by Denis Larrivee
26-28 of February 2020, Vatican City: the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life sponsored
a conference on the social, ethical, and anthropological issues raised by
Artificial Intelligence technologies. Contributing was Denis Larrivee with a
poster discussing novel ethical models that normatively equate technical
systems with the human being.
Introduction – Revising a Human-Centered Ethics
through Techne Anthropology
Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, synthetic
biology, and brain organoids are only a few of many technological achievements
likely to alter not only the relation between human beings and technology but
also how the human being is himself understood or even altered. This reality
has prompted frequent reference to the passing of an age of unfettered
technological advance to the beginning of an age of ethical alignment, where
the metric of progress is no longer technological capability but human
fulfilment. “We need to make sure that these technologies are aligned to
humans in terms of our moral values and ethical principles [1].” These
Aristotelian and other similar concepts attribute to the human being a value
centrality premised on his subjectivity, capacity for morality, and autonomy in
the pursuit of the good [2,3]. Paralleling technical advance, however – indeed an outcome
of it – are challenged to this centrality. These have raised questions about
the value structures and ethical systems that flow from human privileging and
whether these can and should be replaced in keeping with the enhanced technical
capabilities and new material understanding. Current proposals often invoke,
for example, a horizontal rather than hierarchical notion of value placement,
in which ethical parity is equivalently shared rather than imposed. These
proposals premise value contingency on an ‘exceptionless’ criterion that is
ontologically neutral and that appeals to a universal techne anthropology.
Human ‘exceptionlessness’, however, is itself increasingly challenged by
neuroscience at organismal levels of control, revealing the influence of a
natural order oriented toward autonomy, self-awareness, and ontological
identification. This poster explores the consequences of techne anthropology for
ethical theory, ethical praxis, and the ethical subject and posits that its
derivative ethical systems fail to account for this natural order and the
ontological distinctiveness intrinsic to the human being, who is physically
instantiated in global neural operation.
Ethics
in an Absence of The Natural Order
Ethical
and Philosophical Challenges to Anthropocentrism
Tacitly acknowledged in most research initiatives
is an ethical imperative that prioritizes the value of the human being. Termed
anthropocentrism, its prioritization places human beings at the apex of
organismal life and grounds ethical praxis, thereby promoting human flourishing
and restricting harmful interventions. Anthropocentrism, however, has been
challenged ethically, for its perceived placement of value in human beings
alone [4, 5], and philosophically, as an adequate account of reality [6,7].
Table 1 identifies the major current and historically recent challenges to
anthropocentrism, their features and ethical consequences, and movements
endorsing their objections.
Imposing
an Order of Techne
The
Universality of Techne Anthropology
‘…the doctrine that man is a machine was argued
most forcefully in 1751 by de La Mettrie….suggesting there may be no clear
distinction between living matter and dead matter…Yet, in spite of the victory
of the new quantum theory….the doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more
defenders than before among physicists, biologists, and philosophers;
especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer…’
Karl
Popper, 1978
Invoking
Natural Reality in Value Origins
Addressing
the Philosophical Challenge through Neuroscience
Classically, value theory posits that values
are situated in a metaphysics of being, populated by entities that are the
subject of a predication of qualitative properties. The human being is thereby
regarded as an ontologically constitutive, value locus. The ability to
manipulate matter, however, has disrupted the association between being and
ontology, a conceptual process initiated in Bacon’s and, later, Heidegger’s
metaphysics of being. This rupture is reflected in the attribution of value to
consciousness (by Derek Parfit) and phenomenology of the emotions (by Eric
Scheler) in isolation from the individual. However, neuroscience now shows that
cognitive operations emerge from an ontologically constituted entity, the
individual, who is instantiated through the mediation of globally directed
brain states. These observations reveal that neural organization is governed by
metaphysical principles of individuation and qualification; that is, according
to a classical metaphysics of being. Hence, in a metaphysics of neuroscience,
value contingency rests in the individual as a neurally qualified entity and is
differentiated by ontological qualification. Human beings, thereby, occupy the
apex of a value hierarchy. Value relations, accordingly, are seen to be
structured with respect to oneself, e.g. in the presence of self circuits,
[9,10] and between distinguishable entities, e.g. Theory of Mind [11,12].
Intentionalized value relations are maximal when both objects are subjectively
aware and are entities in their own right; that is, as individuals with
subjectivity and ontological parity. Subject object relations, on the other
hand, lack value parity because they exhibit a partial or absence of
reciprocity. This value hierarchy is reflected in the physical instantiation of
normative relations, seen in many neuroscientific findings extending along a
descending hierarchy of value from the greatest (subject-subject) to the least
(subject-object). Table 2 illustrates how neuroscientific findings conform to
these basic metaphysical influences that shape normative relations in the
world.
An
Ethics of Enlightened Stewardship:
Ontology in the Natural Order
Ethical parity models presuppose the structuring
of lateral and mutually influential normative relations between humans and
multiple, technically generated ‘entities’ that share subsets of human
properties. On the basis of this last, parity models extend Kant’s Categorical
Imperative, adopting a Kingdom of Ends formulation that posits that no entity
may be instrumentally used as a means by another - e.g., certain forms of
ecoethics [4] - that is, all are invested with equivalent value. Yet the
reciprocal and mutual imposition of value does not account for how value is
contingent, who can invest it, and what can be done with it. By contrast,
relating value to being, that is, to observable reality - evidenced in a
metaphysical order revealed by neuroscience, for example - evokes a moral
response of ethical supervision that is consistent with external reality [].
This model prioritizes the normative position of human beings, but in the
context of a metaphysically informed stewardship, that endorses an intrinsic
hierarchy of naturally invested values.
Accepting
an Order of Nature
The
Order of Nature vs the Order of Biology
‘…the expressions ‘the order of nature’ and
‘the biological order’ must not be confused as identical…biological order is
part of that universal empiricism that weighs so heavily on the mind of modern
man…and is a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from
a larger reality….’
John Paul II, 1981
References
[1] Ethically Aligned Design, First Edition: A
Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent
Systems. IEEE Standards Association, 2017
[2] Kant I (1993). Grounding for the
Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. By Ellington JW. Hackett Press.
[3] Wojtyla K (2011) Man in the Field of
Responsibility. Trans. Kemp KW. South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press.
[4] Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[5] Chandler D (2013) The world of attachment:
the post-humanist challenge to freedom and necessity Millennium J Inter Studies
41(3):516-534.
[6] Rae G (2014) Heidegger’s influence on
posthumanism: the destruction of metaphysics, technology, and the overcoming of
anthropocentrism. His Human Sci 27(1):51-69.
[7] Levy N (2011) Neuroethics and the Extended
Mind In Sahakian B, Illes J (eds) Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
[8] Gillett C (2016) Reductionism and Emergence
in Science and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[9] Damasio A (2012) Self comes to mind:
constructing the conscious brain. Pantheon Books, New York
[10] Carroll J (2012) The truth about fiction:
biological reality and imaginary lives. Style 46:129-160
[11] Decety J, Cowell JM (2014) Friends or
foes: is empathy necessary for moral behavior. Perspectives Psychol
9(5):525-537.
[12] Esfeld M (2004) Quantum entanglement and a
metaphysics of relations. Studies Hist Phil Modern Physics 35:601-617.
[13] Rhonheim M (2008) The Perspective of the
Acting Person. Washington DC: Catholic University Press.
[14] Habermas J (1984) The Theory of
Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press
[15] Ranisch R (2012) Impersonalism in
bioethics. American J Bioethics. 12(8):40-41.
[16] Pope Francis. Laudato Si: On Care for our
Common Home. Vatican City: Vatican City Press.
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