Today when we listen to conservative ethicists, whether they be bioethicists, infoethicists, nanoethicists, neuroethicists, roboethicists or technoethicists, one would think that ethics can be reduced to a taboo.
According to my favorite French philosopher, Dominique Lecourt, the time has come to launch a counter-ethical school and movement, which I describe as “technoradical”, otherwise we risk becoming a puny humanity seeking a delusional security in a web of taboos which would assault what has nurtured the nobility and dignity of the human being: his insatiable thirst for knowledge. We should not be content with defining good as a step back from evil, neither satisfy ourselves with a “heuristics of fear” to use German philosopher Hans Jonas’ pathetic expression. We must tirelessly build a positive idea of the greater good, live it and then substitute an ethic of fear with an ethic of risk.
Tying these two words together may seem like a heresy; however, the human adventure, when it is as its most noble, was and is always about the courage to confront risk. But Lecourt doesn’t use “courage” in the modern sense of knowing to endure suffering or take bad punches, but in the ancient Greek sense of knowing to take risks not in fear of an evil but in the undertaking of great deeds in the service of good.
From this technoradical point of view, science holds a lesson in ethics: whether we like it or not, it never let’s itself stopped by taboos. We should not regret it or be overcome with fear. On the other hand, we can and should worry about the uses of science conceived according to logics which happen to be the ever more powerful and exclusive logics of profit.
Again must we know what we value to be the good for the human condition. But we will never, they say, come to a universal agreement! At the very least we must ask the question and not retreat to positions we presume sure, but which reveal themselves eminently dangerous. For it is self-evident that nothing exposes more our insecurity than the distraught desire for security.
Not too long ago my colleague and friend rhetorician Dale Carrico hastily dismissed technoradicals as “rebels without a cue”. What he didn’t know at the time is that for me and many others the term “radical” (from Latin rādīx, rādīc-, root) is used as an adjective meaning of or pertaining to the root or going to the root. Therefore, like or unlike the typical technoscientifically-literate and -focused progressive advocate, a technoradical asserts that only a risk ethic can and should guide us in wielding technology and radicalism in order for human beings to overcome some of the root causes of inequalities of power.
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