find no reason to stop the latent and relentless process of separating ourselves from nature. And those who perhaps see clearly, do not have the power to prevent it. It is not ‘as before’, wrote Bonhoeffer. ‘Before’ (in his continuing notes), humankind had the spiritual vitality to defeat ‘the blasphemies of hybris’. He wrote, ‘Man is once more faced with the problem of himself. He can cope with every danger except the danger of human nature itself.’

Prominent thinkers have said no, wait, stop. Let go of the steering wheel. We are headed for, as it were, Blade Runner 49. The late biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson proposed that half the earth should be rewilded. Most recently, Laura Holt called for ‘relinquished areas’ of nature. I myself have proposed that large areas of the planet be prohibitos autem terra: under a ban. I propose that we are not capable of stopping ourselves in any other way.

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* Original translation: ‘The coming of age of humanity (along the lines already suggested). The insuring of life against accident, ill-fortune. If elimination of danger impossible, at least its minimisation. Insurance (which although it thrives upon accidents, seeks to mitigate their effects) a western phenomenon. The goal, to be independent of nature. Our immediate environment not nature, as formerly, but organization. But this immunity produces a new crop of dangers, i.e. the very organisation.’

Thence We Will Create Superhumans

by Corinne Othenin-Girard *

IMAGINE A WORLD IN WHICH parents have the option to go to a geneticist to discuss the ‘genetic fix’ choices of their unborn child.

If you should think that this is a fantasy of a dystopian fiction, you would be mistaken. Not only is the above, to a point, technologically possible today, but the parents' option could be made possible, too, in the not-too-distant future. 

Human Genome Editing is a kind of genetic engineering, where DNA is deleted and inserted, modified and replaced. 

The main argument in support of this technology is that it would be used to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases from one generation to the other. 

There seems now to be an instrumentalisation of individuals with disability, which means that concepts become instruments which serve as a guide to action. The proponents of (Germline) Genome Editing are using ‘the prevention of disability’ as a concept that coincides with how people with disabilities are usually portrayed and viewed by the broad public. 

There are two kinds of such editing—Somatic Genome Editing, and Germline Genome Editing—and there are, broadly, three possible applications. These applications include the following: 

1. Somatic Genome Editing is performed in the non-reproductive cells, and may contribute to treating diseases in existing individuals. It is said that it has the potential to revolutionise healthcare. A stunning success of this method was shown recently in the (possibly permanent) cure of hemophilia. And by now nearly 300 experimental gene-based therapies are in clinical testing. Changes made by somatic genome therapy are not passed down to future generations.

2. Germline Genome Editing is performed in early-stage embryo (before ‘it’ is even called an embryo), or in germ cells (sperm and egg cells). These modifications affect all cells of the potential future child, and will also be passed on to future generations. This technology would be used to prevent the transmission of diseases from one generation to the next. In other words, Genome editing would be used for fixing genetic ‘defects’ or ‘variations’ which cause rare diseases. Germline Genome Editing does not treat, cure, or prevent disease in any living individual. It is used to create embryos with altered genomes. 

3. From there on, the technology of Germline Genome Editing will inevitably expand into the area of generating ‘new’ or ‘improved’ abilities. Any gene can change, based on the ability-development it promises. ‘Treating disease’ or ‘preventing disability’ would therefore merge with ‘enhancement’. If genome editing should be deemed to be ‘sufficiently safe’, it could be applied to all kinds of gene variations—and that which is seen as ‘normal’ might be up for debate. The proponents of enhancement by genome editing mean to improve the human body and mind to its maximum potential. They conceive the natural human body as limited, defective, and in need of improvement, and support functioning beyond species-typical boundaries. 

Assuming that so-called ‘glitches’ of gene editing would be overcome, is it ethically acceptable to use this technology in order to ‘design’ future babies? It has already been done, in fact, and this issue has already come up, through the so-called CRISPR-Baby Scandal. In 2018, a Chinese researcher He Jiankui made the first CRIPRS-edited babies, twin girls called Lulu and Nana. Many researchers condemned his action. The actual editing wasn’t executed well. 

At the moment, public opinion is thought to carry a lot of weight. Therefore, various polls have been conducted to assess it. For example, the parent may have a severe heritable muscle disease: whether gene editing for (unborn) babies is acceptable, when it greatly reduces their risk of serious diseases or conditions. Assuming, again, that the technology is safe and effective. 

But for the technology to be declared as safe, don’t individuals with changed DNA need to be monitored throughout their life? 

The emerging field of enhancement medicine is due to push the boundaries through genetic manipulation, and will apply a shift to what is the human norm. 

Would using genome editing technology to create the 'perfect' or 'ideal' human risk making us become less tolerant of 'imperfections'? A person who couldn't embrace the norm of perfection would be perceived as 'disabled' and not as a person with a difference that needs to be sustained.

A genuinely inclusive and pro-equality society has no preferences between all possible future persons. Instead all existing and future individuals are perceived as having equal worth and value.

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* Corinne Othenin-Girard is a PhD student in sociology in Basle, Switzerland. She is currently working on a participatory project on the topic of Human Germline Genome Editing. Corinne invites readers of Pi to join a Zoom Conference, 9 September 2022 on Human Germline Gene editing (HGGE), more specifically on how it could change the future of humanity.

The Tangled Web We Weave

By Keith Tidman

 

Kant believed, as a universal ethical principle, that lying was always morally wrong. But was he right? And how might we decide that?

 

The eighteenth-century German philosopher asserted that everyone had ‘intrinsic worth’: that people are characteristically rational and free to make their own choices. Lying, he believed, degrades that aspect of moral worth, withdrawing others’ ability to exercise autonomy and make logical decisions, as we presume they might in possessing truth. 

 

Kant’s ground-level belief in these regards was that we should value others strictly ‘as ends’, and never see people ‘as merely means to ends’. A maxim that’s valued and commonly espoused in human affairs today, too, even if people sometimes come up short.

 

The belief that judgements of morality should be based on universal principles, or ‘directives’, without reference to the practical outcomes, is termed deontology. For example, according to this approach, all lies are immoral and condemnable. There are no attempts to parse right and wrong, to dig into nuance. It’s blanket censure.

 

But it’s easy to think of innumerable drawbacks to the inviolable rule of wholesale condemnation. Consider how you might respond to a terrorist demanding the place and time of a meeting to be held by the intended target. Deontologists like Kant would consider such a lie immoral.

 

Virtue ethics, to this extent compatible with Kant’s beliefs, also says that lying is morally wrong. Their reasoning, though, is that it violates a core virtue: honesty. Virtue ethicists are concerned to protect people’s character, where ‘virtues’ — like fairness, generosity, compassion, courage, fidelity, integrity, prudence, and kindness — lead people to behave in ways others will judge morally laudable. 

 

Other philosophers argue that, instead of turning to the rules-based beliefs of Kant and of virtue ethicists, we ought to weigh the (supposed) benefits and harms of a lie’s outcomes. This principle is called  consequentialist ethics, mirroring the utilitarianism of eighteenth/nineteenth-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, emphasising greatest happiness. 

 

Advocates of consequentialism claim that actions, including lying, are morally acceptable when the results of behaviour maximise benefits and minimise harms. A tall order! A lie is not always immoral, as long as outcomes on net balance favour the stakeholders.

 

Take the case of your saving a toddler from a burning house. Perhaps, however, you believe in not taking credit for altruism, concerned about being perceived conceitedly self-serving. You thus tell the emergency responders a different story about how the child came to safety, a lie that harms no one. Per Bentham’s utilitarianism, the ‘deception’ in this instance is not immoral.

 

Kant’s dyed-in-the-wool unforgiveness of lies invites examples that challenge the concept’s wisdom. Take the historical case of a Jewish woman concealed, from Nazi military occupiers, under the floorboards of a farmer’s cottage. The situation seems clear-cut, perhaps.

 

If grilled by enemy soldiers as to the woman’s whereabouts, the farmer lies rather than dooming her to being shot or sent to a concentration camp. The farmer chooses good over bad, echoing consequentialism and virtue ethics. His choice answers the question whether the lie elicits the better outcome than would truth. It would have been immoral not to lie.

 

Of course, the consequences of lying, even for an honorable person, may sometimes be hard to get right, differing in significant ways from reality or subjectively the greater good. One may overvalue or undervalue benefits — nontrivial possibilities.

 

But maybe what matters most in gauging consequences are motive and goal. As long as the purpose is to benefit, not to beguile or harm, then trust remains intact — of great benefit in itself.

 

Consider two more cases as examples. In the first, a doctor knowingly gives a cancer-ridden patient and family false (inflated) hope for recovery from treatment. In the second, a politician knowingly gives constituents false (inflated) expectations of benefits from legislation he sponsored and pushed through.

 

The doctor and politician both engage in ‘deceptions’, but critically with very different intent: Rightly or wrongly, the doctor believes, on personal principle, that he is being kind by uplifting the patient’s despondency. And the politician, rightly or wrongly, believes that his hold on his legislative seat will be bolstered, convinced that’s to his constituents’ benefit.

 

From a deontological — rules-focused — standpoint, both lies are immoral. Both parties know that they mislead — that what they say is false. (Though both might prefer to say something like they ‘bent the truth’, as if more palatable.) But how about from the standpoint of either consequentialism or virtue ethics? 

 

The Roman orator Quintilian is supposed to have advised, ‘A liar should have a good memory’. Handy practical advice, for those who ‘weave tangled webs’, benign or malign, and attempt to evade being called out for duplicity.

 

And damning all lies seems like a crude, blunt tool, with no real value by being wholly unworkable outside Kant’s absolutist disposition toward the matter; no one could unswervingly meet that rigorous standard. Indeed, a study by psychologist Robert Feldman claimed that people lie two to three times, in trivial and major ways, for every ten minutes of conversation! 

 

However, consequentialism and virtue ethics have their own shortcomings. They leave us with the problematic task of figuring out which consequences and virtues matter best in a given situation, and tailoring our decisions and actions accordingly. No small feat.

 

So, in parsing which lies on balance are ‘beneficial’ or ‘harmful’, and how to arrive at those assessments, ethicists still haven’t ventured close to crafting an airtight model: one that dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s of the ethics of lying. 

At the very least, we can say that, no, Kant got it wrong in overbearingly rebuffing all lies as immoral. Not seeking reasonable exceptions may have been obvious folly. Yet, that may be cold comfort for some people, as lapses into excessive risk — weaving evermore tangled webs — court danger by unwary souls.

Meantime, while some more than others may feel they have been cut some slack, they might be advised to keep Quintilian’s advice close.

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* ’O what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive’, Sir Walter Scott, poem, ‘Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field’.

 

A Linguistic Theory of Creation

by Thomas Scarborough

Creation of the Earth, by Wenceslas Hollar (1607-1677)

Perhaps it has been obscured through familiarity. There is an obvious curiosity in the opening chapters of Genesis (the creation of the world). Step by step, God creates the world, then names the world—repeatedly both coupling and separating his* creating and his naming.

Would it not be more natural simply to describe God’s creative acts without embellishment? Would not a description of his creative acts alone suffice? Unless God's naming has some special significance in the narrative, it may seem quite superfluous.

Under any circumstances, the opening chapters of Genesis are supremely difficult to interpret. Bearing this very much in mind, the purpose here is to present an alternative view—unfinished, unrefined—as a new possibility.

Existing interpretations of Genesis include the following:

• Heaven and earth were created in six days
• The six days were six (longer) periods of time
• The earth’s great age was ‘created into’ a six-day sequence
  
• Genesis represents the re-creation of the world
• Genesis stitches various creation stories together
• Its purpose is to glorify God, not first to be factual
• It is a synopsis, which may not be sequential
• It is a myth
• It is a spiritual allegory
• It describes a dream of Moses

Here, then, is a new alternative—presented merely as a possibility—for greater minds to examine the rough edges and (possibly) inadmissible ideas on an exceedingly complex text.

We begin with a simple linguistic fact. Names, in the Bible, were often commemorative. The ATS Bible Dictionary sums it up well: ‘Names were assumed afterwards to commemorate some striking occurrence in one’s history.’ Therefore, an event took place—then it, or the place of its happening, was named: Babel, Israel, the Passover, and so on. In fact, often with a pause.

If we assume that the creation account in Genesis includes, similarly, a commemorative naming, then the account may separate a stage-by-stage creation of the world from a stage-by-stage naming of it. With this in mind, there would then be four stages to each act of creation in Genesis. For example, in the NASB translation of the Bible (abridged):

• ‘Then God said, Let there be light.’
• ‘And there was light.’
• ‘And God called the light day.’
• ‘And there was evening and there was morning, one day.’

One may reduce this to two stages:

• God created.
• Then God named it.

 

And with some nuance, we may possibly say:

• God created, within unspecified periods of time.
• God named his creation during equal pauses (days), as commemorative acts.

In this case, Genesis could be viewed as a series of linguistic events. Its opening verses could set the tone, as a linguistic announcement: ‘And the earth was formless and void’—reminiscent of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure.’ 

Further, one may see a major linguistic shift in Genesis 3:7: ‘Then the eyes of both of them were opened …’ We have, from this point, the language of ‘ought’, as the first rational creatures ostensibly discern right from wrong. Then, needless to say, Babel represents a major linguistic shift in Genesis chapter 11, as languages (plural) appear.

From this, two major issues arise.

Firstly, is God's creating, in each stage of creation, coincident with his naming of it? In other words, did God name things on the same day that he created them, or did he name them afterwards? 

If it was on the same day that he created them, then the theory suggested here would presumably unravel. But arguably, in its favour, each naming is preceded by the word ‘And … ,’ which in the creation account is mostly used to indicate sequences in time. ‘And God called ...’ may represent separate periods of time in which namings occurred, after acts of creation.

A possible problem lies in Genesis 5:2, ‘God named them … in the day they were created.’ However, the word ‘day’ may here encompass every day, as we find in Genesis 2:4. ‘In the day’ may not refer to the separate stages of creation of Genesis chapter 1.

A second issue arises: God's naming does not seem to appear in the text consistently. ‘God called …’ appears only three times in Genesis 1, in connection with the first three days of creation. 

However Genesis, in general, liberally makes use of related words. Take the key words ‘God created ...’ Alternatives that we find in the text are ‘made, ‘formed’, ‘brought forth’, and so on. The same is true of the key words ‘God called …’ Alternatives are ‘saw’, ‘blessed’, ‘sanctified’. An act of commemoration may be implied in all of these words.

In short, the time periods which are described in Genesis may be attached, not first to the creation of the world, but to God’s naming of it—and, incidentally, to man's naming of it. On the sixth day, ‘the man gave names …’

Such a theory would potentially remove major problems of other creation theories. In particular, it could possibly move beyond both literal and liberal readings of Genesis, without colliding with them.

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* I follow Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: “We refer to G-d using masculine terms simply for convenience’s sake.

Also by Thomas Scarborough: Hell: A Thought Experiment.