Talking about . . . technology and morality

‘Let our baby live’ said the headline that started a conversation as I bought my local paper. The story told of parents who were challenging the doctors over their refusal to resuscitate their ten month old baby Charlotte when she next developed breathing difficulties. Not many years ago this issue would not have arisen since Charlotte would have died at birth, being three months premature, weighing just one pound and measuring only five inches. But technology has advanced – and doctors must make difficult decisions.

In a different story, Joanna Jepson was challenging the alleged decision of doctors to abort a baby three months before birth because of a cleft palate. Again, not many years ago this issue would not have arisen, since we had no way of seeing such a deformity in the womb.

Our rapidly developing technology is creating more moral dilemmas[1] – and these can provoke a lot of discussion about the underlying spiritual questions of life. Such questions are important to all of us, and are also explored in recent popular films such as I, Robot and The Stepford Wives.

I, Robot is set in a future where robots are a part of everyone’s life – doing menial chores such as shopping, cleaning, collecting rubbish and serving behind bars. Suggested by (rather than based upon) Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short story collection with the same title, the film explores the first of Asimov’s three laws of robotics: ‘a robot may not harm a human nor, through inactivity, allow a human to come to harm.[2] This parallels a fundamental principle in medical ethics, dating back to Hippocrates and usually expressed as ‘primum non nocere’, or ‘first do no harm’.

This may seem a perfectly logical safeguard for today’s doctors and tomorrow’s robots. But the film highlights some limitations of logic (not least that logic simply links premises to a conclusion, and that the conclusion depends upon the accuracy of the premises as well as the validity of the arguments). In the film a super-computer concludes that the best way to protect humans is to stop them from hurting each other, and therefore it attempts to use the robots to take over the world so that they can make it a safer place for humans. Claiming to have flawless logic the computer also concludes that it is acceptable to kill certain humans during the take-over since this will save more lives in the future.[3]

The Stepford Wives explores the question from a different angle. The geeky men of Stepford have created perfect robotic replacements for their wives. When a new resident arrives, they try to persuade him of the logical value of replacing his troubled and troublesome wife. But he refuses and exposes the deception. Why does he do this when the logic for replacing his wife with a perfect robot is so compelling? Because he loves her – with all her faults and failings. It is such a love that also provides the resolution to the I, Robot story, as the hero demonstrates the need for compassion as well as logical reasoning.

The use of logical reasoning in ethics has a long philosophical history, becoming particularly influential through the Enlightenment and still prevailing today – despite the impact of postmodernity. But as with all logic, our conclusions are vulnerable to false premises and invalid arguments. This is particularly disturbing in the work of the modern philosopher Peter Singer[4] (founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics and professor at the Princeton University Center for Human Values) who takes the modern secular humanist distinction between a ‘human being’ and a ‘human person’ to its logical conclusion in the field of ethics. Generally, secular humanists argue that it is our ability to reason that makes human beings into valuable human people. Singer defines personhood more tightly as ‘a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future.’ He then extends this to argue that if a human being does not have this mental capacity (due to illness or age – or even if they are a newborn baby) then they are not actually a person at all and it is morally acceptable to kill them. Thus he not only argues for abortion and euthanasia – but also infanticide.[5]

Such philosophy, and such films, and such modern technologically-driven medical dilemmas, should cause everyone to consider the impact of a morality based on false premises and invalid arguments. And they may open our minds to God’s perspective, communicated to us ‘ not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words’ (1 Corinthians 2:13, NIV).

Back