Delight Springs

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Research, and the good life for all

Did the Honors lecture yesterday. That was fun! Can't believe it's been nearly five years since the last time.

Today in Bioethics we'll talk "research." Things like clinical trials and research involving animals and their rights, and genetics, and epidemiology. We'll look at the funding gap between what we need to cure and where our research dollars are actually going, and at the moral imperative of genuine and informed consent. We'll look at disturbing instances of fraudulent and dishonest research. And we'll consider Peter Singer's claims about "speciesism."



The future of research is a daunting source of apprehension and speculation. Michael Sandel and Bill McKibben have aired serious concerns about genetic and other "enhancement" research as potentially catastrophic for our capacity to achieve or even recognize "meaningful" lives. Enhanced may not mean improved.

The Times has a cover story today we should notice: Ethicists are split over the use of genetic testing of embryos... to ensure [parents] that a bad gene would not be passed to their children.
In A&P, it's neuroscience and the good life with Owen Flanagan, as we continue to plow through The Really Hard Problem. (He made it into my honors lecture yesterday, btw, as a cherry-picking Blue Devil "modern-day pragmatist." Maybe we can take a peek at a couple of my slides today.

Many philosophers continue to look askance at Flanagan's empirical and hypothetical approach to eudaimonistic scientia, and to the suggestion that some facts about flourishing should inform our "value judgments." I'm still trying to understand why. Is it misplaced loyalty to a miscast reverence for Saint David of Edinburgh? Or for Aristotle? Or Buddha?

And speaking of the happiest, flow-iest man on earth, Mathieu Ricard...

We look as well today at Flanagan's discussion of Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans. "The good life for all," he says, is a more demanding ethic than Aristotle's. Nobody ever said democracy would be easy.

Buddhist psychology is all about alleviating suffering. I wonder if it's enough about optimizing joy, too. And this will inevitably bring us back to one of next time's topics, illusion. Might be worth revisiting a HAP 101 session, early last Fall, devoted to the theme.

Flanagan's main refrain, still, is that we give up our childish habits of thought and live up to our birthright as rational social animals who can handle the truth about our condition as finite material beings living in a material world. Can't argue with that, but I hope we'll draw a careful distinction between childish and child-like. That might be just the distinction a cherry-picking pragmatic pluralist needs, to preserve the integrity of the "thousand-eyed present."

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