Moral Vertigo
Published by Yazad Jal March 11th, 2004 in EnvironmentRonald Bailey’s new article in Reason shows that new technologies have always had a rough ride in initial public opinion.
In 1969, a Harris poll found that a majority of Americans believed that producing test-tube babies was “against God’s will.” Christiaan Barnard was condemned by many as a “butcher” when he transplanted the first heart into the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967. The contraceptive pill introduced in 1960 was outlawed by many states until near the end of that decade. And much further back, Edward Jenner’s 1796 discovery that inoculation with cowpox scabs would prevent people from getting smallpox was mocked by newspaper editorials and cartoons depicting men with cow’s heads.As history amply demonstrates, the public’s immediate “yuck” reaction to new technologies is a very fallible and highly changeable guide to moral choices or biomedical policy. For example, by 1978, more than half of Americans said that they would use in vitro fertilization (IVF) if they were married and couldn’t have babies any other way. More than 200,000 test-tube babies later, the majority of Americans now heartily approve of IVF. Globally nearly 50,000 heart transplants have been performed, and 83 percent of Americans favor organ donation. The contraceptive pill is legal in all states and millions of American families have used them to control their reproductive lives. And smallpox is the first human disease ever eradicated.
Bailey says this is true of stem cell research as well. Bailey is scathing when he dismisses the excuses made by Michael Sandel, Harvard philosopher and a member of the US President’s Council on Bioethics. According to Sandel “When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease…The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo.”
Ah, “moral vertigo”—certainly more to be feared than cancer and birth defects and diabetes and any number of other conditions biotech holds the promise to abate or cure.
But why is the word “moral” being confused with what it is not? Moral understanding? Or is it human understanding? Or human beings unable to make the diference between morality and religious edicts? Not everything said in a religious book is moral. And morality is quite independant of religion.
more than a ‘moral vertigo’ i would say stem cell research is protested against because of the potential hazards .. as it is very easy to misuse it. But then again - thats true of a lot of things isnt it?
We people automatically resist change. Survival instinct, I guess. And, we give all sorts of arguments - and moral argument is just one of them - to let things go on as they are. This resistance has often slowed down development, and so its not all that good.
But its also needed. You say, “new technologies have always had a rough ride in initial public opinion,” and give examples of the technologies that have turned out to be after all good. But, really, there must have been harmful ‘developments’ that didnt come to pass, thanks to these rough rides.
However, I am sure you are not against certain section of people saying biotech research or stem cell research is bad and so should be banned. These people act as society’s conscience, make us pause and take midcourse corrections if necessary.
Ramnath has a good point. And I was about to say the samething before I read his post. I remember reading something in “Why I am not Conservative”. Hayek talks about how Liberals are not change lovers neccesarily but are cautious about change, taking things a step at a time, evaluating the emerging consequences of emerging technologies and ideas to determine whether they are to the detriment or benefit of the fundamental ideals of liberty. I am beginning to think that this is a very academic definition of Liberal attitudes to change, or atleast one primarily applicable to Liberal Academicians, who stand outside the process of change as observers as it were. By this definition change-lovers would not be liberals, that throws out the entrepreneurs and the Schumpetarian Knights of Innovation.
A better way of saying it would be, that liberals recognise that it takes all kinds of people to make this world,and the brave ought not to be needlessly straight jacketed by conventions, that were meant for another kind of people.