This is what passes for an eminent philosopher these days: Julian Savulescu [Part I]
[NOTE: Part II here.]
As soon as I saw the headline for this article, I thought it might be about Peter Singer. I’ve written at great length about Singer before (see this, this, and this), and the title of the article—“The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God”—is what brought him to mind.
But it wasn’t about Singer. Instead, it was about someone the article refers to as a protégé of Singer’s, Julian Savulescu, who has now come to some prominence in the field of philosophy and bioethics.
The article quotes Savulescu as having said the following in an interview:
“I actually think of myself as the voice of commonsense,” says Julian Savulescu. “If you actually looked at things without any kind of baggage, you’d view them like me.”
Ah, the voice of pure reason, devoid of any baggage—except, perhaps, the hubris of thinking he has no baggage, and that “no baggage” (in a Spockian Star Trek way) is an advantage in reasoning out complex bioethical issues.
If you look at the 3-part series I wrote on Savulescu’s mentor Peter Singer (to which I’ve linked above), the title of those posts was “Peter Singer and the trap of reason.” I elaborated at some length on why pure reason—or the attempt at pure reason—in discussing these bioethical questions is a trap that can lead us astray. Reason is necessary, but reason alone is not enough, and reason can miss some elements that reason should be taking into account (I refer you to those posts to see my argument in greater detail).
Here’s Savulescu on human cloning, for example, which is currently banned:
Q: So you don’t see any fundamental ethical objection to human cloning?
A: In reality, hardly anybody does. Remember that 1 in 300 pregnancies involves clones. Identical twins are clones. They are much more genetically related than a clone using the nuclear transfer technique, where you take a skin cell from one individual and create a clone from it.
Q: But twins are not something we engineer. That just happened.
A: One of the big mistakes in ethics is to think that means make all the difference. The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
But that’s not the point, at least not for most people. Of course we do things all the time that are not completely “natural.” Unless a person is some sort of bio-Luddite (and is against all intervention, including blood transfusions and vaccinations and aspirin), interference with nature is a given. If Savulescu were merely saying that we need to decide how much to intervene and in what way, I doubt more than a few people in a million would give him much of an argument. But (and I admit I’m unfamiliar with his work, except for this article, so perhaps he deals with all my objections in his larger work) he seems to be ignoring the real issues.
What are those real issues? Forget morality for a moment, and let’s just stick with the practical. The following is hardly an exclusive list, but one issue is (if you just take cloning, for example) the slippery slope of how the technique is used and to what extent. Identical twins existing by natural means are still individual lives, limited by the limitations imposed on all of us (although they have a leg up with kidney donation, for example) as well as occurring at a certain natural rate. They just happen to be two people (or three, in the case of triplets, etc. etc.) who are genetically identical. However, cloning is an intervention that goes far beyond what’s possible with natural twinning (timing and numbers), and to what purpose? Experience tells us that the slippery slope is very very real. Start out by saying human cloning is confined to some sort of limited situation in which it involves something seemingly benign and helpful, and you can easily end up with Brave New World’s worker bees.
It is also a cost-benefit ratio. Are the benefits worth the costs and the potential costs? And among those costs we must factor in moral issues, which do exist whether Savulescu recognizes them or not, and we must also factor in the law of unforeseen consequences when we unleash forces the consequences of which we do not understand.
Just to take an example, there’s the ability to tell the sex of an embryo combined with the ability to abort embryos of the unwanted sex, which has led to tremendously noxious repercussions in countries such as China and India, where men outnumber women by a huge margin. What’s the remedy? How to prevent it happening in the future?
It may right itself, I suppose, if women become more prized because of the shortage, and people start selectively aborting boys. But won’t the pendulum swing back wildly again? So would it be better to just forbid the practice? But how does one do that? Outlawing finding out the sex of the baby seems way too Draconian, and how could that even be enforced? Outlawing abortions because of the sex of a baby would seem more to the point (some states do it in the US, but it’s not outlawed at the federal level; unlike in India and China, it’s just not that popular here for cultural reasons). But that would also be hard to enforce, and many people object to such a rule because they would consider it to be an infringement on a mother’s rights. You could advocate trying to change people’s attitudes towards having girls in the countries affected, but good luck with that until there’s some more “natural” reason for them to change.
These are indeed “moral issues” as well as philosophical and political ones. I bring them up not to say that I have the answers, but to say that the “twins are the same as cloning” approach seems extremely short-sighted.
[NOTE: The interview with Savulescu was first written up in 2015, but it’s been recently republished.]
For some cause unknown to me your first link “this article” is defective, goes nowhere. Using the quote which follows as a search term I alighted here at Nautilus: http://m.nautil.us/issue/28/2050/the-philosopher-who-says-we-should-play-god
Hope that’s it.
sdferr:
Thanks for alerting me. Fixed the link and it should work now.
Environmental dogma invokes sustainability as a critical goal. If the rate of twinning is once per 300 births, then we must sustain that rate. If it falls below 1 per 300, then we must use cloning to sustain the natural rate. That’s just common sense.
The monumental arrogance to imagine oneself as worthy to play at godhood. The moral blindness to be sanguine about it. An utter lack of empathy. Of such are monsters made…
Two interesting things I found out about him: one of his favorite movies is The Boys from Brazil and he’s related to Count Dracula.
Sounds like a character concocted in a Hollywood dream factory.
All reasonable folk are able to use reason and rationality to lie to themselves so as to believe their own lies. There’s even a name for it – rationalization.
The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
This is not a “true” statement, it is merely his opinion.
Even with a majority of others agreeing to it, doesn’t make it true.
But is likely to make it law. Which is the goal.
Ann above sort of alluded to something I was thinking of.
Remember back in the days of “Friends” when one of the characters had a baby and named her Emma? Well, Emma became a very popular baby name soon thereafter.
What if Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, or some other attractive celebrity made a deal with a fertility clinic to sell clones of themselves? Could there be a million little “Brads” and “Jennifers” running around?
It seems as if it could have negative social consequences.
Contrast with:
What difference would it make if a corpse comes not through a natural impact of a meteorite, but because some hooligan dropped a rock from an overpass? Should we suddenly treat it differently? The fact that it arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
Well, maybe irrelevant to the corpse, but what about to the hooligan?
The leftists in China have planned parenthood and one-child. The leftists in the “civilized” West have planned parenthood and selective-child (for social progress), recycled-child (for medical progress). Well China also has Mengeles, are likely provisioned by planned parenthood clinics. It’s a Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, ethical, PC world.
From Ann’s “he’s related to Count Dracula” link – sounds about right.
https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/getting-to-know…julian-savulescu
“Why did you choose your current career path? I started medicine in 1982 and studied philosophy as my fifth subject. Peter Singer was teaching Practical Ethics and I was so inspired that this guy could speak logically and sensibly about things like abortion, animals and poverty. I almost dropped out of medicine for philosophy then.
When I was working as a young doctor at the Alfred, I started studying master’s in bioethics part-time after work. I was studying under Justin Oakley, an inspirational teacher. Initially it was just something fun to do outside of work, but I soon realised I wanted to take this further. I was then fortunate enough to study for my PhD at Monash under Peter Singer.”
“If you actually looked at things without any kind of baggage, you’d view them like me”
Funny, this is *exactly* what every leftist troll on a right-wing blog does – claim they are “objective” and “even-handed”.
It’s official: All you have to do to be a famous philosopher is to have no idea about how to differentiate.
“All you need is guff.”
So this guy would be against knocking down Robert E Lee’s statute, since who cares how it came about. The SJWs gonna hate it. He had better not go to Charlottesville
“But…but…but…THAT’S DIFFERENT!!!!!!!”
Something about motes and beams, I think…
My parents used to tell my brother and sister and me, “You’re so very intelligent; you can be whatever you want to be.” So we grew up “knowing” we were smart and expecting that the world would give us our due on that account. But none of us had proven to be a classic Success – we’re all just plugging along. Turns out the world doesn’t give a hoot about “our due.”
The difference between us and this guy here is that we have learned the lesson that you can be smart but still not use your intelligence intelligently. He apparently hasn’t. Unfortunately his version of the world – the one he believes is so dispassionate and objective thanks to his own hosting logical fallacies – is wildly popular in some circles, so he’ll continue to believe that he’s not just brilliant but *right*.
“glaring,” not “hosting.” Darn small screen…
Jamie, I thought his “hosting” was the bio analogue of website hosting, and his logical fallacies were merely bio analogues of the AI based future robot overlords. Whose morals will be neurally networked based.
This is par-for-the-course in post-Enlightenment academic philosophy in the West.
And, we know why such treacle and blather is more common than clear thinking these days, especially on matters related to metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Alasdair MacIntyre spelled it out for us in After Virtue, and it goes something like this:
1. The (better) Scholastics (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) were the high point of moral philosophy for the West, because they built on what was already known from the Aristotelian tradition and thereby corrected the otherwise insoluble problems of the Platonist tradition. This gave them explanatory power to address topics that couldn’t be reasonably addressed by less-advanced traditions in philosophy.
2. But (largely because of the association with Catholic thinkers like Aquinas, and Duns Scotus) the Scholastics were associated in the minds of many with the Catholic Church, and consequently became hated simultaneously by the Protestant world (Luther particularly despised Scholasticism) and also by persons like Hume and Voltaire: the entirely-anti-Christian thinkers who increasingly dominated Western thought from the 1600’s onward.
3. Nothing in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition was ever really debunked or even argued against directly. On the contrary, its arguments continued to be advanced by a shy, outcast tribe of Thomists up until the present day. And spinoffs of Scholastic thinking (e.g. the Natural Rights/Natural Law traditions of Burke and Locke which informed the Founding Fathers in America) continued to appear in the less-radical later traditions through the Scottish Enlightenment. But it was rejected by the mainstream as outmoded, as “dusty,” as (fill in your favorite disparaging term unrelated to truth or falsehood here). In short, the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition went out of fashion amongst intellectuals, and later intellectual fads dominated the conversation.
4. The critical premise removed from philosophical ethics was the idea that a good man was good because he was oriented towards a kind of end or “telos,” just as a good watch was good because it was, at minimum, good at telling time. Ethics became unrooted from questions like, “What is the nature of man?” and “Given his nature, what is man for? What is his proper end? What, given his powers and needs, is the highest flourishing of man qua man?” The Aristotelian tradition could distinguish between VIRTUE and VICE on this basis; but once that basis was entirely removed, the quest to replace it with some other grounds for distinguishing between right and wrong began.
5. That quest failed, over and over and over: Every alternative approach had adherents, but also plenty of critics with plenty of widely-held-to-be-valid counterarguments showing how that alternative was self-contradictory, nonsensical, or assumed unproven things. Those who criticized that approach adopted yet other alternatives, all of which could also be shown to be self-contradictory, nonsensical, or assuming unproven things. No well-grounded moral system could be located, and each thinker was stuck with adopting whichever ethics he could best-stomach the incoherence of.
6. As a result of these changes, the West began to retreat into talk of feelings instead of well-reasoned arguments. Initially as a matter of intellectual helplessness — nobody had an ethics he could prove — and eventually as a matter of good manners — you don’t want to come off as snobbish by asserting your unfounded ethics was better than your neighbor’s unfounded ethics — people in the West stopped saying, “I think X is wrong, and here’s why” and started instead saying, “I feel X is wrong.” Since nobody’s emotional or instinctive dislikes had any more authority than anyone else’s, morality was increasingly viewed as a matter of taste. (And tastes vary.)
7. This shifted the grounds of public-policy debate throughout the Western “democracies.” Gone was the earlier idea of “seeking to discover through debate which policies would best achieve the proper ends of man, or of society.” That was a last lingering vestige of Aristotelian telos among the Founders, and the new intellectual fads would not tolerate it. In its place came appeals to emotion, leveraging the power of images and advertising: “Look, here’s a starving kid at the border, we don’t need a wall!” vs. “Look, here’s a woman who was raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant, we must build a wall!”
8. Alasdair MacIntyre’s shocking conclusions:
(a.) There is, so far as we know, no path towards an objective grounds for moral reasoning other than the Aristotelian tradition of telos or something very close to it;
(b.) By rejecting it, we have actually redefined all the terms we use in conversation related to morality or ethics, transforming them into disguised references to instincts, feelings, and tribal affiliations;
(c.) But because instincts are not felt by every person with either identical intensity or identical reference, and because feelings wax and wane and vary person-to-person, and because tribal affiliations vary widely the more pluralistic a society is, the moral terms we use in conversation to argue for public policy are functionally meaningless. We THINK we are saying something meaningful when we use them; but that meaning cannot ACTUALLY cross the barrier from one mind to another mind and keep its meaning the same.
(d.) This situation will prevail until we re-adopt some form of teleological thinking, both about humans and their societies.
I strongly, strongly recommend After Virtue to anyone who wants to understand how we got here.
For those who want to escape the toxic fog of modernity and experience the clear air that earlier thinkers thought normal, just spend a little while reading the easier bits of Aquinas and Maimonides. If you find a hard bit, move on past it to an easier bit. If you find a bit that seems nonsensical or easily-refuted, remember that you are using terms radically differently than they did, and you have certainly misunderstood them, so move on until you can find someone to explain how they are using those terms. (Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide is excellent.)
Finally, if you read some new moral “thought” from a modern academic philosopher, and find it horrifying, don’t be surprised. When Peter Singer says something like, “What could possibly be wrong with having sex with your household pets?” (or whatever) just remember what he is saying. He is saying (in disguised terms), “I have so trained my feelings that I personally feel nothing repugnant about that idea.” He is expressing his rarefied tastes, and that’s all.
But remember: It hasn’t always been that way; and it needn’t always be that way. We moderns are (philosophically and ethically speaking) a bunch of barbarians: Stinking, vulgar, barbarians with bones in our noses, descendants of a more-advanced civilization which has been destroyed for over four hundred years, still using terms like “right” and “wrong” which were passed down to us from that earlier civilization like leftover bits of technology. But we haven’t the foggiest idea how those artifacts were made or how they work, or what they were for.
So, naturally, brutes that we are, we think it’s all about how we feel.
Man, I’m pleased that my comment last night did not take. My own harping of the teleology chord had become a bit strained.
With R.C’s systematic review of how we have come to this point, wherein the sociopolitical or philosophical branches of ethics have become completely unmoored from any critically defensible principles, we have another clear statement of the problem.
And though many here have alluded to the general point, it cannot be restated too many times or too forcefully: Absent granting an objective human nature [even implicit or smuggled-in] and telos, there simply are no moral deductions which can be logically drawn as imperatives. If you can derive no imperative premise from the fact situation, no imperative conclusion follows, eh?
I also have “After Virtue”, though I did not read it until long after it came out. And even now, not as closely as I probably should have done. But it’s relatively early publication date in 1981, when undisguised values nihilism was, so far as I know, still largely confined to a segment of academia, impresses me.
MacIntyre’s not reacting merely to “Language Truth and Logic” and it’s emotive theory of moral language, but to broader and more involved impulses. Hence a book, and a big one, not a monograph.
I suspect though that it would be a pretty challenging read for someone who’s not already had some class room time in on this very subject. And I think the way he tends to frame some of his conclusions, stating them as what seemed to me to be probably necessary inferences rather than inescapable deductions, pointing rather than commanding, reflects the [as I see it] academic and investigative, and a bit discursive tone, of some passages in the work.
Mortimer Adler’s “Ten Philosophical Mistakes” of 1985 is a much shorter and more casually written book, directed at a larger public: glancing along some of the same topics. Principally it’s importance lies in his discussion as to whether imperative statements can be derived from indicative propositions, and if so, under what conditions and assumptions. And his answer is yes, granting certain realist and teleological facts.
And although my initial opinion of “Ten Philosophical Mistakes” was not too high, as I reread some of what I considered to be his weaker arguments, I came to realize that I had somewhat read-over the relatively simple language and argument without pausing sufficiently to consider its adequacy.
Nonetheless what I saw in class decades ago, and what a generation and two before me saw in graduate class discussions, has now come to haunt us in everyday life; as we supposedly “balance incommensurable and competing interests” in our social project. Moral nihilism is the default assumption of about half the population.
So, “our social project” etc? Hilarious. As if there is even a real “we” in the sense of “the moral unity of man” to talk about anymore.
At least Rorty had the guts to admit that there was not on his view, and that he just wanted what he wanted, because ….
Good work R.C.
No edit function … no matter, apostrophes and commas. Just sprinkle to taste making each possessive a contraction. Must be a typing tic … or something. Geez
I am no philosopher and greatly appreciate RC’s information, but I have one question: Where does the consideration of consequences come in? The modern thinkers don’t seem to consider how others are impacted by the action taken. This seems the opposite of reason and more an embrace of Freud’s ID. Using Neo’s example of cloning: Do we know everything we need to know? How good will the clone be (is the process mistake proof)? Psychological impact on parents/siblings and how they interact with the clone? If done at infancy what if you clone a child who goes on to develop cancer or some other disease? Impact that has on the family and/or society? To me this seems more like the post-modern temper tantrum that some have regarding morality in general (ie: I am above all that).
Good point. It’s good, because that is a theme similar to the one I launched off on in my misfired comment last night. LOL
And here I am not referring to consequentialism as a type of moral theory, but consequences as an overlooked implication in a reciprocal system of moral exchange.
For example, Savulescu argues – developing a form of equivocation or ambiguity – that deliberate cloning is no different in kind from the natural production of a twin in utero. (That’s not true but we can leave it for now.)
As such his language seems to go from focusing on the process of intentional production initially, to a consideration of what entitlements the specific being produced might expect; and to then asserting that as the being is analogous to a naturally produced twin, it should be treated no differently.
He tries to argue from an analogy of kind which is dubious, to a supposed justification of intent, which does not follow at all.
It is this implied premise justification of intent, i.e., that the act of cloning is no different morally from the natural production of a twin that fails spectacularly.
And this is because of the consequences for those others, who, in granting the clone producer solidarity and social support on the basis of the principle of reciprocity in the first place, are deeply affected by his breach of the tacit terms of the associative contract.
He, the clone producer, uses them – his ostensible allies – as a field in which to realize his project and plant his clones. The principle of reciprocity is violated.
There is no admission that he is acting through artificial means to take advantage of the social benefit he received on the original basis of being recognized as a natural peer, in order to subvert or manipulate the entire system of social reproduction on the basis of some whim or perceived advantage to himself.
On Savulescu’s announced view then [at least in the article] , the clone maker apparently has no obligation to consider his effect on (or consequences for) the system members whom he seeks to use to his advantage. He effectively grants himself title to change the terms – to “evolve” through biological engineering – the nature of the very population of “the original alliance” : without regard to the obvious consequences; which seem invisible to him on any moral level.
This is actually fairly typical of modern liberal or utilitarian thinking: wherein they simply presume that others “exist for” them and for their use; without taking into consideration that reciprocity of claims and obligations are an intrinsic part of any rational or just system of association worth preserving in the first place. The clone master steps outside that system morally, while taking advantage of it in practice.
There is a half-assed argument that some liberals use to justify this view, which reads like a joke in a logic book.
all men must tolerate some men in order to have a society,
because X, as obnoxious as X is, is some man,
X must must therefore be tolerated
Like I said: their reasoning reads like a bad joke.
It feels like a lifetime ago since I last studied moral philosophy, so I’d like to thank RC for the concise refresher course (R.C. on May 7, 2019 at 10:34 am).
I’ve copied his comment to my desktop, and I expect that it’ll lead to ordering a few books from the library.
Much appreciated.
“This is actually fairly typical of modern liberal or utilitarian thinking: wherein they simply presume that others “exist for” them and for their use; without taking into consideration that reciprocity of claims and obligations are an intrinsic part of any rational or just system of association worth preserving in the first place. The clone master steps outside that system morally, while taking advantage of it in practice.” – DNW
This certainly sounds like the POV that undergirds: Democrats and abortion for the convenience of the pregnant person (because, like, some men have wombs now); Democrats championing admission to women’s sports for transgender persons who are biologically male — and have the concomitant physical advantages; Democrats who are college snowflakes with their safe spaces; Democrats and the electorate who are obliged to elect them regardless of personal preferences; Democrats and illegal aliens; Democrats and the welfare system;…
Hmm. I’m sensing a pattern here.
BTW, MacIntyre’s book came out in the time period while I was mostly concerned with home & family, so I missed it.
FWIW, you can get a PDF of the full book, or Sparknotes.
I have Adler’s book; will put it back on the reading shelf.
https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/4.+Macintyre.pdf
(continued)
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuechaptersummary.pdf
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/ethics/bibliography/
What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
What difference would it make if a couple of fatal heart attacks come not through a natural event, but because some impatient heir had induced them with an obscure drug introduced into their food? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.
The difference between us and this guy here is that we have learned the lesson that you can be smart but still not use your intelligence intelligently. He apparently hasn’t.
Your PC hardware may be a quad core cpu, but if it is still running only DOS or Win 3.1…. well, good luck on the slow lane.
If your PC hardware is pretty old with a dual core, but it has Windows 7 on it…. that’s better than the above.
The funny thing about NASA is that they don’t obey this principle. Their computers during Apollo were primitive beyond belief but could make it to the moon and transmit 250,000+ miles across a vacuum with no signal distortion, bandwidth loss, or power issues. Meanwhile our single smartphone have more computational ability combined than all of NASA’s apollo computers combined, but they now can’t get out of Low Earth Orbit, let alone landing on the Moon.
DNW, Cornflour, lightning: Thanks for your kind words!
I haven’t read Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes; I should look into that.
DNW, I entirely agree with your statement that, “I suspect though that [After Virtue] would be a pretty challenging read for someone who’s not already had some class room time in on this very subject. And I think the way [MacIntyre] tends to frame some of his conclusions, stating them as what seemed to me to be probably necessary inferences rather than inescapable deductions, pointing rather than commanding, reflects the [as I see it] academic and investigative, and a bit discursive tone, of some passages in the work.”
Hopefully any prospective readers will see my earlier post, or this chapter summary helpfully linked by AesopFan…
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuechaptersummary.pdf
…and can view them as an outline or checklist to organize the wandering or tentative prose to which MacIntyre sometimes succumbs.
I have not read MacIntyre’s other books, yet. Wikipedia says that they are:
– Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988)
– Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990)
– Dependent Rational Animals (1999)
Has anyone else here done so?
R.C.,
You’re welcome.
Yeah, it’s not the kind of philosophizing I’m used to reading. There is more ground-laying, and it seems to me justifying of, that preliminary work, going on than there needs to be. But then that may be in the nature of the poli-sci and ethics beasts.
Obviously MacIntyre believed, and probably rightly at the time he wrote, that the problem he was addressing was not obvious to all those in the academic community who might subject his book to, and react with, possibly unsympathetic scrutiny.
What he has written seems to me then, almost as much in the way of historically rooted or contextualized political philosophy and critique, as it does logical analysis or argument.
And if one is expecting to go straight into something like you might find in Russell, or Austin, or Ryle, or even Gilson or some classical scholastic, and as radically different as they are all from one another, you won’t see anything of that kind … Or at least I did not. And I can put up with a lot: Heidegger, for example.
I’ve been trying to think of a book that reads somewhat like it, and all I can think of if Strauss’s “The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis.
That was another landmark book which I became kind of impatient with.
But, that’s my shortcoming, not theirs. And given the sociopolitical context and period in which these books came out, the manner of presentation makes sense.
Sometimes you have to show there is a problem before you can argue your case. I guess.