Rossella Bonito Oliva

Ethical Reflections from the bioethical Implications of the Ongoing technological Revolution Bioethics, as applied ethics that reason about the interconnections between the biological and technical dimensions of the human, cannot but evolve extremely rapidly. The constant innovations coming, for example, from the field of artificial intelligence or from the manipulation of the genome, cannot but constantly question the human form of life. In this interview, Rossella Bonito Oliva, a moral philosopher, discusses the complex issues of the unthought and artificial intelligence, genome manipulation and the very latest innovation concerning the “production” of a “synthetic human embryon”, highlighting what she calls “the increasingly widespread disinterest in the 'human' form of life”.

The Unpredictable as a Resource As knowledge grows, the progress of science despite promises and reassurances does not provide certainty. The contents of science are increasingly specialised and closer to deciphering human life forms. Knowing the “what is” is always accompanied by governing the “what is known”, the critical reflection of culture as the human artifice par excellence. Culture also includes the unproductive philosophy, which does not offer conquests, nor absolute truths. Can the thought in the search for meaning resist the widespread blindness of science as technology, avoid the shipwreck of common living and the exhaustion of humanity’s creative resources? Perhaps only by bringing attention back to the “minor”, to the unpredictable which, despite everything, is the greatest danger and checkmate for the new mythology of technicians, experts and programmers.

PROCREATING BETWEEN SYMBOLISM AND RITUALIZATION. WOMAN’S BODY The event of the birth is charged with a constellation of meanings that steal the act of engendering to the woman. Specifically, the "history" of pregnancy and its outcome are occupied by the rites and myths that survive, and are translated into codified knowledge and neutral practices. These results do not give value to birth in return, nor give attention to women who, engendering, go through a delicate phase of her physiological and psychological life. Paradoxically a sort of sacralization of the procreation in our culture sacrifices the woman, and reproduces with anthropocentrism a symbolic domain of paternalistic imprint. An oblivion in which new forms of parenting and relationship with nature are involved.

If still in Kant, the catastrophe was represented by the image of Lisbon earthquake, in the second half of the 20th century, the catastrophe has its own metaphor in the “hybris” of Technology. In its perverted circularity, Technology is the scene of a match played exclusively by Man, where there’s no trace of an arbiter or director. The disorientation in front of the results of his History goes beyond any ability to feel and imagine, beyond any possible human responsibility; it implies a loss of world, that is the loss of the Sense of relationship between a Subject and the Object, between mutually interested Subjects. Therefore, the catastrophe is always imminent, visible, though at the same time unperceived. Who could testify it if not Man, through his astonishment, questions and wonder? But what is left of Man once he has emancipated from the “shock” of Contingency?

Inventive image Can a term generate new perspectives on phenomena that have already been studied in depth by science? This is the case of tensegrity. The image of the skeleton of a cell helps to understand its meaning: a structure that sustains itself in the cooperation of rigid and elastic parts. Data is interpreted in a different way, which art and architecture use to build light and removable constructions. The anthropology of Castaneda finds the possibility for a different relationship between body and mind for mankind. An eccentric that stays marginal in cultural anthropology. With bigger attention, anthropology of tensegrity can offer modern mankind a way out from the old model of homo faber and technological man.

This essay questions itself on the possibility of a foundation of ethic beginning from the work of two authors -Aristotle and Hegel-, who prefer to investigate the tie between ethic and athropology, rather than focusing on the metaphisical aspect of the subject. While acknowledging the status of ethics as linked, and indipendent at the same time, to politics and moral, Aristotle and Hegel considering the specificity of actions moved by a particular purpose, place on the foreground the “second nature”, the habits and customs as the first line of ethics. As the etymology of ethos − from oikos, ‘house’ − suggests, the study of ethics cannot ignore the inborn tendency of mankind to feel at home. In this context, more than on a foundation in a metaphysical sense, the focus is set on the ground where the structures of anthropogenesis are rooted: a never ending process, always moving and at risk in relation to the prevailing of stasis or mobility, of fear or creativity, in a game where the “human” itself is in danger. The possibility of “being otherwise” of freedom is preserved by the vitality of this cure of ethics as a cure of the human itself