Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices/HannahArendt
From 2013.igem.org
Secret garden
Congratulations! You've found our secret garden! Follow the instructions below and win a great prize at the World jamboree!
- A video shows that two of our team members are having great fun at our favourite company. Do you know the name of the second member that appears in the video?
- For one of our models we had to do very extensive computations. To prevent our own computers from overheating and to keep the temperature in our iGEM room at a normal level, we used a supercomputer. Which centre maintains this supercomputer? (Dutch abbreviation)
- We organised a symposium with a debate, some seminars and 2 iGEM project presentations. An iGEM team came all the way from the Netherlands to present their project. What is the name of their city?
Now put all of these in this URL:https://2013.igem.org/Team:KU_Leuven/(firstname)(abbreviation)(city), (loose the brackets and put everything in lowercase) and follow the very last instruction to get your special jamboree prize!
![tree](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/a/ac/Tree.png)
![ladybugcartoon](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/6/64/Ladybugcartoon.png)
The Public Judgment and Common Sense in relation to Synthetic Biology
The iGEM-team from Heidelberg in 2008, concluded that "[o]nly a well-informed public is able to develop a non-prejudiced and profound opinion about synthetic biology” (iGEM team Heidelberg, 2008). They argued that it was necessary to inform the public about the uses, potentials and practices of synthetic biology and therewith enabling the public to have an informed opinion on the developments in synthetic biology. The students from Heidelberg are not the only ones that feel the need to close to gap between the public and the scientist concerning developments related to genetic manipulation and the synthetization of DNA. In much of the recent literature it is argued that in order to bypass the hostility of the general public towards new developments in genetic engineering, a new approach has to be found which brings the scientist and the citizen closer together (Schmidt et al, 2008). This paper will investigate how the public may judge developments in synthetic biology based on a reading of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and her interpretation of the notion of judgment as it is found within Immanuel Kant's philosophy. It appears that Arendt's understanding of judgment is close to the goals of iGEM and that of particular teams to popularize and make the scientific process transparent. However, her stress on the common sense of the public as a prerequisite for judgment points to significant problems for spreading the knowledge of synthetic biology.
![Aphid feeding](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/4/45/Aphid_feeding.jpg)
It is commonly agreed that recent development within synthetic biology are in need of ethical consideration because the potential of this new science is huge and the accessibility of this novel technique is not yet fully regulated and can easily spread. Most reviews on ethical issues in synthetic biology concern themselves with the biosafety and biosecurity, and if you are lucky it also discusses justice related aspects of synthetic biology. Biosafety deals with threats to humans and the ecosystem that might occur in the case of accidents, whereas the biosecurity aspect deals with the danger when an individual, group or government with bad intentions lay their hands on this new technology in order cause harm. Next to the fact an ethical evaluation based on these two aspects seems to be a quite narrow interpretation, namely a risk-analysis, of what an ethical evaluation ought to be, it most often does not discuss, or dismisses, the concerns that the synthesization of a genome has on the public that feels weary about the possibility of creating new life forms.
At the same time, most reviewers are aware of the clash between the scientist and the public, being manifested by the dismissal of novel technologies by the public, for example, the abundance of protests in Europe against genetically modified crops. Hence, some claim that a new form of communication needs to be sought in order to inform the public about new scientific technologies that might cause troubles with the beliefs of the public. One phrase that is often mentioned in the literature is that the public holds that the scientist is “playing for God” by creating new life forms.1 Yet, even though some people might indeed be of this opinion, this phrase runs the risk of making all criticism against the creation of new life forms appear as religious or dogmatic. It seems that in relatively secular societies the religious argument does not have a strong base, especially not when it is voiced in the public realm. Moreover, making every argument against the creation of new life forms appear as dogmatic or religious runs the risk of disqualifying the public before one has properly considered the arguments that are at stake.
![Aphid colors](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/e/ee/Colored_aphids.jpg)
![Aphid feeding](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/4/45/Aphid_feeding.jpg)
In order to investigate the relation between scientific innovations-or may one say revolutions?-and the judgment of the public it seems imperative to investigate the actual process of opinion-formation. Next to that, it is important to investigate how this relates to the transparency of the scientific process and supplying the public with more information as was proposed by the Heidelberg iGEM-team mentioned in the introduction. Hannah Arendt in her lectures on the political philosophy of Immanuel Kant develops an understanding of what it means to judge something, and how this is intrinsically linked to issues as publicity and popularization. In these lectures Arendt stresses the need for publicity and popularization in order to enable the public to judge something properly. Moreover, Arendt's lectures stresses the importance of separating ethics, understood in a Kantian sense, and judgment. For Kant, there cannot be such a thing as a moral opinion, that is, something is good, or it is bad, there is no matter of taste. The attractiveness of Arendt's effort of investigating the Kantian judgment consists of the fact that it moves beyond an ethics which in our times would be called dogmatic and turns to a way of judging that is related to taste and is grounded in a political community. Hence, even though Arendt did not link her analysis of judgment to scientific processes, it seems to be a good model in order to evaluate how judgments and opinions evolve, how they relate to publicity and the popularization of science, without making ethics into a matter of deontological and theological arguments.
Publicity and Popularization and a Condition for Judgment
Kant is an enlightenment thinker. His works are imbued with the awareness that people should break free from the dogma's that inhibit their autonomous thinking and that they should become autonomous agents. His most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason, is a plea to break with the metaphysical tradition of his time. However, Kant is not only concerned with breaking with the tradition and authority of his time that dictated philosophical thought, in the Critique of Pure Reason he breaks with the previous traditions by looking at the conditions and limits of reason itself (what can I know?). Hannah Arendt argues that Kant himself did not “see the clearly destructive side of his enterprise”, which consisted of breaking with previous metaphysical thought (Arendt, 34). Instead he argued, as Arendt quotes, that the “loss affects only the monopoly of the Schools, but by no means the interest of men,” because the distinctions and concepts introduced by these different Schools never “succeeded in reaching the public mind [das Publikum] or in exercising the slightest influence on its convictions” (Arendt, 25).
![Aphid colors](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/e/ee/Colored_aphids.jpg)