Science Debate

No Dispensing Machine for Happiness
Two great scholars discuss a very hot topic–bioethics and happiness. Pellegrino: “It is a question that concerns everyone”. Israel: “Happiness is not well-being”

by Paola Navotti

What makes us happy? In an era in which some realms of science aspire to become dispensing machine for happiness, two scientists explained how ridiculous that is. Edmund Pellegrino heads the committee responsible for bioethical concerns for the President of the United States, which means that he is Bush’s advisor on the subject. Giorgio Israel, Professor of Mathematics at Rome’s La Sapienza University, is also a well known journalist and author. At the end of the meeting, I realized that I had listened not to speeches, opinions, and intellectual poses, but to a true process of reasoning that, inasmuch as it was logical, was accessible even to those who know little about the subject. In a Meeting on reason, Pellegrino and Israel exemplified what it means to use it!

Edmund Pellegrino
The questions of bioethics do not concern just the elite who study it, but everyone, because, sooner or later, we all find ourselves facing the suffering of a loved one, having to decide the right thing to do, asking ourselves what happiness truly is. Here the leit motiv begins: what makes us happy? It’s the fulfillment of our desires–who could deny it? If we have a crooked nose, happiness is having surgery to straighten it out. More dramatically, if we are sick, happiness is our managing to survive. However, can we say that when we satisfy desires, then everything’s just as it should be? Isn’t it perhaps true that one desire produces another? Here we are, then. Experience shows us that happiness does not necessarily depend on the possession of goods, be they material or spiritual. It’s something deeper, something we’re made for, that goes beyond our possibilities, in the sense that happiness coincides with total gratification, with no longer having desires to fulfill. This is the condition of Adam and Eve before their expulsion from the earthly Paradise. We, who do not live in Paradise but on this earth, are instead condemned to always desire, yet still we are destined to draw near to God, to total happiness.

Giorgio Israel
We apply the term scientific to phenomena whose causes we can identify, and that are thus predictable and reproducible. Science aims to classify entities as similar, so as to apply the principle of repeatability, of control. But the human entity, unlike other phenomena, is more elusive, because it has a unique prerogative that, albeit not scientific, is nonetheless real: initiative, freedom. Biotechnologies, on the other hand, consider man as pure material, something to be “adjusted”–for example, suppressing or producing embryos ad infinitum according to the case at hand. The World Health Organization defines health as “the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” But how do you define “complete”? Human experience tends toward totality, but does not yet possess it. Speaking of complete well-being is pure rhetoric. We did not create life and, to be intellectually honest, we should describe it rather than explain it. Life is the one thing that is ours more than anything else, and yet it is also the most mysterious thing that exists. So much so–and this is truly paradoxical–that “few people like those who have suffered know the true dimension of life and, thus, can touch the meaning of happiness.” After decades of aberration, imposing itself as a pedagogic method, science is now doing worse: ensuring the power to choose a child’s eye color or character, without caring about what he will truly want. And we call this progress?