This is the first one in the series Common Arguments in the series of mini podcasts,
and in this one, I'm going to be looking at two very common arguments.
So welcome to everyone here and welcome to everyone watching or listening to the podcast.
So there's some arguments that use time and time again against advances in science and especially biotechnology.
And it's not natural is one that you'll hear often.
It's disgusting is one that started to come up actually much more recently in the States.
It's too risky. That's one that'll come up a lot. And finally, it's a matter of opinion.
And I'm going to look at the first two arguments. It's unnatural and it's disgusting in this podcast.
And then we're going to look at it. It's too risky. And it's a matter of opinion in two separate podcasts after this.
So let's start with it's not natural. Louise Brown, born in nineteen seventy eight, was the first ever test tube babies,
and many people were worried and hugely worried about the birth of Louise Brown because test tube babies just seemed unnatural.
So James Watson Watson amongst parents, both Nobel PRISE winners, expressed fears of deformed babies who might be the victims of infanticide.
The thought would be that in the test tube, they would become deformed and people would then want to kill them.
Many obstetricians wondered who would care for the babies if the experiment with nature went wrong.
And Jeremy Rifkin, who's an American bioethicist,
was concerned about babies growing up as specimens sheltered not by a warm womb but by steel and glass.
So this idea that something's unnatural really worried people.
But we all know the punchline of this particular story.
Thousands of test tube babies have been born now and they have no greater chance of defects than ordinary births.
So even if test tube babies are somehow unnatural, it doesn't suggest there's anything wrong with them.
And I apologise for the lack of the E there. So many people believe that something's being unnatural is a black mark against it.
But what is it for something to be unnatural? And why is being unnatural a bad thing?
Well, let's have a look at three possible meanings from natural.
Firstly, there's violates the laws of nature. Secondly, there's artificial.
And thirdly,
man made to read unnatural as violates the laws of nature and ensures that the it's not natural worry actually becomes the it's too risky worry.
It's not a separate objection in this case.
And when we look at it simply as it's not natural, i.e. it might violate the laws of nature,
we can put our minds at rest because actually we can't violate the laws of nature.
The laws of nature govern us. We don't interfere with them.
And so we really put our minds at rest.
If that's how we think of unnatural to read.
Unnatural as artificial, on the other hand, doesn't seem to particularly generate a problem.
I mean, artificial roses, OK, but they might be made of real silk.
Artificial intelligence, for example, is real intelligence. Artificial material is made of real fabrics.
And perhaps therefore we should read it's not natural as it's manmade or it's influenced by man.
And in a way that makes sense because we do think of things that are not made by man that are natural in that sense as attracting a premium.
We pay more for things that are not man made, for example.
But why is being man made or influenced by man enough to make something bad or immoral?
It's true that some philosophers, many philosophers, in fact, believe that only human beings can be immoral.
You can't animals can't be immoral. So when your dog steals the meat from your table, it's only acting naturally.
It's not being immoral. It's only us who can do something that's immoral.
But if it's the same, if you believe that, you're also going to believe that only human beings can be moral.
So it can't be this that makes manmade things bad.
And there are plenty of things made by man that don't seem at all immoral or bad.
I mean, anaesthetic in childbirth, for example. Is that a bad thing?
Is that an immoral thing? What about vaccinations? They've saved the lives of millions of human beings.
Now, what's bad about those yet they're man made email.
Now here, I'm slightly open on this. I think it possibly could be bad, but it's certainly not obviously bad.
And I'm sure you can think of many, many manmade inventions that are not bad.
There also seem to be plenty of things that are not made by man that are bad on earthquakes, disease, tsunami, cannibalism.
I mean, there's plenty of cannibalism in nature, quite apart from man.
So being manmade seems neither necessary nor sufficient for being bad.
So when you hear that it's unnatural and therefore bad,
and I've just mentioned a few things here for the sort of things that people women having babies after the menopause, it's unnatural.
Therefore, it's bad engaging in genetic engineering.
It's unnatural, therefore bad creating life forms like Synthia that don't exist in nature, bad, unnatural, transplanting pig organs into human beings.
Xenotransplantation again, unnatural, bad. And you should be sceptical.
These things might be bad, but not because they're unnatural.
We haven't yet found a single reason for thinking that because something is unnatural, it's bad.
So let's have a look instead at the idea that something's disgusting.
Well, intuition plays a large role in our decisions about whether something is or isn't morally acceptable.
Some people think that if we feel something is wrong, it must be wrong.
And there's certainly some truth in that. I mean, if when you're listening to my arguments, you're thinking that doesn't sound quite right.
I would advise you that that intuition is possibly a good intuition and you ought to follow it up.
Well, American ethicists Leon Cass and Alta Charo have said that.
We shouldn't make moral recommendations on cloning,
so they were talking to the Ethics Committee on cloning that was set up by President
Clinton and they argued against making recommendations on the basis of reason and logic.
And what they were arguing is that emotional responses are much more important when we're discussing ethical questions in the context of politics.
So what matters is your intuition, not your reason or your logic.
And they yock theory of morality, which I'm going to call it.
So yuck, yuck. Therefore, it's immoral, says that if something disgusting, then it's wrong.
And so if you find it disgusting to think about transplanting pig organs into humans or eating in vitro meat,
meat that's been created in the laboratory or using eggs from aborted foetuses for IVF or for research purposes,
if you think these things are disgusting, you should also think of them as immoral.
That's according to this theory.
But consider reading in a tourist guide that you shouldn't take photographs of certain people because they believe that in recreating their image,
you're stealing their soul. Well, OK, if you heard that, you'd probably refrain from taking photographs, why why would you hurt these people?
But this doesn't mean that you would accept that in taking photographs, you are stealing their souls.
Most of us would believe that the fears of these people are based on ignorance and this is the problem with intuitions,
intuitions are often grounded on ignorance.
And it's understandable for people to recoil from things they don't know anything about, but such intuitive recalls are not always well grounded,
and the only way to discover whether our intuitive fears are well grounded is to subject them to
rational scrutiny and to subject our intuitions to rational scrutiny is to try and pin them down.
We need to be able to recognise and firstly recognise and intuition.
So we OK, we think this is disgusting. Then we need to find out why we hold it if we can.
So we need to look at it and subjected to scrutiny. Ask why we hold it and ask whether our reason for holding it is or isn't a good one.
And often when we try and pin down an intuition, we find we can back it up with good reasons,
but now we have an argument for whatever it is we were saying. We're not relying simply on our intuitions.
On other occasions, we find ourselves unable to pin down our intuitions.
And sometimes this means that they're going to dissolve that we see they didn't have any grounding at all.
And on other occasions we're going to be left with the disturbing feeling that something is wrong or right.
Perhaps, though, we remain unable, despite our best efforts to say why it's wrong or right.
Now, if we're in the last case, the rational thing to do is to keep an open mind,
to keep trying to pin our intuitions down and to listen to hard to those who believe themselves to have arguments both for and against.
So if you find yourself on hearing of a science and scientific innovation,
thinking that's disgusting, do not be tempted immediately to infer that it is immoral.
It might be immoral, but almost certainly not because it's disgusting.
In the next two podcasts, we're going to consider the arguments, it's too risky and it's all a matter of opinion.