Innocently Blissful

Well, I suppose I could start this out with an essay on the nature of sin. What is sin? What is the greatest sin? and so on...but I feel that will be long, tedious, and generally un-useful to this conversation. What I mean to direct your attention to is the ethics in scientific research.

What, if any, obligations do we hold the rights of the individual in the face of scientific gain for the betterment of the human race? Gosh, what a loaded question. Religiously, and under the notion that everyone is equal and deserves "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I do not think we would be justified in harmful research to humans on which we base future public policy. We could not, for example, measure harmful doses of radiation to pregnant women to determine standards for radioactive machinery - at least not through trial and error. It's that error component that religion takes issue with - if we were to mess up, or even knowingly malpractice, on a human - for any sake - it would be a gross moral displacement. Because, and from our hearts we can really come to believe, who are we to infringe on the rights of anyone else? You know, the whole Golden Rule. And don't take this to mean that I disagree: I would certainly not want someone else secretly harming me for "useful" information under any setting without my consent. Who would?

But is it possible to live our lives that way? Even the most pious person still has to eat, and that's food that's being taken away from others. That is people across the world indirectly suffering because we, our very existence, denies them of natural resources they are so entitled to under this doctrine. Yeah, it's awful, but can we help it? No, absolutely not, and I don't think anyone reasonably argues that. A funny quote I read the other day, just as an anecdote, was "Throw a rock at an idealist philosopher. If he ducks, you know he's lying." See my point? We all adjust our ideals to fit the world we live in and acknowledge these necessary evils and attempt to make moral decisions in the face of them.

But where does that bring us? One argument is utilitarianism - take the action with the benefit of the most good compared to the least bad. Sounds a little fuzzy, doesn't it? Well it is, obviously - I mean, "most good"? "Least bad"? But once again, we are never going to be god-like beings, we are never going to know the true good from the true bad, and in the face of our current standing (by this time I mean our nature as conscious beings limited of divine knowledge) we must reconcile and move on to a decision.

So could one be justified in saying "It would be appropriate to experiment on a woman's uterus to see what safety measures we must employ in future medicine, at the same time rendering her infertile to save potentially infertile future users?" Well, that's a little vague, but I'll add other pre-conditions. For example, even if you were to say "Well, Mike, that's a scenario where we are creating something that has potential bad. Under the naturalist way of living, we don't have to deal with scenarios like these." Yeah, but there are scenarios there, too. Take, for example, discovering the world we live in. There exist poisons, there exist elements of the world that will kill us, and from the beginning, we do not know anything about them. How do you think humans learn? Trial and error. Of course we move on later to theoretical, inductive logic but to get there we need these deductive pillars: things we have picked up from trial and error. And it's an ugly process.

So getting back to my point, would it be justified to use a harmful experiment to deduce knowledge of potential good (potential "greater" good) when we lack these existing packets of knowledge that facilitate inductive reasoning? And, as I hate to point out, inductive reasoning kind of sucks. It's not reliable, and it's full of errors (theoretically it can be better, but it will never be perfect and we are operating in a world of incomplete scientific understanding of, to say the least, the human body).

So, I guess the conclusion that we must come to, if any, is that we have a problem with: a) where we are right now, and b) taking these black-and-white approaches to moral reasoning. I suppose I haven't fully gone into why utilitarianism is flawed, but I'm assuming you can figure it out on your own. So, we can't live in an idealist world, nor can we hold an adaptive (yet constantly so) moral approach to anything in it. Where are we at?

Haha, we can even forget about answering that question. We are absurdists, and we should all engage in a struggle to stay ignorant of certain truths that will make us want to jump off a bridge to kill time until we die with some artificial semblance of accomplishment. Yay for reality!

Anyway, I know I'm slipping into an archetypal pattern of thought right now, but bear with me. Imagine a future where we abandon ethics, or rather, abandon our inhibitions for wanton human experimentation in a quest to find knowledge for the greater good, a better world, a higher truth (whatever stupid utopian motive we afford ourselves - irrational humans...). We will live in a world of rich, specialist, educated aristocrats with poor, deprived layworkers. We'll experiment on them, or perhaps initiate a campaign of martyring anyone who volunteers their life for scientific research (as we already have begun for post-mortem cadaver donors). We will see the mind as a machine, not a divine, sacred entity. I mean, we no longer see the sun as a divine, sacred entity and that's just another portion of spirituality about the surrounding world we lost. I mean, I don't think we'll ever understand our own minds. I don't think we'll think one day, I'm feeling bad because this food I ate is not catalyzing this reaction at the synapses in this section of my brain, compounded with this reaction elsewhere, etc etc. If we were to do that, we'd be controlling our own thoughts, and the very idea of engineering our ideas is like artificial intelligence (it cannot expand on itself, it can only do what it is programmed to do).

So, then, we reach the end of the human potential (which, by the way, we only feel is unlimited because of our ignorantly divine attitude towards it right now), and exist on a plateau as robots, programming ourselves to accomplish those repetitive, higher-processing acts which are above ours right now, but that is just to give it a perspective.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that even if we were to be able to decipher the mind, and be able to program it, we would live in a machinated world on a plateau, we could go no further, and it would be better (in my opinion) to remain at that state of ignorance of something that fosters a divine perception than push forward to our unholy machination.

We should not obey ethics because they are right, but because they are necessary. Divinity is not a truth, it's a state of knowledge (our knowledge). And we should praise that innocence of ignorance, that bliss that will carry us to heaven on earth, and shun that internal craving for knowledge at the expense of our souls (be what they may).