Epilogue: Thinking With

In which I leave much to be desired.

If one imagines the We in a circle of its own unity surrounded by circles maintaining their own unity, perhaps the concept of human action as a pebble dropped into a pond would have more meaning. No pebble can be dropped into a pond without its ripples encountering other ripples and those ripples having other consequence through their encounters.

— V. F. Cordova (2003)

Aroniathon #1: The Grasses are Taking Over.

How to keep the grasses down that overtake the rewilding Baroa belaobara (berryapple) plantation.

From: The Aroniathon series.

Model: ‘Dzucks’. Photo by Bartaku, 2011¹

With this book, I wanted to examine the trouble that is bioethics and reimagine it as an ethics of life. I do not mean solely thinking about ethical questions about life, but instead, I imagine bioethics as a discipline that is inspired by life and cherishes life. That is an acknowledgement that if we, as a human species, want to survive on a damaged planet, we need to think with all kinds of life. It means letting go of utopian visions and sterile thought experiments. At the same time, suggesting an ontology on which we can build such bioethics seems blasphemous. That is probably why I, who wrote a traditional PhD on children and biobanks, wanted to be something other than a bioethicist for years. I imagined I could be a philosopher of biology and spend my years thinking about what life is. Alternatively, I could become an anthropologist or sociologist—after all, I love empirical research. At the same time, I realised that bioethicists have the freedom to engage with all these types of research. I came to appreciate and love the grey zone that bioethics occupies between science, medicine, philosophy, and the humanities. In 2022, we face uncertainties and doom scenarios that pandemics and wars bring. For some people, this means that there is no hope for humanity. However, I believe that as ‘ethicists of life’, bioethicists can contribute to increasing hope. This means widening the scope of bioethics to engage with and perhaps even include environmental ethics and engaging with diversity and experiences. It means being informed by the past and learning to think with the past about possible futures. In dire need, bioethics should be forward-looking and ask what we value, what world can sustain such values, and how we get there.

This approach to bioethics is not new. We could say it was present at the cradle of the discipline, as becomes clear when we revisit Van Rensselaer Potter’s book Bioethics, A Bridge to the Future (Rensselaer Potter, 1971). Here, he imagines bioethics based on a specific view of biology, with the ultimate goal of preserving humanity. Now, fifty years after the publication of this book, Potter’s hope for a new science seems naive. Bioethics, as a discipline, is far removed from the all-encompassing idea he had for it. Even the effects of bioethics on legislation are limited. It would be great if legislators and policymakers would take the survival of the human species as a guiding principle and shared value system in light of significant future uncertainties and dangers. The pandemic has shown us that this is far from the case. Moreover, present-day bioethicists would probably not think that what Potter suggested was related to the current discipline of bioethics. Thinking about a shared value system that spans the entire scope, from individual values and virtues to a worldwide policy, is far removed from our current practice.

Still, I think our field has much to gain if we take some of Potter’s ideas, update them, and incorporate them into our practice. However, we also need newer ideas and a fresh look at the task at hand. In this book, I engaged in thinking with many inspiring philosophers and scientists and have wanted to make them relevant to bioethics. I started by describing the idea of philosophy as plumbing, as Mary Midgley used it, and positioned the bioethicist as philosophical plumber par excellence. Bioethicists are often engaged in scientific research projects. They are ideally situated to make the structures and stories explicit to guide a specific scientific practice. Sometimes these structures are weak and need to be fixed. For example, we can question the dualistic nature that is still prevalent in thinking about genes, natures, and environments despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary. Like plumbers dealing with the stench of under-floor soil pipes, bioethicists deal with muddy and messy truths hidden from sight in the world’s underbelly. Sterile thought experiments and arguments stripped of their complexity will not do anymore. Besides thinking about structures and dealing head-on with the messiness of the world, bioethicists and plumbers have in common that they connect things. Bioethicists are neither fish nor fowl, and as liminal creatures, they can bind and bring into dialogue disciplines that are usually worlds apart, such as the humanities, biology, and philosophy.

This refreshing relationality is pervasive in many aspects of Mary Midgley’s philosophy. She writes about the relationships with other disciplines and the importance of relationships we have with other human beings, other-than-human beings, and the world at large. Such a worldview of connectedness is maybe not so common in Western philosophical thought, but it is deeply entrenched in native philosophies. The Native American philosopher V. F. Cordova describes Native American philosophy and worldview as fundamentally relational. Humans are not atomistic beings but are connected to and in a dynamic relationship with their surroundings, influencing and being influenced. The worldview is reminiscent of process philosophy, a Western concept that has remained somewhat fringe in the philosophical canon but that is gaining more traction lately. Native American philosophy describes the importance of the idea of belonging, of connectedness to a place. Human beings have a specific role to play in their situatedness. They care for places and all creatures belonging there. I think nowadays, our sense of place is cosmopolitan. We are creatures that belong to the whole world, experience the world, and affect the world, and our actions have far-reaching consequences. The Native American idea of caring for places is a powerful metaphor for our relationship and duty to the Earthly ecosystem as a whole. The role of caregivers transcends discussions in environmental ethics about anthropocentrism and ecocentrism and gives human beings a specific task as specific organisms in the ecosystem.

It strikes me as significant that in 21st-century scientific practice, the idea of the interconnectedness of humans and other-than-human organisms such as animals, plants, mushrooms, and bacteria is vindicated. Acknowledging this is, in my view, also recognising that we must keep these connections in mind if we want a liveable future. As demonstrated by epigenetics, but even more by recent findings in microbiology and mycology, the entanglement of all living beings should give us pause as to how bioethics should never be solely about humans and their survival. Indeed, new visions of biology show how playfulness, creativity and chance encounters have been part of life since its earliest beginnings. Creativity should be integral to scientists’ and philosophers’ methodology if we want to continue living in a liveable world. Bioethicists, as ethicists of life, can play an important role. Life itself can inspire us with joy and the possibility of imagining the future we would like to have. We can help make that future happen by thinking with trouble and insisting on hopeful discourses and routes. Such a feat is not something one discipline can do alone. Bioethics as interdisciplinary is a truism, but I hope to have given the idea of interdisciplinarity some substance. We can playfully engage with colleagues from many different fields, not as competitors or handmaidens, but thinking with them about the world and its future.