Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
no more qualified than others to discern or to care for the good of
humankind. Benevolence must be called in from the outside to supple-
ment the knowledge acquired through theory: it does not flow from
theory itself.
39
Emphasizing that the prospect of genetic control “raises ethical ques-
tions of a wholly new kind” for which we are most ill prepared, Jonas
later urgently suggested, “Since no less than the very nature and image
of man are at issue, prudence becomes itself our first ethical duty, and
hypothetical reasoning our first responsibility.”
40
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. came to much the same conclusion about
modern medicine. Echoing Jonas, he wrote that “man has become
more technically adept than he is wise, and must now look for the
wisdom to use that knowledge he possesses.”
41
Recall T. S. Eliot's inci-
sive, thundering questions: Where is the knowledge we have lost in infor-
mation? And where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Jonas
emphasized that we are “constantly confronted with issues whose posi-
tive choice requires supreme wisdom—an impossible situation for man
in general, because he does not possess that wisdom, and in particular
for contemporary man, who denies the very existence of its object: viz.,
objective value and truth. We need wisdom most when we believe in it
least.”
42
It is not so much that we are continually threatened by one or another
slippery slope. Rather, I believe, being on a slippery slope is precisely the
human lot, what it means to be human, at least since Darwin and in par-
ticular the disasters of the twentieth century. The dreadful has already
come about, asserts R. D. Laing.
43
And I think it bears all the signs of
Dostoyevsky's breathtaking “anything is permitted.”
Thinking about Birth and Beyond
Even at this point, I have a sense that there is something else still lurking
in the darker corners. As mentioned, at issue in the Human Genome
Project is a fundamental philosophical-anthropological concern: not only
how self is at all known and experienced but
whether there is self
at all,
much less a person, or instead, merely genetic information encoded in
or on strands of DNA/RNA nestled within any individual's body cells.
Walter Gilbert's excited pronouncement, “Here is a human being; it's
