Biology of Cognition
The Bioethical Dimension of Maturana’s Thought Rossella Mascolo
What is “bioethics”?
First, what do we mean when we talk about “bioethics”? Is it consistent to distinguish ethics from bioethics? Or do the two concepts collapse onto each other? Van Rensselaer Potter, then Professor of Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined the term “bioethics” in the early 1970s. As he explained in his book Bioethics: Bridge to the Future (1971)3, the word bioethics includes the whole area of ethics, not only medical ethics, but also environmental and agricultural. He claims that this is implicit in the term, as the prefix “bio” refers to the implementation of ethics to all life domains. But soon, to his surprise, “bioethics” became popular and was “seized upon by the medical profession which has overlooked its original scope and breadth” (Potter 1996). According to the journal Bioethics, nowadays bioethics is generally perceived as encompassing public health, infectious disease, AIDS, managed care, genomics and stem cell research, genetic testing, and cloning, all of which give “human beings new power to improve our health and control the development processes of all living species.”4 According to philosopher Hugo Tristram Engelhardt Jr., bioethics refers to moral life in the domain of health care (Engelhardt 1996); he refers to the so-called human bioethics, which he has only recently extended to environmental ethics. In general, bioethics “refers to the normative questions which inhere in the application of medical knowledge to specific problems like euthanasia, abortion, genetic and behavioral modification and the like” (Pellegrino 1975: 213). This definition was published right after Potter began to use the word “bioethics,” but these kinds of considerations are still regarded as valid today and it is generally accepted that ethics coincides with bioeth3 | He dedicated the book to Aldo Leopold who, according to Potter, would have the honour to anticipate “the extension of ethics to bioethics.” 4 | Webpage of the UNESCO on bioethics at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/bioethics/
ics only when it provides moral authority for health care policy (e.g., see Engelhardt 1992: 3) Other current trends consider bioethics to include animal and environmental ethics (see, for example, Tallacchini & Terragni 2004). Piergiacomo Pagano, an Italian biological researcher who wrote a book entitled Environmental Philosophy (Pagano 2006), invites us to consider environmental issues within bioethics; however, he is not able to transcend the Cartesian division between disciplines and he preserves an anthropocentric attitude when he also suggests a bridge between humanities and natural sciences, considering their a priori existences as separated areas (Pagano 2003). Furthermore, these are isolated attempts, sealed off from each other, and the notion of human bioethics continues to predominate with its strong anthropocentric vision. Figure 1 depicts the modern view of bioethics as being divided into different branches. In this view bioethics is developing in separate areas, each argument located in its specific branch, which barely communicates with the other branches with the consequence that there is no development of bioethics in general (Mori 2003: 551–552). This kind of isolation is not unusual in Western society, where Descartes’ influence is strong and reductionism prevails. Reductionism is implicit in all theories of traditional natural sciences: it is the philosophical position according to which a complex system is but the sum of its parts and it is possible to reach an understanding of the nature of complex things through a study of the interactions of their parts or their fundamental elements; hence it is a mechanistic view of the world (cf. Bohm 1980). With this kind of cultural substrate, bioethics is conceived in a patchy way, where the classical separations – mind/body, subject/object in the process of knowledge, natural sciences/ human sciences, rationality/emotionality – are clear. Others have also been concerned with this separation. For example, Mori (2003: 552) noted that determining a relevant moral criterion for ethics should not be considered a purely internal problem in relation to a single area, but should involve the whole horizon of thought and the whole perspective adopted.
human bioethics environmental ethics
animal ethics
bioethics
Bioethics in the Cartesian tradition
Figure 1: Bioethics in the Cartesian tradition.
Facts and values; science and philosophy
Traditional bioethics is sometimes presented as a philosophical discipline, separated from the scientific area so that facts and values are separated. For example, Engelhardt says that bioethics is plural, that it goes beyond the borders of individual cultures, including Western culture, and thus there are reasons and arguments that everyone should accept (Engelhardt 1991: 12–13). He claims that such acceptance is possible for impartial people who are without prejudices and not influenced by their culture, involved in the power of their rational argumentation (ibid: 17). Nevertheless the difficulty, as Engelhardt explains, is that as facts and values are located in different domains, moral concerns are not scientific facts that can be proven through reference to an independent reality. In the case of moral conflicts, where we have not only “facts” but also evaluations of “facts,” he calls for an objective point of view. In his opinion, we are not compelled to follow the suggestions of natural sciences, which can provide factual verification of empirical theories (ibid: 29–30). As we will see, in Maturana’s epistemology, Englehard’s reasoning is not valid as it is impossible to access any objective point of view. Depending on the separation between facts and values, and between the criteria of validation of knowledge for science and philosophy, ethics (or bioethics) falls into the vexata quaestio of “naturalistic fallacy”
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/6/3/370.mascolo
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