Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices/HannahArendt

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.

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).