Prologue

Basic Ingredients of Ethics and Human Legacy

We deal with ethics on a daily basis, from the time we are born to when we eventually pass on. From culture specific ideas like Sanskar, through which we try to teach the unspoken and unwritten rules of society to the next generation, to global institutions like the United Nations that aim to preserve ethical standards for the entire world. It is therefore not a surprise that when dealing with technology and science of any kind, working towards ethical science is a fundamental issue that not just scientists and engineers, but the entire society, has to collectively decide on. To do so, let us begin by considering the major questions regarding ethics.

1. Why is ethics an existentially important question for our societies?
2. How have the instruments and beliefs used by societies to determine and enforce ethically good and bad behavior changed over human history?
3. How are modern governments and other institutions failing at ensuring ethical behavior?

In this book we will build our understanding of ethics and make an attempt to answer these questions. This exercise will help us contextualize ethics for nanotechnology that we address below.

Humans and Ethics

We consider humans to be distinct from the rest of the animals, mainly due to their ability to think ethically and act with complex planning. Ethics through shared empathy, in particular, is the distinctive line between an animal and a human. We may share several things in common regarding the body and behavior with animals, but humans have been developing differently from even the closest great ape species for over ten million years. Our mind has been diversified, widely and deeply, in cognitive and affective (emotional) perceptions of the world and of other minds around us. The emotional structure and functioning of humans have been altogether highly elevated themselves-no other members of a species can more deeply understand and predict the behavior of each other as we can. We humans have shed tears far more for each other than any other species. Though many animals have developed many superhuman cognitive senses, in the entire history of life on the Earth, ethical thinking is exclusively a very different psycho-asset, which distinguishes humans from animals, and which is the central life energy of human culture and experience.

This claim was verified through the research of C. Donald Batson, who says "we humans have the capacity to care for others for their sakes (altruism)" and "empathy-induced altruism is within the human repertoire." He further explains that empathy-induced altruism is a far more pervasive and powerful force in human affairs than has been recognized. Failure to appreciate its importance has handicapped attempts to understand why we humans act as we do and wherein our happiness lies. This failure has also handicapped efforts to promote better interpersonal relations and create a more caring, human society.

The struggle of all the past and present cultures can be viewed as the important story of human ethical conflict. The prominent stories of every religion and world epics, the innumerable philosophical schools of thought, the finest ideas in social sciences, the basic guidelines of national constitutions, the formal-informal teachings of gurus and teachers and the whispering of every parent into the ears of their cherished children carry the message of ethical thinking. In a way, all the cultures of the world have been cultivated by upholding the ethical values throughout the thousands of years of known human history.

The important question, then, is how do cultures decide on exactly which ethical ideas to follow and how to implement them. Everybody defines ethics as per their value structure, experience, moods and whims. Every person has their own say on the righteousness of any thought and action. Even established philosophies of the world, of the West and the East, are divided regarding the perception of ethics. The matter is further complicated by the fact that ethical conclusions can change with situations and contexts.

The Western thinkers, from Socrates to Kant, Marx and Derrida and Eastern philosophies depicted in Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islamism, and Sikhism, all commonly agree that the aim of ethical life is primarily to control animal-like selfish thinking and behavior and to dedicate oneself to the welfare of the "others" - local society and global humanity. All the cultures unanimously agree that the aim of every human's life is enjoyment (Anand), which is the culmination of feeling accomplishment, and that it is possible only through one's thoughts and deeds dedicated to the "welfare" of the "other." For example, Dalai Lama, argues that the most important thing for us is to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and acknowledge our inherent interdependency.

Failure to act ethically can and does create conflicts. On the other hand, welfare-oriented deeds liquidate the "self" into the "other," and thus gives us the feeling of accomplishment and enjoyment. Of course, this perception may seem fantastical in this modern world, but if everyone thinks and acts for the welfare of the "other," the perpetual agony of mankind-manifesting in the form of a fight between two family members up to the heinous world wars that devastated all of humanity-will be ameliorated. The ultimate hope is for a positive movement by all the cultures where every human being is considered an equal valuable member of the world culture (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam - meaning that if there is any concept of family, it includes the whole earth; the concept of a family cannot be smaller than that). Thus, every member of this family - humans, animals, birds and other creatures - are cared for and honored for everyone's optimum development.

God and Ethics

For the majority of cultures throughout the history of religion, a rough system of beliefs and practices based on a monotheistic or a pantheon of gods would serve as the instrument to decide and enforce ethics in society. In this way, God, or god(s), is a personified myth of collective virtues. The "death of God," as Nietzsche would put it, came about with the rapid emergence of science and technology, evaporating the power that religion alone would determine. It can be argued that this "death of God" was in a way the "death of ethics," freeing humans from most moral obligations and making them "liberal."

Since the eighteenth to the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the concept of ethics has been unethically defined and replaced by many illuminating post-medieval concepts. These concepts tend to be fairly attractive to us-liberty, individual freedom, personal privacy, individual property, business rights, democracy, fundamental rights, human rights, capitalist economy, corporate economy, etc. The impact of social struggles like the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799) spread roaringly throughout the world with a trio of values- Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; but Liberty, in isolation, mischievously damaged the concept of Equality and especially Fraternity; and ultimately today, they have resulted in countries and states that are best described as crony capitalisms and electoral autocracies. "Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they sought Equality" (Jacques Attali, "Fraternity and Utopia" 2000).

Liberty, Science and Technology, Capitalism and Ethics

Now, with the rise of capitalism as the popular form of economic framework, competitive profits and money have been accepted as the key inspirations of any innovation and development. Due to the development of science and technology, we now have production, distribution, and consumption on a grander scale than ever before; however, this has led to an accumulation and centralization of profit and power in the hands of an increasing minority of the world. "We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold incentives and competitive pressures" (Bill Joy, Wired, 2000).

The concepts of "liberty" and "freedom" are used by the governments of capitalist states to legitimize the profit orientation and its centralization. They have transformed the medieval decentralized and distributed economy into a centralized capitalistic economy; and open and co-operative economic participation into a patent-based monopolistic economy. Unfortunately, by ignoring the ethics of the welfare of deprived people we have transformed our "democratic" politics into a commercialized money- power game. With a great deal of confusion and derailment, most states have become "ethics-neutral business center" with increased exploitation and oppression of the weaker classes, hiding it through unethical legitimations

Consequently, now we have more inequality amongst the population, more disparity in economic and political participation, more political tyranny in even so-called democratic states and more antagonism at every level. This is apparent as the measures of economic equality...