China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics
Published in Andrew Maynard, Jack Stilgoe, The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Geoengineering and Clean Energy, 2020
This line of reasoning would suggest that the speculative future of radically enhanced human bodies and minds appears so foreign or remote only because people are held back by the assumptions of human unchangeability. If this does not appear plausible, there are other, more sophisticated (and insidious) ways of erecting a straw man. It has been suggested, for instance, that there is a systematic “status-quo-bias” or an inappropriate preference for how things are. According to Nick Bostrom and Tony Ord, this bias “may be responsible for much of opposition to human enhancement.” Tellingly, they assert that the removal of biases such as this one “will sometimes do more to improve our judgments than accumulating or analyzing a large body of particular facts” [4, pp. 657f.]. Since in the case at hand all the relevant facts are assumed to lie in an unknowable future and since there are apparently no good reasons to challenge cognitive enhancement technologies, the irrational attitudes of detractors are explained by Bostrom and Ord in terms of an “inappropriate favoring of the status quo.”21 After reviewing psychological evidence that such bias actually exists, the authors recommend a strategy for discovering whether it is operative in the particular assessment of cognitive enhancement: Status quo bias is tantamount to the belief that the continuous cognitive-ability-parameter is at its optimum; those who hold this belief will resist the reduction of intelligence just as much as its enhancement [4, p. 665]. It turns out, however, that this more sophisticated argument provides only a variant to Caplan’s and Harris’s false dichotomy: One either believes in optimal parameter values (that is, in a non-improvable human nature) or one should endorse cognitive enhancement.22
A third approach beyond the false dichotomy between teacher- and student-centred approaches in the engineering classroom
Published in European Journal of Engineering Education, 2019
At the outset of this article, it was noted that contemporary arguments for reform in university teaching tend to rest on a polarity that counterposes traditional teaching with student-centred or active learning approaches. The danger with arguments that rest on a polarity is that they may be setting up what is really a false dichotomy. The way out of a false dichotomy is to check whether the two options presented are the only options. Here, I draw on two pieces of education scholarship, from quite different contexts, that allow us to explore this question.