-
Three: In Defense of Rich Public Bioethics I: Self and Society
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
T H R E E In Defense of Rich Public Bioethics I Self and Society Facing imminent death for his crime against Athens, Socrates is visited in prison by his friend Crito, who implores him to escape. In considering possible reasons that could justify fleeing, Socrates sets himself into an imaginary conversation with the laws of Athens. The laws argue that no state can endure if its decisions have no power and are overthrown by individual citizens. Socrates replies that in his case their decision was unjust. The laws retort: “Was there provision for this in the agreement between you and us, Socrates? Or did you undertake to abide by whatever judgments the state pronounced?” Socrates is astonished, but the laws continue:“Since you have been born and brought up and educated, can you deny, in the first place, that you were our child and servant, both you and your ancestors?” (Crito, 50c–e). Socrates paints a complex picture of the relationship between the individual and the polis.At least in democratic Athens, it involves choices and conscious agreements made by citizens with the state. But this is not the entirety of the relationship, because the state is the parent of its citizens. It is the author of their being and education, generating their very existence and fundamentally shaping their identity. 61 With their parables of the state of nature, Hobbes, Locke, and other early moderns greatly simplified the story of the individual self and his or her society.Human individuals are pre-social beings with their interests fully formed. Through conscious agreements, they construct society. It is they who generate the state, not the other way around. Such social contract theories were motivated by the need to ensure greater individual freedoms. The religious wars of the age revealed the atrocities that can result when Socrates’communalistic vision is pressed too far.Individuals become mere grist for the mills of power and ideology. For the moderns, the role of the state is reduced from shaper of souls to protector of atomistic rights-bearers. Political association is not about achieving a definite vision of the good life, but about establishing a fair, open framework in which multiple visions can coexist.Liberalism,according to this view, gives a procedural answer to the question of the good: let individuals be free to decide on their own.As long as the conditions of informed consent obtain, the individual is fully in control of developing his or her life plan.Because individuals enter into only voluntary relations, their substantive decisions about what constitutes a good life can be treated as private preferences.Within the neutral framework proffered by government , anyone is free either to consent to or to refuse a proposed contract that would commit them to a certain way of living. With its overbearing emphasis on reducing risks and ensuring informed consent, instrumentalist public bioethics recapitulates the contractual image of society. Just as the task of government is to remain neutral on matters of the good, so too the task for public bioethics—a small appendage of government—is to ensure a neutral,fair framework in which individuals have the right to make their own choices.The fear in both cases is that the only other alternative is a coercive paternalism in which “the laws”forcibly impose a pattern of existence or a way of life on individuals. But there is a problem. Humans are not bundles of fully-formed preferences who preexist social and political relations. Socrates’more complex picture is truer to the human condition in which we are thrown into a world that nurtures and shapes us. Oftentimes our own identity and sense of the good can be opaque to ourselves, and we rely on our social surroundings to inform us about who we are and what we want, even if we come to realize that what we want is to be something different than what we see around us. 62 Rich Public Bioethics and the Kass Council [52.207.218.95] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:25 GMT) An important result of our constitutive interdependence is that many of our“personal”decisions about how to live cannot be cordoned off to a private sphere that consists in voluntary contractual relations. My choice to lead a lifestyle that is energy- and materials-intensive has ramifications for others, including future generations. But here the picture gets even more complex, because this is not entirely “my choice.” In the...