Steven Pinker dismisses dignity
as a basis for bioethics discussions in biomedical research, which US conservatives and religious leaders are invoking to dismiss potentially life-saving medical advances. Unfortunately “overweening hubris” characterizes most formal discussions of real revolutions:
In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President’s Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers “taking over” like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.
Some brains do deteriorate with age. But for most aging adults, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention and sifting through a clutter of information that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact like a name or a phone number. This is a good thing.; it may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.