Balancing Science and Morality

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Suzanne Fields

An acquaintance of mine, close to my age, is hooked up to machines in an intensive-care ward. She can't live without them. They keep water out of her lungs, jolt her heart to keep it ticking and drive food through a tube. She is unlikely to regain a conscious life.

And yet ... and yet. No one is willing to disconnect. Keeping this body alive in an intensive-care unit will cost her children most of their inheritance. But they aren't without hope. Until hope dies, she won't.

Such a somber subject is treated as humor on a Seinfeld episode, when Elaine decides she wants to make a living will and has to give someone she knows the power to speak for her if she can't speak for herself. She chooses Kramer, the tall, lanky, awkward geek, whom she thinks will be cautious and not precipitously cause her demise. She tells him emphatically that he has her permission to let her go if she is in a coma and can't get out of it.

But then Elaine watches a movie in which a woman wakes up after months in a coma and regains her ability to live an active life. Elaine becomes hysterical. She must find Kramer so she can tell him how the movie ends and that she's changed her mind, that she doesn't want him to disconnect, after all. She's terrified she'll be run over by an automobile before she finds him and he'll give up on her prematurely.

If only such life-death dilemmas could be resolved simply by finding our Kramer. We can speculate at length about not wanting to live a long life if it means machines without consciousness, but it's never an easy decision when faced with it in reality. We talk about "smart machines," but machines without a human guide are dumb, indeed.

We live in an age which provides many scientific miracles, but we're always short on ones we'd like to claim for ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues. Science, which once promised open-ended optimism, only shows us how humanly limited it is. Scientists sometimes may be miracle workers, but their miracles are severely rationed.

Einstein's brain, according to certain scientists who have been studying it, had an enlarged cerebral region responsible for mathematical thought and spatial relationships. But Einstein knew the limits of his science.

"One has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see how clearly, how utterly inadequate, that intelligence is when confronted with what exists," he wrote to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium in 1932.

"All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit," he told the Princeton Theological Society. "It is only to the individual that a soul is given."

Daniel Boorstin, who studies man's historical quest to know and improve his world, notes that Western philosophers and scientists since the Protestant Reformation have sought understanding through reason and experience. As a result, he writes in the Wall Street Journal, they changed the central question from "why" to "how." But he would be closer to the truth, it seems to me, if he looked at the way the two questions have been fused rather than separated.

As a man of science and a secular Jew who hardly practiced his faith, Einstein nevertheless spoke eloquently of the mystery that impels scientific facts. "The finer speculation in the realm of science springs from a deep religious feeling and that without such feeling they would not be fruitful." Inherent in such a statement is the "why" as well as the "how."

It is with tragic irony that the Age of Enlightenment, which ushered in a philosophical optimism grounded in man's ability to reason, suggested to many thinkers that we could replace religion with a "science of morals." We now know the impossibility of that. A science of morals is an illusion. If most scientists focus on answers to how and most moralists seek answers to why, it's incumbent for all of us to show respect for both.

We are awash today in questions that require a thoughtful balance in the interacting questions posed by science and morality. Can we justify scientific research on embryos if it yields information to spare lives of people suffering from certain diseases? With the new birth technology, how should we respond to the necessity of eliminating certain fertilized eggs so that other eggs may develop? Who gets organ transplants? What are the limits on genetic engineering when they allow us to eradicate specific disabilities?

"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins," wrote Victor Hugo in the middle of the 19th century. "Which of the two has the grander view?" That is the question of a literary man. Scientists and moralists must avail themselves of both instruments. A scientist will be guided by what the lens allows him to see, but even then his interpretation renders him vulnerable, as Copernicus learned. The moralist scrupulously considers the data for its impact on human life. Einstein wore both hats imperfectly.

On his deathbed the father of the Theory of Relativity is reported to have said, "If only I had more mathematics." But all the mathematics in the world cannot provide human satisfaction in. answering moral questions or in deciding when to disconnect a mother, a wife, a friend from a dumb machine.