Wednesday 17 April 2019

ETHICAL ASPECTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS FROM THE CLASSICS TO PRESENT-DAY ISSUES



Nature is clearly rebelling. Natural disasters and cataclysms have been more and more frequent and their brutality has increased in recent years. We ourselves have certainly had a taste of frightening scenarios  noticing either too hot weather or rather stormy winds which inevitably have been haunting our lives.

The only certainty we have is that this impressive upheaval is due to an enormous industrial activity on the planet. Our world is characterised by a frenzy to make more and more money: at the same time, mankind has been increasingly producing rubbish, which has the worrying feature of being indestructible. 

Therefore, everyone can draw a precise conclusion and recognize capitalism as the reason of today’s issues: the majority of well-to-do people owns more than what they really need.

Most of us have bumped into Greta Thunberg's protest surfing the Net or watching the news. She's  a 16-year-old environmental activist who, despite her tender age, decided to commit herself to this massive issue. As she said in a recent speech, "On climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed”, since we have never treated the climate crisis as a real crisis. Unfortunately, these troubles exist  and are endangering our lives. 
If the economic system is responsible for our dangerous reality, we ought to start using our wealth and our advancemments in science and technology in order to find strategies to preserve life on Earth.


These present-day issues recall the reflections on the ethical aspects of scientific progress we ran into while  reading Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein  and Robert Louis Stevenson’s  The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Though usually considered cults of the Gothic genre, these two 19th century novels propose bioethical reflections which can be linked to today’s circumstances.

The protagonists of both novels are overreachers, rebels who go beyond the limits imposed to Mankind by God or Nature and are eventually punished with death. From this point of view, our current society gets the features of the modern Prometheus, since,  led by the only purpose of creating richness (for a few individuals), it is challenging Mother Nature. However, we had better keep in mind that our punishment will be definitive if we continue this way. 

It is through the commitment of activists like Greta Thunberg that we are given a chance to reflect and start acting on our mistakes. Unfortunately, at the same time, the world powers seem to be rather detached from these matters. Their lack of interest has been  proved by concrete gestures, like the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, which was justified by President Donald Trump as a move to rehabilitate American economy. This is the evidence that young Greta has a point.

I’d say that today’s society’s behaviour is close to Dr Frankenstein's and Dr Jekyll's: all of them create "monsters" they aren't capable of controlling. The climate crisis and its catastrophes can be compared to Frankenstein's creature,  who is willing to kill after being rejected,  or to Dr Jekyll’s inability to go back to his previous state of existence when evil Mr Hyde takes control of his body. What Stevenson aimed at using the theme of the double was criticizing the hypocritical attitude which characterised the Victorian society,  the so-called Victorian compromise. But the same is happening nowadays: nobody is taking the responsibility for the monstrous consequences of the unproper usage of experiments and discoveries which were meant to make our lives easier and more comfortable but that are now destroying  our planet.  

What we could learn from these two  19th century classics is the importance of avoiding an immoral use of any type of discovery which may endanger its users and of employing them, instead, for the good purposes they are meant to fulfil.  Dr Jekyll and Dr Frankenstein aren’t model scientists,  but we can certainly learn from them. Their tragic stories highlight the necessity of always carefully pondering what human beings may achieve while researching and experimenting, they warn us of the deadly risks. 

We have actually created irreversible problems to our home, planet Earth, and they are just like  huge, uncontrollable monsters. We must try stop them now, before it is too late,  as young-but-wise Greta  has been recently telling us. 

Eugenio Refrigeri


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