Emmanuel Levinas and bioethics

What would have happened if there had been advanced prenatal screening technologies? He would have had a “healthy” baby, but in exchange for this, he would have lost the chance to attain self-transformation and to know the “precious truths of life” described above. This is the crucial point. (I made a further analysis by using the terms “the desire of the body” and “the joy of life” in the book Painless Civilization.) The more we pursue the preventive reduction of pain, the more we lose the chance to transform the basic structure of our way of thinking and being, and the more we are deprived of opportunities to know precious truths indispensable to our meaningful life. Preventive reduction of pain means preventive reduction of the possibility of “the arrival of the other” (the words of Emmanuel Levinas). It leads us to a situation where all of us live in a state of the living dead; in other words, a situation in which we are able to reduce pain and suffering, and are able to gain more pleasure and comfort. But as a result of that, we gradually come to lose the opportunity of experiencing the joy of life that comes from encountering an unwanted situation and being forced to transform ourselves to find a new way of thinking and being we have never known. Remember the discussion about the disappearance of “conviction of love,” discussed in Section 4. It is closely connected to the current topic, because to love someone means to be forced to transform one’s self, and to feel this unexpected transformation as bliss.

The above is the most significant problem that accompanies preventive reduction of pain. One may think that even if there is such a danger in preventive reduction of pain, it does not necessarily mean that we have to stop the development of this kind of technology. This might be so, but please note that what I am primarily concerned about here is not social policymaking but the fate of our contemporary civilization; in other words, the question of what we have to bear as a fate if our current civilization continues to develop in this direction. To clarify the fate of contemporary civilization, and to show a way of escape from our dark future (which, of course, might include the abolishment of certain technologies and policies) is the main criticism of a painless civilization. I believe current bioethical issues must be discussed from this point of view.

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Painless Civilization and Fundamental Sense of Security
(2005)
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