week three

   Overall, the gestalt set forth in Callahan’s Demythologizing the Stem Cell Juggernaut is one built on fair considerations of a multitude of variables implicated in the discourse at present. The weakness of the gestalt is in the lack of consistently applying attention to the logic that underpins each belief. For instance, Callahan believes that the argument “nothing is lost” is weak because it presumes that it is legitimate to have spare embryos. Here, Callahan is taking issue with the origin of this legitimacy, saying that it is a public health problem that has been accommodated medically. He asserts the remedy of the underlying cause by suggesting to address the social and economic context responsible for this problem. I find this argument to be naive at best, it assumes the illegitimacy of a practice based on the allusion to intractable hypothetical quasi-fascist alternatives. Callahan forgets to account for the uncertainty of IVF’s, if abortion is morally acceptable because it is predicated on the certainty that it will save a mother from death, shouldn’t the uncertainty of the success of an embryo in IVF make it inherently immoral? Ironically, it is easy for Callahan to support abortion regardless of the benefit it provides the woman, where is his argument for social and economic reform as a primary objective?   

   In continuation, the profusion of reasons Callahan utilizes to educe his gestalt largely serve to beguile the “juggernaut”. His three considerations in weighing a moral obligation are all fallacious to some degree.

   To begin, the first- that there is a common misimpression that stem cell research is the only methodology applicable to various diseases, is really a mischaracterization. We have been treating these diseases for years with alternative methods, the disproportionate media attention played to stem cell research has slowly degraded since Callahan wrote Demythologizing the Stem Cell Juggernaut. In science, it is often necessary for some amount of hype to be generated about a line of inquiry while it is established, while this may engender negative practices and misinformation, it is nonetheless necessary. The omission of one line of inquiry will not constitute a moral failure for those whose interests are weighed towards the defense of the embryo, it will however be a failure of the philosophy of science.

  Moving on to the second- the question of what might else be done with the money used to fund stem cell research that is more constructive, is a concern that can be broached about many more topics. It is a matter of personal interest which public vocation one chooses to divest or restructure. Further, this concern isn’t a criticism on any of the commercial biotech ventures.  

   Finally, the third- that there are more pressing issues to attend to than those of the present and future that are afflicted by illness; is a reformulation of the second. For Callahan, the only figure that seems to matter as far as medical progress and medical need are concerned is the national life expectancy. Callahan doesn’t draw the conclusion that research into diseases of age may ever illuminate our general understanding of biology. Callahan ascribes a lower research priority onto diseases of old age because he is comfortable with the idea of conditionally dehumanizing- to a degree, humans that can’t provide for themselves: that are going to die anyway.

Week 2

There are several inconsistencies in both liberal and conservative discourse. Though many of these inconsistencies are resolvable given further distinctions; some are not. For example, in developing his moral anthropology, Cohen attempts to present what makes humans distinct from animals.

“We are special animals, separated by distinct powers of reason and by our moral aspirations and moral failings. the other animals live outside of good and evil-”

In my view Cohen makes this claim to hastily to consider cases where a biological human is unable to acquire or has no need for a classical moral tradition. Cohen recognizes this and treats these cases to the prescription that they are “human lives”, the term that only had two dimensions: the biologic and the ethical. Cohen leaves this fallacy by allusion to a vague biological notion that is particular to humans. Here unattended, one is left to assume that what makes a life human is first genetic, as no arguments can be made about the dependence of a moral tradition being to the equality of all humans. Macklin identifies this type of metaphorical reasoning as the main impasse to the conservative tradition of bioethics to having a constructive discourse with the established liberal and communitarian ideologies.

“But these criticisms seem misguided: first the council’s willingness to ask fundamental questions about “being human”- questions about birth and death, equality and community, happiness and excellence- shows it takes the discipline of bioethics seriously; it properly begins with an account of the human person as an ethical animal, and that without a moral anthropology it has little useful to say.”

   Its trivial to say that without moral anthropology you can’t apply moral anthropology to a moral anthropology. A normative moral anthropology defined by Macklin and any others- in pluralism; will inescapably be driven by ideology. Egalitarianism becomes myth when it is applied to issues, for which there are resulting a paradox’s that have to be resolved by arbitrary distinctions. What is egalitarian about the right of a pregnant women to save her life by aborting her baby, while barring someone from the possibility of life by restricting the use of embryonic stem cells?

    Cohen characterizes Conservatives’ embrace of the “culture of life” as accepting the human reality of mortality as always preferable to betraying “our neighbors, our family, or our nation.” How are the cases of Terri Schiavo and those presupposed by life extension technologies different? Cohen only addresses the case of embryonic stem cell therapy, for which his case is based on the principle that all humans are created equally.

Ecclesiastes 3:18-21: “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals.  Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath (literally “spirit“); humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

Cohen’s sentiment that human sexuality is clearly different than animals is born out of  his ignorance of the various behavioral and chemical mechanisms utilized by animals to the same end. I guarantee that some humans indulge in “merely the animalistic character of sex”. So it is seen that if all humans are created equal- intrinsically,  the “culture of life” embraced by conservatives is posited conditionally on DNA alone. The human genome is a very fickle thing to condition anything on. Quantitatively, a healthy human has about as much in common with a Bonobo then it does a person with Down’s syndrome.

Week one

The affect of Raman and Tutton's critique of Rose and Rabinow's was to reamalgamate the framework of biopolitics towards a sensibility of it's contingency on both the molecular and collective. Rose and Rabinow's critique had been excessive in it's reevaluation of Foucault's framework in light of neoliberalism's political and economic dominance. Their differentiation of the term biopower in strictly molecular forms isn't provident to the multiple politics instantiated at different levels. If multiple agents act unilaterally on a issue it is often the case that at some point communitarianism will come into play. There is a matter of scale that needs to be accounted for when considering the operation of biopower in social space, molecularization can be an attributed to agents of varying levels of complexity. In Individual Good and the Common Good, Callahan establishes that when individualism is brought into tension with communitarianism a modality is established based on the contingency of each. Callahan's critique is less focused on the general notion of biopower but bioethics stemming from it's operation, his predilection is towards communitarianism in regarding its' biopolitics. Raman and Tutton do not commit themselves to any particular predilection- in fact the whole effect of the critique is to dispose of any such assumptive ideality. What is the practicality afforded by such differentiation one might ask? As we have seen from these three frameworks, whatever practicality such differentiation enables, there is a loss to the same degree of it's modality. The compound effect this type of differentiation has in the social sciences is to translate old social theory into new perspectival understanding of ourselves.