In 2003, when the War on Terror was at its height, Eric Cohen authored a long reflection on the need to consider the moral and philosophical conundrums produced by advances in biotechnology. In so doing, he posed the question of “Why should we be concerned about bioethics in a time of war?” After all, with thousands of American men and women heading off to battle, was this not perhaps a time to defer discussion of such abstruse issues? Cohen turned to C.S. Lewis’s address to his students at Oxford, titled “Learning in War-Time,” for guidance.
The circumstances during which Lewis composed that speech—Britain during World War II—were very different from those of the U.S. in 2003, which in turn, are very different from the state of the world in 2020, when life everywhere seems poised to grind to a halt over fears of epidemic. Yet a common thread remains relevant throughout:
With so much horror, what room can there be for happy pursuits? With challenges so obviously large, why worry about problems so seemingly small?
The answer Lewis gave, in his typical way, was both sharp and deep: “The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. . . . If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.” It has always been an uncertain mix of greatness and misery, joy and heartache, long-term plans and sudden disasters.
This insight cuts two ways: we should still laugh, still marry, still light Sabbath candles—if laugh less loudly, marry more urgently, rest less easily. For these are the human things to do. But just as war should not evict everything beautiful, it does not excuse us from self-examination in the midst of self-defense.
[W]ar (like disease) reminds us that we are mortal; and we are mortal because we are biological. The ultimate aspiration of biotechnology—or the biotechnology project—is to master and use the way our bodies work so that we might live as if we were not really bodies at all; or as if we could always make our bodies do what we want them to do without fail. Bioethics, at its best, reminds us of what it means to be biological—what it means to be born, to grow up, to make love, to have children, to grow old, and to die—always with the threat of having life suddenly taken away from us.
The remarkable advances in biotechnology in the seventeen years since Cohen wrote those words make them only more relevant. As reports arrive of Italian doctors making heart-wrenching decisions about how to allocate resources to patients, the ethical questions remain as urgent as ever.
Read more on New Atlantis: http://thenewatlantis.com/publications/bioethics-in-wartime