This one was also published on Jiemian (for reprints, please contact Jiemian), but it was not a commissioned piece. I wrote it casually and sent it to them. The feedback was that the quality was worse than the previous two, which may have had something to do with the rather rambling way I wrote this one, or perhaps with the fact that the issues this article faced were more tangled and its viewpoint correspondingly more moderate. Still, they did publish it, but with very extensive changes: the title was altered (Can Technological Progress Really Tailor Human Value Preferences?), and the He Jiankui theme was also removed (don’t ask why; just call it Chinese characteristics), while I was also made to awkwardly tack on painless childbirth as the “starting point.” The content was cut a great deal as well. Here I am posting the original:
Conservative ethics is always lagging behind technological development
He Jiankui used gene editing to create girls innately immune to AIDS, and was subjected to a full-scale denunciation. At the same time, however, many people also began to imagine the future, believing that even if the technology is not yet mature now, in the not-too-distant future gene editing will certainly help people have better babies.
Gene editing can not only preemptively eliminate many genetic diseases; it may even make babies prettier and smarter. One can imagine that this technology will certainly be welcomed by a considerable number of parents. One might even say that once the technology develops to a certain level, the ethical position may reverse: today, most people condemn the few who edit genes for their children, but in the future, if a pair of parents does not do gene editing before giving birth, they may instead be denounced by everyone.
In both the present and the imagined future, the logic of condemnation is actually the same: bringing into the world a baby that is uncontrolled, unsafe, and full of surprises is irresponsible. As things stand today, babies after gene editing have more unpredictability, but one can imagine that at some point in the future, babies born naturally without gene editing will be the ones that seem more uncontrolled and less safe. Many of the reasons we use today to condemn He Jiankui will one day be turned around and used to condemn those who reproduce naturally.
Of course, in fact, today’s so-called natural childbirth already contains countless technologies. If a contemporary mother, where conditions allow, never gets prenatal checkups or pregnancy examinations, does not eat scientifically, hires a midwife to deliver at home, and when faced with a premature baby or a baby with a congenital disease does not take the child to the hospital for treatment… then we would very likely regard her as irresponsible. What was perfectly normal preparation for childbirth in ancient times is far from sufficient in the eyes of modern people. Conversely, techniques that seem utterly normal to modern people, such as caesarean section, may have seemed rebellious and heterodox to ancient people.
Thinking in this way, might gene technologies that today still astonish or provoke resistance eventually become as commonplace as caesarean section in the near future? Very likely. We can hardly stop the rapid development of technology, and we can hardly stop changes in ideas, values, ethics, and culture. Historically, it is often ethics that adapts to technological development, rather than technology that adapts to ethical constraints. What should we do when a new technology challenges the old ethics? Simple: break the old ethics and establish a new ethics suited to the new technology…
Even if ethics lags behind, it cannot be discarded
Up to this point, things seem a little bleak. Does it mean that all our thinking and concern for ethics are ultimately for nothing? Since ethics will always change, is there still any need for us to care about it? Why not simply follow the demands of technology?
Not at all. Although we know ethics will always change, how it changes is still related to our thinking and choices. For example, we know that everyone’s thinking also goes through change; the same person at 18 and at 80 often has very different ideas and virtues. But even so, does that mean an 18-year-old can have no position whatsoever, drift with the current, and muddle through life in a fog?
In fact, the development of ethics is similar to the development of science or technology: there is no revolution that descends from nowhere. Adherence to tradition and subversion of tradition are always proceeding simultaneously. If scientists had no conservative stance at all and simply denied all old authorities, they would become nothing but pseudo-science dabblers who achieve nothing; if inventors were unwilling to use any existing patterns and kept reinventing the wheel, they likewise would not accomplish much.
Technology is destined to develop, and ethics is bound to change with the times; this is our fate. But this cannot constitute a reason for us to abandon ethics—such a stance of abandonment is like saying: since you are going to die anyway, why not die now?
Ethics itself has two characteristics: first, it actively seeks under the fate of mortality; second, it grasps the proper measure between too little and too much. Therefore, the inevitability of technological development cannot cancel ethics. In the face of technology, the mission of ethics is to seek the proper balance between resistance and embrace: neither allowing ethics to become overly conservative, stubbornly opposing the changes of the times, nor allowing ethics to become overly loose, blindly embracing technological change.
Lagging ethics does not always resist new technologies; when people praise new technologies as so “good,” the basis may likewise be outdated ethics
Notice that I said overly conservative ethics resists the changes of the times, but it does not necessarily always resist new technologies. On the contrary, some people who unconditionally surrender to new technology are in fact precisely adhering to a certain excessively conservative ethics.
Ethics asks “what is good”; that is to say, it seeks to reflect on the criteria of “good and bad”. Holding a rigid ethical view is manifested not only in stubbornly deeming technology bad, but also in unconditionally deeming technology “good”. When the advocates of new technology emphasize that technology will bring benefits to humanity and will make reproduction better, their conception of “good” may well be outdated.
In the eyes of some people, being innately immune to AIDS is regarded as something better; this view may have been correct in an era when people were completely helpless against AIDS. But under today’s technical conditions, controlling AIDS contagion, completing mother-to-child blocking, and preventing children from becoming infected with AIDS are already not difficult to do. In such a technological environment, it seems out of step to go to great trouble to carry out innate transformation.
So then, when we try to use new technologies to make people or future generations smarter, more beautiful, and healthier, where do the criteria we adopt come from? What counts as smart? What counts as beautiful? What counts as healthy? These yardsticks, like ethics itself, are also changing with the times.
The historicity and diversity of value yardsticks
Some people may say: there must always be some yardstick that is definitely correct, right? For example, removing genetic diseases is always healthier, isn’t it? But the matter is not that simple either. In fact, “genetic disease” is a rather strange thing from the perspective of evolution. If a certain genetic disease were always a bad thing, then the survival ability of the group carrying that gene would necessarily be worse, so over the long course of evolutionary history, through so-called “survival of the fittest,” they should already have been eliminated. So if a certain disease can be inherited stably from generation to generation, then in fact it should have some special survival advantage.
Indeed, scientists have gradually found survival advantages accompanying some genetic diseases. For example, people carrying the gene for sickle cell anemia are better able to resist malaria, and therefore have a survival advantage in regions where malaria is prevalent. Survival of the fittest does not have an absolute standard of the “fittest”; fitness is always relative to the environment, and the environment itself is always diverse and changing. An advantage in one region and one period may become a disadvantage in another region or another era.
In addition, many times the distance between genius and madman is only one step. The talents possessed by many geniuses may not be a good thing in other people. Paranoia can drive people mad, but it can also make them focused. So, for example, if there is a genetic trait that gives a person a 10% chance of becoming a madman, is it a disadvantageous gene? But what if the person who has this gene also has a 0.1% chance of becoming Einstein?
When it comes to measures like smartness and beauty, historicity is even more pronounced. People who are good at programming are smart today, but in ancient times that skill would have had nowhere to be applied. To have broad knowledge and an excellent memory, to be able to recite text backward and forward by heart, unquestionably made one a smart person in ancient times, but today, when information can be searched with a search engine at the flick of a hand, that is no longer such a remarkable feat.
Be wary of technology flattening diversity
Therefore, when we say that a certain technology can bring a certain benefit, we must additionally pay attention to whether we are thereby taking some yardstick that was already quite limited in the first place and boosting it to an excessively high level. Will we suppress the space for diversity to grow, and let a single yardstick expand excessively?
Because every new technology is often tied to a specific set of evaluative standards, and when that new technology sweeps the world, it simultaneously expands a certain value yardstick to the extreme.
For example, plastic surgery in theory can make faces change in endlessly varied ways, but in fact we have already seen that in a country where everyone gets plastic surgery, faces become more and more uniform rather than more and more diverse.
So in the future of gene technology, do we have confidence that we can reverse this trend? When we have extremely precise technology that can customize a person’s various attributes from birth, will people become more convergent or more diverse? For example, genetic disease genes that are beneficial in a particular environment will naturally be eliminated, and genes that can produce Einstein but at the same time increase the probability of madness will also have to be preemptively eliminated by responsible parents.
Precisely because the development of modern technology always runs ahead of the development of ethics, when certain value yardsticks are carried along and made fashionable in the world by new technology, people may not even be aware of it. The advocates of new technology think they have shaken off the constraints of outdated ethics, yet they fail to imagine that their own values are the ones standing still.
A single yardstick promoted through its binding with new technology may be suitable for the values or aesthetics of this moment and this place, but the loss of diversity and contingency limits our adaptability and imagination for the future. Ethics should open itself to a changing future, not only by opening its heart to receive new technology, but also by striving to leave room for the plurality of values.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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