I was pleased to have been interviewed by Daniel Herbster for AdvanceUSA about my views on bioethics and human exceptionalism. I thought I would post a few exerpts here, along with the link, for anyone interested in reading the whole thing. First, I was asked why bioethical issues are so important. From the interview: Bioethics is a contraction for “biomedical ethics.” It is a field that has profound influence over core areas of human endeavor that help establish and define the morality of society, and indeed, the meaning of human life itself. Should elderly people have their health care rationed? Is assisted suicide a proper medical service? Is it right to create cloned human embryos for use in research or to bring to birth? Is it wrong to abort fetuses because they test positive for Down syndrome? Should parents be able to genetically enhance their children? Are there morally relevant differences between humans and animals? What should happen if a nurse refuses to participate in an abortion or a physician wants to cut off wanted life-sustaining medical treatment because the patient has a poor “quality of life?” These and other equally important bioethical issues are much larger than the sum of their parts because they establish philosophical norms that exert tremendous influence upon society beyond the policies themselves. Indeed, I can think of few fields more important than bioethics in determining the kind of society we shall become in the 21st century.
Later, I was asked what I thought are the most important bioethical issues we face. I decided to swim a little deeper, since utilitarian bioethics is a symptom rather than a cause:
At the end I was asked about the novels Brave New World and 1984:Actually, it is bigger even than bioethics. I think humanism is mutating into an explicit and misanthropic anti-humanism. Indeed, I now believe that we are in the midst of what I call a “coup de culture” in which the social order founded in Judeo-Christian/humanistic view that upholds the unique importance of human life is being supplanted by a philosophical system steeped in utilitarianism—which is where bioethics comes in and the potential of creating disposable castes of people—hedonism—by which I mean the presumed right to indulge almost every urge and desire and not be judged—and radical environmentalism. Thus, Ecuador’s new constitution just granted “rights” to “nature” that are co-equal to those of people and Spain is about to pass into law the Great Ape Project that creates a “community of equals” among humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and other apes. The new movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a remake of a great old science fiction film from the 1950s, has the aliens coming to earth not to save mankind from self destruction, but to obliterate humanity—a complete genocide—in order to save the earth. Think about it! An A-List Hollywood extravaganza explicitly sends the message that we are the vermin species on the living planet, which is the heart of the Deep Ecology ideology. I think the goal is to knock us off the pedestal of human exceptionalism so that we will be so humbled and self-degraded that we will willingly sacrifice our own welfare and prosperity to “save the planet.” In this light, the problem of bioethics is a part of a larger overarching threat...
BNW is probably the most prophetic novel ever written and is more relevant today than it was in 1932 when it was first published. I think we are already on the path to the inhuman society Huxley depicts, which not coincidentally, is utterly utilitarian and hedonistic. The only aspect he missed was the radical environmentalism that has come to the fore in recent years. Huxley’s characters believe in nothing. But I don’t think humans can believe in nothing. We seem to be hard wired to seek the transcendent. With theism under attack, a new form of earth religion based on deep ecological principles could well fill the developing belief gap. I also think 1984 is well worth reading because of how vividly Orwell depicted the power of word engineering—a hallmark of the coup de culture today.That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
