Against Cartesian Dualism

 

Every now and then, it's useful to look at the philosophical underpinnings of current thought and what implications they have for engineering ethics.  In a recent post on the website of the journal First Things, professor of biblical and religious studies Carl Trueman noted that Cartesian dualism—a way of looking at the human person promulgated by René Descartes (1596-1650)—is enjoying a comeback in the popular mind, although modern philosophy has long since discarded it as an inadequate model.

 

If you know anything about Descartes, you will probably recall his most famous saying:  "I think, therefore I am."  He arrived at that conclusion after discarding everything he could think of that might possibly not be true—the evidence of his senses, things he knew on authority, and so on.  Whatever else might be false, he reasoned, he couldn't help thinking that he was still thinking, and therefore there must be a thinker somewhere.  He was so impressed by this idea that he developed a whole philosophy around it, which came to be known as Cartesian dualism.

 

Descartes believed that the soul—which in modern terms pretty much amounts to what we would call the mind—was a "spiritual substance" that was immaterial, without dimensions or location.  And the body he believed to be completely material, an entirely separate substance from the soul, consisting of the brain, the nerves, the muscles, etc., all of which operate under the control of the immaterial mind and will.  As to exactly how the immaterial controlled the material, Descartes wasn't sure.  But he thought the point of contact might be the pineal gland, a small pine-cone-shaped gland near the middle of the brain.

 

Modern science has discovered that the pineal gland, far from controlling the entire body, mainly secretes melatonin, which affects sleep patterns—but that's about it.  And modern philosophy has discarded Cartesian dualism, because nobody after Descartes was ever able to show how a completely immaterial thing like Descartes' hypothetical soul could affect a physical thing like the body.

 

But this news evidently hasn't reached a lot of women athletes who submitted an "amicus" (friend of the court) brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold abortion rights in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, in which the State of Missouri is seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal in the U. S.

 

As Trueman observes, the women in the amicus brief speak of their bodies as nothing more than sophisticated tools or instruments, operated by their minds and wills.  They say that they "depend on the right to control their bodies and reproductive lives in order to reach their athletic potential."  If we stop with only that quotation, we can see that (a) the operative verb is "control" and (b) the purpose of controlling the body is to "reach their athletic potential." 

 

In other words, for these women, their body is a means to the end of achieving success in athletics, just as a fast race car is a means to achieving success in the Indy 500.  And prohibiting abortion is like compelling a race-car driver to give a ride to a 300-pound hitchhiker during the race. 

 

Cartesian dualism shows up in lots of places these days outside of law courts.  The whole transhumanist movement, of which famed entrepreneur Elon Musk is a proponent, is based on the idea that the real you is basically a software program running on the wet computer called the brain.  The phrase "meat cage" that some people use to describe the body partakes of this same idea—that we are not our bodies, but that we use our bodies in a way not much different in principle than using a car or a computer. 

 

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of Cartesian dualism is the temptation to assess the humanity or non-humanity of other people based on our judgment as to whether they have a mind worthy of the name.  I would imagine it is easier to contemplate an abortion if you believe the fetus in question has not developed a mind yet.  And the same goes for people who are mentally disabled, suffer from Alzheimer's disease, or are otherwise incapacitated to the extent that their minds no longer control their bodies adequately.  Perhaps it's just as well to sever the connection between the mind and the body if the mind can't do its job controlling the body any more.

 

Well, if Cartesian dualism isn't true, how should we think of the relation between the mind and will (or soul, to use the more old-fashioned term) and the body?  The model of the person Descartes was trying to displace is called hylomorphism, originated by Aristotle.  Philosopher Peter Kreeft explains that Aristotle's theory considers the body to be what the person is made of, and the soul as the form or molding and patterning influence of the body.  So matter (Greek hyle) is "informed" by form (morphe) to create one integral thing with two aspects or causes:  the material cause, namely the body, and the formal cause, namely the soul.  But the human person is one unique thing, not two.

 

If hylomorphism was more popular than Cartesian dualism, I think we would see a lot of salutary changes in everything from attitudes toward the life issues (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) to medical and surgical procedures (sex-change operations, transhumanist initiatives) and even tattoos.  If you thought you were hiring a tattoo artist to burn an image of some hip-hop star on your very being, instead of just some piece of machinery you happen to be living in now, you might think twice before doing it. 

 

But the spirit of the age favors Cartesian dualism.  As consumers, we are urged to treat the rest of the world as a selectable, disposable warehouse of products and services—why not treat our bodies the same way?  I'm glad that my university is a rare holdout among public institutions of higher education for continuing to require that all its undergraduates take at least one philosophy course.  In such a course, they stand  a chance of hearing about Cartesian dualism and why it is no longer respectable.  And they might even take what they hear in class seriously, and apply it to their lives.  Such a hope is all that keeps some educators going.

 

Sources:  Carl Trueman's article "The Body Is More Than a Tool" appeared on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/10/the-body-is-more-than-a-tool.  Elon Musk's promotion of transhumanism is described at https://futurism.com/elon-musk-is-looking-to-kickstart-transhuman-evolution-with-brain-hacking-tech.  Peter Kreeft demolishes Cartesian dualism (and a lot of other false philosophical ideas) in his book Summa Philosophica (St. Augustine's Press, 2012).  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on hylomorphism.

Don't Be a Technocrat

 

Much as some engineers would like to ignore politics, it's irresponsible to do so.  I'm not saying you have to be a political junkie, but an awareness of the ultimate purposes and effects of the organization you work for is part of being a responsible engineer.  Writing in the Human Life Review, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has issued a call to defeat technocracy before it takes over more of our lives than it has already.  And every engineer should hear that call.

 

The meaning of the word "technocracy" has changed over the years.  Engineer William Henry Smyth coined it back in 1919 to mean democracy as mediated through scientists and engineers.  For a brief time in the 1930s it became a small political movement of its own, favoring the management of society by engineers and other experts rather than by democratic means.  That sense is usually the one which is used today.  A pure technocracy would be in radical contrast to a democracy, where the ultimate authority resides in the people at large.  In a technocracy, all important public (and many private) decisions are made only by experts, qualified by the usual professional credentials of education, licensing, or other signs of expertise.  And by implication, a technocrat is a sort of technically-educated bureaucrat, one of those experts to whom power has been entrusted to do the right thing for the uneducated rabble, who aren't smart enough to know what is good for them.

 

As you can tell, I'm no fan of technocracy, and neither is Wesley Smith.  He sees technocracy as a primary threat in a spectrum of what are called "life issues":  abortion, euthanasia, healthcare rationing, and the destruction of the privilege of conscientious objection for medical workers.  The problem stems from the stunted view of human life that technocracy tends to have.  Because this stunted view seems to be all too common among engineers, I'll pause to describe it in some detail.

 

Engineers are great at getting things done, but not so great at deciding what things need to be done.  In a technocracy, certain fundamental assumptions are made without questioning or even thinking about them.  For example, one such assumption is that increasing a country's GDP (gross domestic product) is a good thing.  So anything that contributes to the GDP is good, and anything else is bad.

 

That sounds nice, except what about all those useless old people in rest homes?  They can't contribute to the GDP—they're too old to work.  And what about children?  Same deal—they are a drag on the economy, not a benefit.  Even the worst technocrat can see, you would think, that if a culture quits having children, pretty soon there won't be any culture to worry about.  But it was technocrats who came up with the brilliant idea of China's one-child policy, which threw a giant monkey wrench into that country's demography and is threatening to wreck its future economy even now. 

 

Engineers are great at coming up with more efficient ways to do things.  And within the proper context, greater efficiency is indeed a worthwhile goal, if you're talking about, say, energy efficiency or reducing a waste stream.  But when you try to apply that same attitude outside its proper sphere, you end up like Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher that Smith quotes as saying the respect one should receive depends on your "capacity for physical, social, and mental interaction with other beings."  A person with such an attitude, which is entirely consistent with the goal of increasing a country's GDP, will take a dim view of people with disabilities of any kind, and will see nothing wrong with, for example, aborting any baby with Down's syndrome, or refusing health care to an old useless guy with only a high-school education who's probably going to die in a few more years anyway, in preference to a young productive college grad. 

 

Essential to doing engineering ethics right is the cultivation of one's moral imagination.  The easy way out is simply to do what you're told, acting as a small cog in the large organizations that most engineers are a part of, and not asking about the wider implications or effects of one's work.  But it's attitudes like that which have allowed China to start constructing their social-credit system, which Smith cites as an egregious example of technocracy gone bad.

 

For those unfamiliar with it, think of social credit as your credit score, only applied to your whole life instead of a narrow aspect of your financial behavior.  The Chinese government, with input from their technocrats, decides what kind of citizen they want.  Then they set about giving points to people who behave the way they want, and taking away points from those who don't.  Intrusive technologies such as GPS tracking, facial recognition, and of course, informants, are deployed to find out who you associate with, what you do in your spare time, and what websites you visit.  (Even here in the West, our technocratic watchers in the private sector have perfected the website part of the business.)  And for people who do things the government doesn't like, such as going to church or meeting with other Christians or Muslims, loss of social credit score can mean restrictions in travel, loss of employment, or worse, not only for yourself but for your children as well, who had the bad judgment to be born to such ne'er-do-wells.

 

It can't happen here, can it?  Wesley Smith doesn't seem to think so, at least not in the full-bore prison-camp variety, because the Constitution would prevent it.  Well, I'm not so sure, because lately the Constitution has been found by its nine Supreme Court interpreters to say a lot of things that most people didn't think it was saying.

 

But one thing is for sure:  if engineers, who are vitally necessary to any sort of technocracy, individually and collectively refuse to destroy democracy and replace it with technocracy, that will be the end of technocracy.  Idealistic?  Maybe.  But the first step is to understand what technocracy is and what its goals are, and only then can you decide to oppose it.

 

Sources:  Wesley J. Smith's article  "Defeating Technocracy is Crucial to Life," appeared in Human Life Review, vol. 47, Winter 2021, pp. 30-38.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on technocracy.

Death With Style and Elegance: Philip Nitschke's Death Pod

Near-universal consensus about anything is rare in ethics.  But I think you could get most people to agree on an answer to the question, "Was the invention of the Nazi gas chambers a good invention?"  In the Auschwitz concentration camp operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, an estimated 1.1 million people died, most of them Jews, and scientifically-designed gas chambers were used to kill many of them.  Those gas chambers represent a nadir in the history of engineering:  designed by a corrupt, malevolent government for industrial-scale executions of people who died in them only because they ran afoul of Hitler's regime.

Ah, but what if those wanting to try out a gas chamber are not compelled, but have made the decision of their own free will?  And have even passed an online test certifying that they are of "sound mind"?  And have read a fancy advertising brochure promising "death with style and elegance"?  Just climb into the Death Pod—which looks like what you might get if you asked Apple to design a body-length chest-style freezer—lie down, make yourself comfortable, and push the button.  The software does all the rest.  Allegedly, the user will experience first "euphoria" as the oxygen level decreases, then pass out into the Great Beyond.  Since liquid nitrogen is involved, it's not clear whether the corpse is flash-frozen after death or if that's just a convenient way to get a supply of suffocating nitrogen.  But after you're dead, it really doesn't matter. 

The inventor of the Death Pod is Philip Nitschke, a resident of the Netherlands who has been working on self-operated suicide machines since at least the 1990s.  I won't remark on the similarity of Mr. Nitschke's name to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, except to say that they seem to share a pessimistic view of life that partakes of what some call the culture of death. 

The alleged problem that the Death Pod addresses is the tiresome necessity of involving medical personnel, or worse yet, rolling your own method, in one's decision to commit suicide.   The writer and wit Dorothy Parker portrayed the difficulties facing someone who has reached the decision to do herself in with this grim little poem, titled "Résumé:"

            Razors pain you,

            Rivers are damp,

            Acids stain you,

            And drugs cause cramp.

            Guns aren't lawful,

            Nooses give,

            Gas smells awful,

            You might as well live.

But Parker, who died in 1967 of mostly natural causes, didn't live to see how the Death Pod could solve all these problems in one stroke.

In a development that I am sure will be noted by future historians (assuming there are any left), the idea of legalizing suicide has spread around the world in recent decades.  In the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and some U. S. states, both euthanasia (mercy killing by physicians) and suicide are legal, and organizations such as Nitschke's "Exit International" promote the idea that killing yourself should be—well, it's hard to say what they think it should be.  Socially acceptable?  More often considered as an option to be chosen when facing problems?  Quick, easy, and convenient, like the tag line to countless other advertisements for products that let you become more of the ideal autonomous self that modern culture seems to be encouraging us to be?  All of these things and more.

As far as I can tell, nobody has actually died in a Death Pod yet.  Nitschke enlisted the help of an industrial designer in creating a full-scale model that people visiting it on display in Venice, Italy can try on for size.  There's a photo of a gal lying underneath the clear plastic canopy of the thing, holding a bunch of lilies and grinning.  Death can be funny if you can open up the canopy and get out afterwards.  But that won't be an option once Nitzschke finishes his design and publishes 3-D printing instructions for the entire system.

This whole thing may be nothing more than a publicity stunt, as the news reports about it say that Nitschke isn't planning to make and sell the device himself, apparently concerned that he might get in trouble with a government which doesn't look favorably on people selling products that are not only likely to kill their owners, but almost guaranteed to.  Instead, the suicidal customer is expected to download the plans, 3-D print the device somewhere (good luck finding a printer large enough to handle a coffin-size plastic box capable of holding the weight of the average human), and hook it up to liquid nitrogen that you get at your handy local liquid-nitrogen convenience store. 

Technically, this scenario doesn't make much sense, and it sounds like there's some important ingredients missing.  For example, a third party (Nitzsche doesn't say who) has to be involved to give the user an access code to get into the thing, presumably ensuring that the user has passed an online test verifying that they are of sound mind.  But the definition of "sound mind" must be pretty skewed.  Public health officials tend to treat suicidal tendencies as aberrant behavior, not evidence of a sound mind.

There are so many things wrong with this idea that I could write several columns about it, but I will close with this thought, which readers not believing in the supernatural can skip.  Ever since the Fall in the Garden of Eden, humanity has been in a battle that is primarily waged in the spiritual realm, between God and his angels and the Devil and his angels.  The Devil would like nothing better than to kill off humanity, which he finds offensive in the highest degree.  So he likes to portray death as attractive, even as stylish and elegant, in order to achieve his purposes, which are to kill, steal, and destroy.  Philip Nitschke is an unwitting servant of the Devil when he goes around promoting attractive means of killing oneself.  The Devil, a liar from the beginning, likes to fool us with the illusion that we are autonomous individuals who can freely choose what to be or how to end our lives, with no adverse consequences.  The Death Pod is just one of the latest of his tricks.  But somehow the product's execution (pardon the expression) doesn't sound like it will live up to the hype its creator has generated, and I for one hope it doesn't. 

Sources:  I first heard about the Death Pod on the Patrick Madrid Show carried by the Catholic radio network Relevant Radio.  I also referred to reports on it at the websites https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/euthanasia-expert-invents-death-pod-with-die-button-that-kills-victims-within-minutes and https://www.businessinsider.co.za/a-pro-euthanasia-humanist-has-invented-a-death-pod-to-help-patients-pass-on-peacefully-without-the-need-to-involve-a-medical-professional-2019-5.