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This is the first one in the series Common Arguments in the series of mini podcasts,

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and in this one, I'm going to be looking at two very common arguments.

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So welcome to everyone here and welcome to everyone watching or listening to the podcast.

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So there's some arguments that use time and time again against advances in science and especially biotechnology.

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And it's not natural is one that you'll hear often.

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It's disgusting is one that started to come up actually much more recently in the States.

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It's too risky. That's one that'll come up a lot. And finally, it's a matter of opinion.

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And I'm going to look at the first two arguments. It's unnatural and it's disgusting in this podcast.

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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.

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So let's start with it's not natural. Louise Brown, born in nineteen seventy eight, was the first ever test tube babies,

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and many people were worried and hugely worried about the birth of Louise Brown because test tube babies just seemed unnatural.

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So James Watson Watson amongst parents, both Nobel PRISE winners, expressed fears of deformed babies who might be the victims of infanticide.

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The thought would be that in the test tube, they would become deformed and people would then want to kill them.

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Many obstetricians wondered who would care for the babies if the experiment with nature went wrong.

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And Jeremy Rifkin, who's an American bioethicist,

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was concerned about babies growing up as specimens sheltered not by a warm womb but by steel and glass.

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So this idea that something's unnatural really worried people.

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But we all know the punchline of this particular story.

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Thousands of test tube babies have been born now and they have no greater chance of defects than ordinary births.

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So even if test tube babies are somehow unnatural, it doesn't suggest there's anything wrong with them.

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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.

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But what is it for something to be unnatural? And why is being unnatural a bad thing?

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Well, let's have a look at three possible meanings from natural.

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Firstly, there's violates the laws of nature. Secondly, there's artificial.

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And thirdly,

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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.

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It's not a separate objection in this case.

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And when we look at it simply as it's not natural, i.e. it might violate the laws of nature,

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we can put our minds at rest because actually we can't violate the laws of nature.

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The laws of nature govern us. We don't interfere with them.

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And so we really put our minds at rest.

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If that's how we think of unnatural to read.

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Unnatural as artificial, on the other hand, doesn't seem to particularly generate a problem.

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I mean, artificial roses, OK, but they might be made of real silk.

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Artificial intelligence, for example, is real intelligence. Artificial material is made of real fabrics.

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And perhaps therefore we should read it's not natural as it's manmade or it's influenced by man.

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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.

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We pay more for things that are not man made, for example.

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But why is being man made or influenced by man enough to make something bad or immoral?

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It's true that some philosophers, many philosophers, in fact, believe that only human beings can be immoral.

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You can't animals can't be immoral. So when your dog steals the meat from your table, it's only acting naturally.

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It's not being immoral. It's only us who can do something that's immoral.

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But if it's the same, if you believe that, you're also going to believe that only human beings can be moral.

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So it can't be this that makes manmade things bad.

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And there are plenty of things made by man that don't seem at all immoral or bad.

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I mean, anaesthetic in childbirth, for example. Is that a bad thing?

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Is that an immoral thing? What about vaccinations? They've saved the lives of millions of human beings.

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Now, what's bad about those yet they're man made email.

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Now here, I'm slightly open on this. I think it possibly could be bad, but it's certainly not obviously bad.

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And I'm sure you can think of many, many manmade inventions that are not bad.

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There also seem to be plenty of things that are not made by man that are bad on earthquakes, disease, tsunami, cannibalism.

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I mean, there's plenty of cannibalism in nature, quite apart from man.

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So being manmade seems neither necessary nor sufficient for being bad.

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So when you hear that it's unnatural and therefore bad,

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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.

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Therefore, it's bad engaging in genetic engineering.

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It's unnatural, therefore bad creating life forms like Synthia that don't exist in nature, bad, unnatural, transplanting pig organs into human beings.

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Xenotransplantation again, unnatural, bad. And you should be sceptical.

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These things might be bad, but not because they're unnatural.

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We haven't yet found a single reason for thinking that because something is unnatural, it's bad.

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So let's have a look instead at the idea that something's disgusting.

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Well, intuition plays a large role in our decisions about whether something is or isn't morally acceptable.

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Some people think that if we feel something is wrong, it must be wrong.

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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.

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I would advise you that that intuition is possibly a good intuition and you ought to follow it up.

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Well, American ethicists Leon Cass and Alta Charo have said that.

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We shouldn't make moral recommendations on cloning,

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so they were talking to the Ethics Committee on cloning that was set up by President

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Clinton and they argued against making recommendations on the basis of reason and logic.

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And what they were arguing is that emotional responses are much more important when we're discussing ethical questions in the context of politics.

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So what matters is your intuition, not your reason or your logic.

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And they yock theory of morality, which I'm going to call it.

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So yuck, yuck. Therefore, it's immoral, says that if something disgusting, then it's wrong.

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And so if you find it disgusting to think about transplanting pig organs into humans or eating in vitro meat,

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meat that's been created in the laboratory or using eggs from aborted foetuses for IVF or for research purposes,

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if you think these things are disgusting, you should also think of them as immoral.

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That's according to this theory.

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But consider reading in a tourist guide that you shouldn't take photographs of certain people because they believe that in recreating their image,

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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?

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But this doesn't mean that you would accept that in taking photographs, you are stealing their souls.

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Most of us would believe that the fears of these people are based on ignorance and this is the problem with intuitions,

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intuitions are often grounded on ignorance.

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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,

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and the only way to discover whether our intuitive fears are well grounded is to subject them to

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rational scrutiny and to subject our intuitions to rational scrutiny is to try and pin them down.

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We need to be able to recognise and firstly recognise and intuition.

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So we OK, we think this is disgusting. Then we need to find out why we hold it if we can.

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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.

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And often when we try and pin down an intuition, we find we can back it up with good reasons,

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but now we have an argument for whatever it is we were saying. We're not relying simply on our intuitions.

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On other occasions, we find ourselves unable to pin down our intuitions.

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And sometimes this means that they're going to dissolve that we see they didn't have any grounding at all.

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And on other occasions we're going to be left with the disturbing feeling that something is wrong or right.

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Perhaps, though, we remain unable, despite our best efforts to say why it's wrong or right.

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Now, if we're in the last case, the rational thing to do is to keep an open mind,

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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.

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So if you find yourself on hearing of a science and scientific innovation,

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thinking that's disgusting, do not be tempted immediately to infer that it is immoral.

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It might be immoral, but almost certainly not because it's disgusting.

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In the next two podcasts, we're going to consider the arguments, it's too risky and it's all a matter of opinion.