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A Jaina Perspective* WORLDVIEWS Worldviews 17 (2013) 77–88 brill.com/wo Ethics of Synthetic Life: A Jaina Perspective* Christopher Key Chapple Loyola Marymount University 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA [email protected] Abstract Many Western philosophers, from Aristotle through Descartes and even Collingwood and Whitehead, have regarded the material world to be largely inert and subject to human intervention. The modern period has yielded more nuanced definitions of nature, seeing the process of life as self-generating and self-sustaining. The Jaina worldview, dating from the first several centuries before the common era, has developed an elaborate biological schematic that attributes sentience and hence soul to even the elements of earth, water, fire, and air. They also developed a sophisticated ethical response to the “livingness” of things. The Jaina attitudes toward synthetic life are explored at the end of the paper, suggesting that even engineered cells would nonetheless possess the qualities of life that must be valued and protected. Keywords synthetic life; Jainism; soul; sentience; nature The issue of synthetic life raises many questions of an ethical nature. In today’s global reality, it is important to engage all ethical issues through a cross-cultural approach. The Jaina tradition, rather uniquely among the world’s religions, has developed a distinctive definition of life that merits consideration in light of this topic, particularly because of the long legacy of a commitment to non-violence that has accompanied Jaina beliefs and practices. This essay will begin with a cursory exploration of select European and American philosophical definitions of life from classical and modern and contemporary thinkers. The Jaina worldview in regard to life will then be explained, with a focus on the Jaina advocacy of vegetarianism as an *) This paper was written for a workshop that has been supported by the SYBHEL project: Synthetic Biology for Human Health: Ethical and Legal Issues (SiS-2008-1.1.2.1-230401; a pro- ject funded under the European Commission’s Science in Society Programme of Framework Programme 7). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/15685357-01701007 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:56:35PM via free access 78 C.K. Chapple / Worldviews 17 (2013) 77–88 example of applied Jaina ethics. The article will conclude with an explora- tion of how Jaina thinking might be applied to the various issues posed by the emergence of synthetic life forms as explained in the introductory article. 1. General Considerations: What Is Life? In order to respond to the question of synthetic life, it is important to take into account various definitions of life. The Oxford Dictionary1 definition states: 1. the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death; living things and their activity; a particular type or aspect of people’s existence; vital- ity, vigor, or energy. 2. the existence of an individual human being or animal; a biography; either of the two states of a person’s existence separated by death (as in Christianity and some other religious traditions); any of a num- ber of successive existences in which a soul is held to be reincarnated (as in Hinduism and some other religious traditions); a chance to live after narrowly escaping death (especially with reference to the nine lives traditionally attributed to cats). 3. (usually one’s life) the period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being; the period during which something inanimate or abstract continues to exist, function, or be valid. In contemporary discourse, one generally associates life with the first sense of the word: “capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” In his classic work on life, De Anima, Aristotle (384-222 B.C.E.) wrote that life consists of “intellect, sense, loco- motion, and motion of nutrition, growth and decay” (Aristotle 1907: xxxix). He attributed a soul to animals, but specified that the soul of animals is not immortal. Descartes and Bacon denied a soul or even sentience to animals, proclaiming they hold no thoughts or feelings. Aristotle noted that plants exhibited some qualities of life: nutrition, growth, and decay but did not attribute sentience to them. Life is not attributed by Aristotle (or the Western tradition in general) to such entities as rocks or bodies of water. 1) www.oxforddictionaries.com. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:56:35PM via free access C.K. Chapple / Worldviews 17 (2013) 77–88 79 The philosopher Robin Collingwood (1889–1943) states that, “the world is a world of dead matter, infinite in extent and permeated by movement throughout, but utterly devoid of ultimate qualitative differences and moved by uniform and purely quantitative forces” (Collingwood 1960: 112). Similarly, no less than process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861– 1947) writes, “nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, and colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly” (Whitehead 1997). Western thinkers, from Aristotle to Whitehead, make a clear distinc- tion between inert, non-responsive material substance and beings who possess consciousness. Many other examples could be found, from Bacon to Descartes, of philosophers who hold an anthropocentric view that places primary value on the human and sees nature as being little more than a tool to be used for human comfort. In contrast, in the early Twentieth century, Carl G. Jung (1875-1961) ques- tioned the underlying narrowly defined assumptions regarding the nature of life when, as a young man, he mused “am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone he is sitting on?” (Jung 1961: 20). He considered animals to be kin, writing that, “We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, hunger and thirst, fear and trust in common” and that “Animals were dear and faithful, unchanging and trustworthy” (Jung 1961: 67). He considered plants to be “the thoughts of God’s world” (Jung 1961: 67) and wrote that, “the woods were the place where I felt closest to . the incomprehensible meaning of life . and to its awe-inspiring workings” (Jung 1961: 68). Numerous other writings could be cited already from the Romantics, both European and American, who reveled in the joys of nature. Contemporary science has begun to introduce data that to a degree blurs the distinction between animate and inanimate matter. Vast quanti- ties of material that we now classify as “dead” in fact arose from the life process. Most spectacularly, the very air that cloaks our planet and allows life to flourish with its delicate balance of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases, reached its critical mixture as aerobic bacteria over the course of billions of years digested mineral material, producing lime- stone, one of the earth’s more abundant rocks, and what became our life- nourishing atmosphere. The first speculations in this area were set forth by Vernadsky (1863-1945), the father of bio-geochemistry, who posited a link between the formation of the earth and the processes of life. James Lovelock (b.1919) advanced this work, noting that: The air we breathe, the oceans and the rocks are all either direct products of living organisms [think of the chalk cliffs of Dover, just one gigantic pile of shells] or else they have been greatly modified by their presence, and this even Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:56:35PM via free access 80 C.K. Chapple / Worldviews 17 (2013) 77–88 includes the igneous rocks coming from volcanoes. Indeed, organisms are not just adapting to a dead world determined by physics and chemistry alone, they live within a world that is the breath and the bones and the blood of their ancestors and they themselves are now sustaining (Lovelock 1988: 38). Contemporary ecological insights into the origins and supportive connec- tions amongst life forms similarly provide a much-expanded sense of the universe. In the words of Thomas Berry (1914-2009), the universe may thus be seen as a “communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (Berry 2006: 17). Instances abound, from American Romantic poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) to Astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996), of the mysterious insights that can be found in the workings of nature, even amongst those aspects of nature that are considered inert and non-sentient. These few examples of nature-friendly attitudes are cited to exemplify the transition from a human-centered to a nature centered orientation within the mod- ern world advocated by environmental thinkers. This move from classical anthropocentric to more bio-centric or nature centered views has recently been complicated by emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, that allow hitherto unknown manipulations of life. As noted in the introduction to this issue of Worldviews by Anna Deplazes, modern science has started to blur to boundary between “natu- ral” and synthesized forms of life. Synthetic biology can be defined in at least four ways, some of which open the possibility that life can be manipu- lated and organized in such a way that new forms of life might be known. Synthetic life introduces the notion that smaller units of life within existing life forms and the relationships between these various components must be taken into account as holding new possibilities for life. The concern for overall organizational patterning of constituent parts of life indicates the need for complex relational thinking in regard to defining the nature of life. Aristotle and even Whitehead were not pre-disposed to think of life in this holistic sense, whereas more poetic and systems-oriented thinkers such as Whitman, Berry, and Jung would have the capacity to envision the smaller (chemical) and organizational (strings of nucleotides) challenges pre- sented by synthetic life.
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