Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
solve, let alone to address in a philosophically adequate way. Echoing
Heidegger's warning of the risks inherent in the inclusion of humans in
the standing reserve of natural resources, C. S. Lewis in
The Abolition
of Man
laments that the modern conquest of nature will lead not to its
stated end but instead to the subjugation of one group of humans by
another, confounding the unstated, but widely held assumption that tech-
nology
eo ipso
results in human liberation and well-being.
42
It is precisely
this difficulty, for example, that now faces non-Western nations and
peoples as they struggle with the introduction of Western science and
technology into their traditional, indigenous ways of life.
43
From a some-
what different perspective, ecofeminists and feminist philosophers of
science have made the same point in claiming that the “logic of domi-
nation” present in Western science and technology is patriarchal in char-
acter, and thus links the environmental and women's movements in ways
deeper than was previously realized.
44
Toward a New Home-World
What, then, are the pitfalls in adopting a cybernetic understanding of
biology and evolution as the basis of an engineering of the human
genome? There are at least two: (1) adoption of a mechanistic paradigm
for explaining adaptation and natural selection, and (2) biologism, or
the explanation of human behavior solely through biological processes.
The science of ecology, to take an example that both surprises and dis-
appoints, has proven to be vulnerable to both these mistakes, even as
it preaches environmental harmony and ecological balance. For in
erasing any significant difference between humans and their natural
environment—a move, by the way, that ecofeminism bravely calls to
task, attributing it to deep ecology as well—it courts the danger of
justifying any action, no matter how environmentally destructive it
may be, as adaptive and natural. What is more, in the desire to over-
come the lingering effects of dualism, the science of ecology runs the risk
of abolishing human transcendence and the moral and political respon-
sibility grounded in it. One disturbing sign of just such a possibility is
certainly our profound indifference to the autonomy of future human
generations as we move closer to altering irrevocably the germ line of
our species.
