“New eugenics” in the 21st century

Thirdly, they were trying to protect “the fundamental sense of security.” They did not use these words, but what they really had in mind was this. They thought that technology of selective abortion was dangerous because it systematically deprives us of the sense that our existence is being accepted unconditionally. It is a kind of trust in the world and society, and this trust provides us with the foundation upon which we can survive in our society. This is a sense of security with which I can strongly believe that even if I had been less intelligent, ugly, or disabled, at least my existence would have been accepted equally to the world, and if I should succeed, fail, or become a doddering old man, my existence will continue to be accepted equally to the world. This is the basis of our life upon which we keep sane in this society. I want to call it “the fundamental sense of security.” Selective abortion and some new reproductive technologies are problematic because they systematically erode “the fundamental sense of security” we have to keep protecting. Here lies the most important problem of “new eugenics” in the 21st century.

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Disability Movement and Inner Eugenic Thought
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“Economic reasons”

In 1974, the Eugenic Protection Law Revision Bill finally failed to pass the Diet. The clause for selective abortion did not added to the law. A group of physicians in abortion clinics have continuously demanded a clause for selective abortion, but every time they insisted it women and disabled people acted against them. Hence, the Japanese law has not had such a clause up to the present. However, we should understand that when a woman has a disabled fetus she is allowed to abort it if she claims “economic reasons.” The debated issue was whether the clause should be added to the law; in other words, it was a debate over the symbolic meaning of the clause when added to the law. (Eugenic Protection Law was revised in 1996, and its name was changed to Maternal Protection Law.)

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Disability Movement and Inner Eugenic Thought
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“Inner consciousness of discrimination”

In the late 1960s, some disabled people with Cerebral Palsy joined “Blue Grass Group (Aoi Shiba no Kai),” a friendship society for people with CP, and started “independent living” in Kanagawa Prefecture. Among them were Koichi Yokotsuka and Hiroshi Yokota, both were the philosophical leaders of the independent living activities at that time. As soon as they joined the group, they began protesting against our society full of discrimination toward disabled people. In 1970, a mother killed her CP child, but the general public sympathized with the mother, not with the killed child. Blue Grass Group accused our way of thinking, and stated that non-disabled people had a strong egoism, that is, our “inner consciousness of discrimination.” They believed that this egoism held by non-disabled people was the main source of discrimination. However, interestingly, they thought that not only non-disabled people, but also disabled people themselves shared this consciousness; hence, all of us have to fight against our “inner consciousness of discrimination.” Of course, their main focus was a discriminative society created by non-disabled people, but they did not turn their eyes away from their own consciousness of discrimination.

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Disability Movement and Inner Eugenic Thought
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Japanese bioethics at its beginning

Japanese bioethics began in the early 1970s. Most Japanese scholars still think that Japanese bioethics began in 1980s, but it is questionable. My recent book, Life Studies Approaches to Bioethics: A New Perspective on Brain Death, Feminism, and Disability, 2001, demonstrated that.

Women’s liberation groups and a disability group brought a new type of thinking into our philosophy and ethics. It should be noted that “minorities” in our society, that is, women and disabled people, founded Japanese bioethics. In this sense, it started as “feminist bioethics” and “disabled people bioethics.” This made Japanese bioethics somewhat different from “American” bioethics. Feminists and disabled people were mainly grass-root activists; they did not write academic papers or books. Instead they wrote a great deal of leaflets and handwritten documents. We can read them today because their publication finally began in recent years. Japanese “academic” bioethics began in 1988 when Japanese Association for Bioethics was founded. I wrote about Japanese feminist bioethics elsewhere, hence, I want to concentrate myself on the Japanese disability movement and its impact on bioethics.

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Disability Movement and Inner Eugenic Thought
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The word "life" has various meanings

I first used the words "life studies" in my book An Invitation to the Study of Life (1988). Strictly speaking, this book was written in Japanese, hence, corresponding words were "Seimeigaku." I started using the English words "life studies" probably in the early 1990s. "Seimeigaku" is now becoming popular now in Japan, but "life studies" are still unfamiliar to an English audience.

The word "life" has various meanings. We might be bewildered because we come up with so many implications. Let us take a look at some examples on the web.

The words seem to have at least five meanings.

1. The study of one's personal history. See The Aphra Behn Society.

2. The study of issues of everyday life, for example, food, health, leisure, gender, race, discrimination, etc. See College of Applied Life Studies at University of Illinois.

3. The study of religious, spiritual and ethical aspects of human life. See Center for Life Studies, Sunbridge College, NY.

4. The education about wildlife and ecology, for example, Sea Life Studies,Inc., Life Studies' Homepage.

5. Curriculum of high school courses. See Buffalo Grove High School, and Stockport Grammar School. This categorizing at high schools is very interesting to me.

6. Robert Lowell, well known poet, published the book "Life Studies" in 1959, which received the National Book Award.

I propose to add new meaning to the English words "life studies," and give the words new life.

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What is Life Studies
(2004)
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Philosophy of Life & Death

4. Relationship and irreplaceability
All beings in the universe, especially all living things on the earth, are incorporated into the fundamental “relationships.” They can not exist without these relationships. At the same time, every being in these relationships is fundamentally “irreplaceable” to each other. In life studies we view everything from the perspective of correlation between "relationship" and "irreplaceability."Environmental issues and philosophy of life & death should be considered from this perspective.


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What is Life Studies
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Elimination of Pain and Suffering

Life studies urges us to rethink the whole system of contemporary civilization because it doesn't seem to provide us with sufficient opportunity to live a life without regret both in developed countries and developing countries. The critique of contemporary civilization should be included in life studies.

In the book, Painless Civilization: A Philosophical Critique of Desire (2003), I fundamentally criticized the negative aspects of contemporary civilization in terms of life studies, especially that of the USA and Japan. The endless tendency in our civilization to eliminate pain and suffering makes us totally lose sight of the meaning of life that is indispensable to human beings. I examined our desire, and divided it into two categories, "the desire of the body" and "the desire of life." I will translate this book into English and upload to this site. Many bookreviews and commentary have appeared since publication in Japan. I would like to know your response to the concept of "painless civilization."

>> For more details please visit a special page of Painless Civilization.

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What is Life Studies
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Wisdom and Mutual Support

What is the aim of life studies?

Our ultimate aim is to live in this society without regret. In order to do that, we have to reconsider the meaning of our own life and death seriously. In this materialistic, capitalistic society deeply influenced by scientific technology, we are apt to forget the meaning of life and the value of our existence. We have to fundamentally criticize the negative aspects of contemporary civilization, scientific technology, and capitalism. Gender, sexuality, violence, war, and ecology are also important topics of life studies. We need wisdom and mutual support on the intelectual level. This is why life studies is needed.

But, we have already had bioethics and environmental ethics.

At first I studied bioethics and environmental ethics, but soon I realized that they had a fatal flaw. 1) Bio-medical ethics was separated from environmental ethics. 2) Bioethics did not pose questions about "the meaning of life" and "the nature of contemporary civilization." 3) They concentrated on "ethics," and seemed to make light of other approaches. Hence, I concluded that we need another approach to this topic. I am not satisfied with applied ethics.

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"Spirituality" and "Meaning of Life" outside Religion

2) Research on images of life among ordinary people.
The results were found in the paper "The Concept of Inochi(life)" (1991). Many Japanese (and probably people around the world) grasp the idea of "human life" in relationship with that of "nature." The images of "life," "spirit," and "nature" are overlapping with one another in their worldview. The keyword is "interrelatedness and irreplaceability." I discussed cultural differences in ethics of life in the paper "Bioethics and Japanese Bulture" (1995) and "Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World" (2003).

3) The third way between religion and science.
In the book How to Live in a Post-religious Age (1996) ,written as a reaction against the 1995 Sarin nerve gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on the Tokyo subways, I examined ways to seek "spirituality" and "meaning of life" outside religion.

4) Three natures of human life. See guiding concepts 7.

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What is Life Studies
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Researcher's own life

10) Connection of academic research to researcher's own life
The most important thing for life studies is that a researcher hem/herself can live his/her own life without regret. In this sense,academic research that will not help transform the researcher's own life should not be called "life studies." Life studies encourages a researcher to rethink his/her actual life and transform it, and after that, express that painful process in some form in order share it among us. Morioka expressed the process in the book Painless Civilization (2003). This process should lead to the transformation of the social system and our intellect.

* I plan to foster research network for life studies to communicate with each other and learn from each others' experiences. If you are interested in our project, and if you are frustrated with an existing discipline, please do not hesitate to contact us. We would like to know your ideas or plans.

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What is Life Studies
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Between "relationship" and "irreplaceability"

6) Relationship and irreplaceability
All beings in the universe, especially all living things on the earth, are incorporated into the web of “relationships.” They can not exist without these relationships. At the same time, every being in these relationships is fundamentally “irreplaceable” to each other. Life studies urges us to view everything from the perspective of correlation between "relationship" and "irreplaceability." (see Concept of Inochi(life).)

7) Three natures of human life
In the series of essays Life Torn Apart, I insisted that three natures are deeply engraved on humans, namely, "the nature of connectedness (with all living things)," "the nature of self-interest," and "the nature of mutual support." These natures sometimes keep in harmony, but sometimes come into conflict with each other. I believe that it is important to see the relationship between humans and the world of living creatures from this perspective.

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What is Life Studies
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“Therapeutic cloning”

With regard to the “safety problem,” the report concluded that present cloning techniques cannot guarantee the safe production of a human clone individual.

In the light of these problems, the report concluded that the production of a human clone individual must be legally prohibited. Concerning research on human somatic clone embryos, the report stated that this should be permissible within certain limitations if a justifiable ground is to be found, because it may bring great benefit to humans in the field of medicine. But at the same time, the report stressed that a human somatic clone embryo has significance as the “sprout of human life” (hito no seimei no hōga), like a human embryo, and should therefore be handled with the utmost care. [2/3]

Based on this report, the Bioethics Committee of the Council for Science and Technology announced that the production of a clone individual, together with chimeric/hybrid human individuals, must be legally penalised, and that research on human somatic clone embryos should be regulated in some way (December 21, 1999). This announcement signalised the government’s decision to legally regulate the production of a clone human individual and other chimeric/hybrid human individuals but not “therapeutic cloning” and other research. In other words, the government had abandoned the idea of establishing a comprehensive law dealing with assisted reproductive technology and research on human germline cells.

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The Ethics of Human Cloning and the Sprout of Human Life (2004)
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The concept “the sprout of human life.”

The birth of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from a somatic sell, attracted wide public attention in Japan, and the words “cloned human being” became a popular notion. However, the “public debate” on the ethics of human cloning was considerably less heated than that relating to brain death and organ transplantation. Scientists and commentators repeatedly stated that while the cloning of a sheep was acceptable, human cloning should be prohibited. A well-known female scientist said that she could not imagine a scientist who would try to clone a human being.

In 1998, the Council for Science and Technology established the Bioethics Committee and asked its members to examine the ethical and legal aspects of human cloning. The Committee concluded, in 1999, that human cloning should be prohibited, and, based on the report, the government presented a bill for the regulation of human cloning in 2000. After a debate in the Diet, the original bill was slightly modified and issued on December 6, 2000. [1/2]

In the following chapters, I take a closer look at this process and discuss some of the ethical problems that were debated. Also, I make a brief analysis of the concept “the sprout of human life.”

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The Ethics of Human Cloning and the Sprout of Human Life (2004)
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Criticism of modern civilization

Third, it took “modern civilization based on scientific technology and capitalism” for granted, and sought the methods of regulating the conflicts of interest among us. However, difficult bioethical dilemma are created by the “advancement” of scientific technology, and sometimes they are worsened by the mechanism of capitalism. In contemporary society, our desires are created by technologies and mass media and as a result, we lose the happiness that we enjoyed before. Of course it is impossible to totally abolish [188/189] today’s science and technology, but it is necessary to examine the essence of modern civilization based on scientific technology and capitalism, and think about how to create an alternative civilization and society. I believe criticism of modern civilization should be one of the foundations of bioethical thinking.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
(2004)
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Each tradition contains a number of valuable lessons

The idea of life studies can be discovered in all periods or areas. What I am doing is to mould the idea to suit contemporary society. Unfortunately, “American” academic bioethics in the 1980s seemed to lack the insights of life studies; I had to find them in other traditions, that is, feminism and the disability movement in Japan in the early 1970s. But this does not mean that some traditions are superior to other traditions in terms of life studies. Each tradition contains a number of valuable lessons that we should learn with a humble attitude.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
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Human relationships with the environment

Life studies also deals with human relationships with the environment. I wrote a series of essays from 1995-1998, and published them as a digital book, Life Torn Apart, in 2001 (Morioka 2001b). In these writings, I insisted that humans are imprinted with three natures, “the nature of connectedness (to all living things),” “the nature of self-interest,” and “the nature of mutual support,” These natures are sometimes in harmony, but at other times they conflict with each other. In the latter case, mediation is impossible. In this sense, human life is torn apart and moves in two opposite directions, the direction of isolation and the direction of connectedness. Under this scheme, the problem of “preservation” and “conservation” in environmental ethics is clearly analyzed, but we cannot expect simple answers to this heavy question. Contribution of life studies to environmental ethics and environmental philosophy will be enormous. This is a future challenge for us.

In the same year, I published another book, Life Studies Approaches to Bioethics: A New Perspective on Brain Death, Feminism, and Disability (Morioka 2001c). In this book, I demonstrated that incorporating feminist and disability studies would change bioethics into a more attractive field; like life studies, it would be filled with diverse ideas and focus on the process of empowerment. As I mentioned before, Japanese bioethics started in the early 1970s as “feminist bioethics” and “disabled people bioethics.” Their approach was closer to our “life studies” in that [191/192] they were seeking the “meaning of life” and “self-affirmation” in our discriminative society, and in that they severely criticized contemporary civilization, scientific technology, and capitalism (Morioka 2002). I examined “men’s sexuality,” which sometimes indirectly forces women to abort a fetus when men are not willing to have a baby. This kind of “symbolic violence,” which is lurking in our society, should be emphasized in the field of life studies. I discussed the idea of “the fundamental sense of security” as a key term for thinking about the negative psychological impact of new eugenics. I am currently writing a fundamental criticism of modern civilization, which will be published as a book in the next year.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
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Seeking “spirituality” and the “meaning of life” outside of religion

In 1995, an unbelievable event occurred. Members of the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, launched a sarin gas attack in crowded subways in Tokyo, killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000 people. At first, they were members of a small religious group seriously seeking the “meaning of life.” However, they began to consider our society to be evil place, and planned to destroy the whole world in order to reconstruct a clean one. I was shocked by their action because I felt I shared many of their aims. This event made think again the relationship between life studies and religion, and I published the book How to Live in a Post-religious Age in 1996. In this book, I confessed that I am a man who cannot believe in any religions, nor believe in scientific materialism. I want to seek “spirituality” and the “meaning of life” outside of religion. I called this “the third way between religion and science.”

Does this attitude lead to the denial of religion? No. My position is an agnostic one. I do not affirm or deny religions. I have had discussions with various religious people, and I found that we can talk about spirituality and the meaning of life without using religious language. If we respect each other’s worldview and do not force one’s own presuppositions on the others, we are able to have a deep discussion with each other concerning the issues of life, death and nature. [190/191]

Life studies should be a project where people of faith and people without religion get together to communicate with and learn from each other. I conceive of life studies as a project where people with religion seek to think about life without using dogmatic words, and people without religion seek to think about spirituality and the meaning of life using ordinary language. I think this should be the basis of life studies.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
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Criticism of modern civilization should be one of the foundations of bioethical thinking

Third, it took “modern civilization based on scientific technology and capitalism” for granted, and sought the methods of regulating the conflicts of interest among us. However, difficult bioethical dilemma are created by the “advancement” of scientific technology, and sometimes they are worsened by the mechanism of capitalism. In contemporary society, our desires are created by technologies and mass media and as a result, we lose the happiness that we enjoyed before. Of course it is impossible to totally abolish [188/189] today’s science and technology, but it is necessary to examine the essence of modern civilization based on scientific technology and capitalism, and think about how to create an alternative civilization and society. I believe criticism of modern civilization should be one of the foundations of bioethical thinking.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
(2004)
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The term “life studies” instead of “bioethics”

For these reasons, I coined the term “life studies” instead of “bioethics” in 1988. The idea of life studies has gradually developed since then. In 1989, I published Brain Dead Person in which I discussed the topic from the viewpoint of life studies. I distinguished three concepts, namely, “my brain death,” “brain death of intimate others,” and “brain death of strangers.” I made clear the differences of the meaning of death in these threecases, and demonstrated that these differences might be the cause of ordinary people’s inconsistent attitudes towards brain dead persons in various settings. I also criticized the essence of modern medicine and scientific technology, and developed key ideas like “partism of modern medicine” and “efficiency and irreplaceability.” This book was the real first product of life studies.

Through research on brain death, I realized that there have been no empirical studies on the idea of life among ordinary people. Scholars sometimes talked about the Japanese idea of life and death, but their arguments were based on traditional Buddhist or Confucian literatures. It is not certain that today’s ordinary people share these traditional ideas. I performed research using open questionnaires and gathered nearly thousand responses from ordinary people. I published part of the results in the paper “The Concept of Inochi,” in 1991 (Morioka 1991) and made various interesting discoveries. Many Japanese grasp the idea of “human life” in relationship with that of “nature.” The images of “life,” “spirit,” and “nature” overlap with one another in their worldview. For many of them, environmental issues are conceived as problems of life. And here, too, their images of life vary. There is no such [189/190] thing as “the” Japanese idea of life. Interestingly, however, several patterns of grasping images of life were discovered. For example, there were many responses that suggested that life is interrelated on the one hand, and irreplaceable on the other. People seem to feel some dynamism between interrelatedness and irresplaceability. This research is still continuing and is one of the most important contributions to the field of life studies.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
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Medical ethics should not be separated from environmental ethics

As I mentioned before, when I first studied “American” bioethics in the 1980s, I was very frustrated because it seemed to me a somewhat narrow and shallow approach to the issues of life. Some of my friends had similar impressions. First, it discussed only medical issues. It did not deal with environmental issues. It is ironical that V.R. Potter who coined the word “bioethics” in 1970 regarded this word as a kind of “environmental ethics” rather than a medical ethics. For me, separating medical ethics from environmental ethics seems senseless because humans live on this planet surrounded by nature and our health and happiness cannot be separated from the environment. My first impression was that medical ethics should not be separated from environmental ethics.


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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
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