Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of truth makes a good deal of sense—the crucial point isn't what you
know, but who owns the means and product of research. To be sure, this
is a scandal in the sense that, if present trends continue, the very sciences
that proudly parade a commitment to truth would, in their constant and
upward-spiraling escalation of costs (and their search for escalating
financial support), be for sale to the highest bidder and thus undo that
very commitment to truth.
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Is the scandal, then, that once on this fateful
path, a course is inexorably set, like the best of slippery slopes, even if
concealed by nice words?
The reminder is inevitable: the astounding Grand Inquisitor scene in
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamasov
, where, after hearing
Ivan's tale of the return of Christ and the priest's objections to that,
Alyosha cries out with his riveting question, Is anything then permitted?
Is nothing forbidden? Can anyone then do anything they want, simply
because at this or that moment they by chance happen to want it—and
can pay for it?
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It would appear that modern medicine's impending realization of its
ancient dream to improve the human condition is set deeply within some-
thing that resists being expressly spoken. Such may be the actual scandal,
for must we not wonder about the wisdom of the choices that will, it
seems, inevitably be made by those who will make them simply because
they alone understand the technologies, or have paid for them? We must
wonder, too, with Hans Jonas, about efforts to rectify and alleviate the
“necessities and miseries of humanity” in the manner of Francis Bacon
by technological means, at the same time so conceiving of knowledge
that no room is left for what can alone provide guidance, a knowledge
of “beneficence and charity.”
38
No matter how well he understood the necessity of moral guidance
for that “race of inventions,” Bacon's project succeeds only in creating
a powerful paradox since neither theory nor practice in this usage
contains or can say anything about such goals or moral governance.
Neither beneficence nor charity “is itself among the fruits of theory in
the modern sense,” nor is “modern theory . . . self-sufficiently the source
of the human quality that makes it beneficial.” Indeed, Jonas argues
that the fact that the results of theory are detachable and can be handed
over for use to those who had no part in the theoretical process is
only one aspect of the matter. Because of their expertise scientists are
