Daylife/Reuters Pictures
|
What would our forebears have made of test-tube babies, microwave ovens, organ transplants, CCTV and iPhones? Could they have believed that one day people might jet to another continent for a weekend break, meet their future spouse on the internet, have their genome sequenced and live to a private soundtrack from an MP3 player? Science and technology have changed our world dramatically, and, for the most part, we take them in our stride. Nevertheless, there are certain innovations that many people find unpalatable.
Leaving aside special-interest attitudes such as the fundamentalist Christian denial of evolution, many controversies over scientific advances are based on ethical concerns. In the past, the main areas of contention have included nuclear weapons, eugenics and experiments on animals, but in recent years the list of “immoral” research areas has grown exponentially. In particular, reproductive biology and medicine have become ripe for moral outrage: think cloning, designer babies, stem-cell research, human-animal hybrids, and so on. Other troublesome areas include nanotechnology, synthetic biology, genomics and genetically modified organisms or so-called “Frankenfoods”.
To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. That, however, is an abdication of responsibility. Some moral reactions are irrational, but if scientists are serious about tackling them – and the bad decisions, harm, suffering and barriers to progress that flow from them – they need to understand a little more and condemn a little less…
I left Jones’ Headline alone. It’s could be construed as opportunism, deliberately leading discussion to the sensational and uninformed – excused as “inviting comment”.
As societies become more scientifically literate, scientific developments may well be judged more from a position of knowledge and less on the basis of intuitive responses driven by moral heuristics. However, there is another serious obstacle to the rational approach: our emotions, and especially the most morally loaded of emotions, disgust. In the wake of the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep, bioethicist Leon Kass of the University of Chicago argued that the visceral feeling which many people have in response to the most contentious scientific advances embodies a kind of wisdom that is beyond the power of reason to articulate. Many people are guided by this supposed “wisdom of repugnance”.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is not one of them. He has coined the more disparaging term “yuk response” to describe this reaction, and believes we should challenge the idea that repugnance is a reliable moral guide and the ultimate arbiter. “You begin the process by questioning the validity of the yuk response, calling it into doubt and pointing out that the yuk meter may be untrustworthy,” says Caplan. Then it becomes possible to start exploring the reasons and justifications for people’s initial intuitions of right or wrong, and see how they stand up to scrutiny.
Most of what Jones describes is cultural and parochial, of course. How shall I oversimplify? If I included an illustrative photo at this point of a nubile, bare-breasted young woman, our religious brethren would reel back, aghast. Slightly less hypocritical Western males would leer – and hope ther wives and fellow workers didn’t see them looking. Much of the rest of the world – from Euro sophisticates to Oceania – would admire her beauty. In Japan there wouldn’t be a peep even if she was barely into puberty.
Found by KD Martin at Cage Match
#25 – Skippy
>>Morality certainly came first, and without
>>it we would not have survived long. It is a
>>built in instinct, and it is even seen in
>>the animal kingdom.
I’m not so certain. Animal ALTRUISM (explainable in Darwinian terms as related to kin selection and/ or recipricity) is seen in the animal kingdom.
Morality, I’m not so sure about. Inasmuchas “morality” can only be known by communicating with the organism that is exhibiting the behavior, I don’t know how that would ever be determined.
If god did exist, why would you “worship” him? Isn’t he nothing but an all powerful tyrant?
What makes you believe that God is an all-powerful tyrant? I genuinely yearn to see God exercise some of His fearful sovereignty right about now.
#32–shubee==heh,heh. The whole point about god seeing every sparrow that falls is that HE IS exercising his sovereignty RIGHT NOW. Nice you even use the term “fearful.” God is a douche no matter what.
Thought Experiment: Imagine a universe with NO GOD. How would it look any different than the universe we are in right now?
Wait a second. Yes. No difference at all leading to the logical inference that=====?
Every symbol is true and false as all are incomplete. Yet certain patterns persist and make themselves evident in the passing of time. Man’s emotional nature is more than a random coincidence of perception and hormones it evolved and is evolving alongside, his intellectual nature. While the mind is busy observing and extrapolating, the heart is putting an emotional context to experience so that thereby we may develope the values necessary to keep us from destroying ourselves with the knowledge we aquire.
The perfection of the universe is sublime!
Given our relative lengths of time on earth, and that many bible thumpers are trying to co-opt science by saying that evolution occured AFTER god made all life in an instant, and remade himself in our image==I wonder if God is Tyrannosaurus Rex. It would explain so many things.
The whole point about god seeing every sparrow that falls is that HE IS exercising his sovereignty RIGHT NOW.
Not necessarily. There is a difference between permissive will and perfect will. Perhaps God is temporarily letting those who refuse to submit to His supremacy to run the universe by themselves.
If there is really a GOD… He has a weird sense of humor!
dontchathink?
Is science out of control?
Not at all!!
Is religious opposition to science out of control?
Hell, YES!!
#36–shubee—hahahahahah. The hole only gets deeper. If temporary means eons as with “the devil” then “ok.” Yea, god makes we hoomans responsible for our own sin even though there was no sin until god created it to punish us for what he knew we were going to do in the first place.
Doesn’t the illogic of this all powerful god break down at some point? No. Sign this boy up for a slot in heaven.
bobbo #39,
It’s not clear to me that we are just machines all programmed to self-assemble, procreate, struggle in war and then die.
#6
RE: Medical research on chimps
Chimps are missing one crucial attribute which makes them far better suited for medical research than humans. Chimps do not have lawyers.
#13
> Morality and religion can
> not be taken apart from
> one another.
The example to disprove your hypothesis is simple. Take any moral act and suppose it is made by an atheist. If morality and religion are directly correlated, then it shouldn’t be possible for an atheist to be moral and yet they are. Furthermore, religions vary greatly but what is considered moral is fairly constant. Human beings caring for one another is an innate survival instinct.
> Really, why is killing the
> old and weak of our society
> something that shouldn’t be
> done. A Christian and answer
> this easily
History shows your argument to be empty. Caring for the weak is a practice that predates Christianity and Judaism and even written history.
#16
> Which do you suppose came first –
> worshiping some aspect of the
> unknown, or a prescriptive
> code of moral conduct governing
> people’s behavior?
Your question is a false dichotomy. “Worshiping” required free time which did not come until humans gathered in larger groups. A code of ethics would require language at the very least to pass on said code to future generations. If we go back further into human’s hunter-gatherer phase I suspect that caring based on survival instincts would predate both concepts. In addition, buying the dead might just have likely started as a reaction to illness as it would to the creative ideas of the local religious nut.
#41
> buying the dead
Should obviously be “burying the dead” but perhaps commerce came before public health. ;->
#40 – Shubbee
>>It’s not clear to me ….
Things are clear to Bobbo that are not clear to the ordinary mortal. Try reading his messages!
Only denizens of Bobbo’s Toy Universe are able to wend their way through his labryinthine punctuation and emerge with their sanity.
#40–shubee==whats right in front of your eyes and in full view of your experience and logic is “not clear” to you.
But something that is illogical, nonsensical, contested, sociological, unproveable, and unevidenced is open to your contemplation, nee==worship.
What color is the sky where you live?
#44 – Bobo
>>whats right in front of your eyes and in
>>full view of your experience and logic
Not everything in life is right in front of your eyes, or in full view of your experience or logic.
Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.
Black sheep dwell in every fold;
All that glitters is not gold;
Storks turn out to be but logs;
Bulls are but inflated frogs.
Drops the wind and stops the mill;
Turbot is ambitious brill;
Gild the farthing if you will,
Yet it is a farthing still.
#1, bobbo,
There is no god,
Well, when I was much younger I could not only swear there is a god but her name was Babara Eden.
#45–Mustard==nice song. How come everyone things you are dumb?
#46–Fusion==its still true.
with all the ” praise jesus or burn ” signs I have seen, signs like these are a welcome change.
>> ArianeB said, on January 10th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
>> Is science out of control?
>>Not at all!!
Not at all? AT ALL?
What controls are there on science?
If “science” wants to create technologies that could jeopardize the whole planet (global warming and genetic engineering come to mind) what mechanism is there to stop them?
#49–Greg Allan==I so routinely disagree with you, only fair to post when we agree. Science is again just the amoral tool, but your concept in opposition to Ariane is quite correct.
Now if we could just form a religion to worship the human species or maybe even mother earth. That could even bring us all together==using science as our catechism.
#47 – Bobo
>>nice song. How come everyone things
>>you are dumb?
I thing they thing it because because of my poor mastery of pungchooashun. What do you thing?
In any case, I reiterate my earlier contention that there are things in this universe that you can’t punch up on your pocket calculator, and you choose to fear, ridicule, belittle, lampoon, and hate those things. I choose to open my mind to the possibilities.
#50 – Bobbolina
>>Now if we could just form a religion to
>>worship the human species or maybe even
>>mother earth.
We’ve formed one to worship mother earth already. Wicca. Didn’t you get the memo? It’s been around since 1954.
http://tinyurl.com/7qwjbh
“Science – a discipline so powerful it can only be used for good or evil.”
-To paraphrase the Firesign Theater, one of their finest quotes-
#34, amodedoma
Well, we don’t understand it all, we don’t even know what dark matter and dark energy are. But a universe full of black holes which tend to destroy anything with which they come into contact seems to me to be less than perfection.
And the math describing it is full of non-canceling infinities. That’s not perfect, either. We can’t even reconcile the micro and the macro yet.
In fact, the universe is a chaotic system doomed by entropy to eventually disappear.
The universe has no morals.
Science is not moral, it’s science.
bobbo said, on January 10th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
>> #49–Greg Allan==I so routinely disagree with you, only fair to post when we agree. Science is again just the amoral tool, but your concept in opposition to Ariane is quite correct.
>> Now if we could just form a religion to worship the human species or maybe even mother earth. That could even bring us all together==using science as our catechism.
Thanks for speaking up! On these discussion groups it is too easy to just go negative all the time.
As a Christian, I would never worship either the human species nor nature but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a common ground with those who do.
For one, there is a tradition of humanism in Christianity that would have a lot of overlap with secular humanists.
Secondly, we Christians have a lot of paganism in our traditions and practice, so we have a lot in common with the pagans who DO worship the earth (if I understand correctly.)
@54 .. “The universe has no morals.”
Actually, morals are a property of the physics of the universe. This isn’t a joke or absurd.
1. Humans have fairly constant morals across cultures and religions.
2. Morals aren’t unique to humans, demonstrated in animal studies.
3. The benefit of morals is that they represent a survival strategy.
Conclusion:
Morals are likely a property of all higher life forms. Neither unique to humans nor earth-life.
Add:
All life is made of matter.
If all higher life has morals and all life is made of matter and this is universally true of any life in the universe, then morals are in fact a built-in property of the universe.
And this shouldn’t be surprising, except most people associate morals with religion but just go try to find even a diehard atheist who wants to have his property stolen and his children murdered.
“The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image – a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.”
Albert Einstein
GOD = General Ordinance Division, of course it exists otherwise modern warfare would not work.
#54, You ‘scientific’ types are all the same, everything you don’t understand is chaos, or random, or doesn’t exsist. I guess it’s humility that’s lacking, or perhaps a fear of the unknown. It’s amazing that science advances at all.
Dark matter and dark energy are theories yet to be proved and even when and if they are (c’mon LHC find that Higgs Boson!) they will only continue to reflect an incomplete model.
Moral are part of the human exsistence and humans are part of the universe therefore…