"Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed." (163-4) |
towards_a_scientific_cooperative_on_the_ethics_of_synthetic.pdf |
As I argue in my Frankenstein essay, following Mellor’s feminist reading of Victor as a “rap[ist] of nature,” Victor’s hubristic downfall is motivated in large part by his inability to behave as an ethical scientist; he both rejects the academic/scientific community of Ingolstadt in favor of hermetically isolating himself in the laboratory, and also struggles to seriously engage with his emotions or empathize for others. Due to these (characteristically male) traits, the relationship between Shelley’s scientist and nature surely becomes a perverted one whereby the natural world is a female, inanimate thing for Victor to derive pleasure from (e.g. therapy through its “beautiful and heavenly” scenery) or exploit for discovery (e.g. exhume and then cobble together dead animals to engineer his creature). My Victor, however, is a seasoned researcher who has benefitted through working in the research community and developed the empathy required to actively warn the Foundation of the need for a global bioethical government. As a humbler and more sociable scientist, this Victor also shows the modesty to be the second author after Henry Clerval, his “beloved friend” here with a comparable mind for science and scientific ethics. The formation of such a cooperative, so Victor and Henry understand, is necessary to protect the world against a Frankenstein-style monster engineered (1) in isolation, without the consent or involvement of the larger academic/scientific community, and (2) without concern for what it actually means to have created an artificial human—a being fit with as many psychoemotional needs and complexities as any of us. Shelley repeatedly makes clear the variety of emotions and mental states that the creature may experience: as he laments to his creator, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
It is also through this collaboration that Victor has demonstrated a genuine appreciation of science as a stepwise process and nature as a source of knowledge/inquiry with whom the scientist must collaborate rather than dominate. This is, for instance, my intention with the citations of preeminent philosophers of science (e.g. David Hull, Sir John Herschel) and frequent excerpts from Romantic poems, inspired by Shelley’s own such inclusion in Frankenstein. My featured poems are:
- Following the novel’s subtitle (“A Modern Prometheus”), Lord Byron’s “Prometheus,” in which Byron encourages the rebellion of the titular mythical figure: to him, Prometheus is “a symbol and a sign / To Mortals of their fate and force,” in whom “Man in portions can foresee / His own funereal destiny.”
- Following the creature’s “quick study” of John Milton, Adam’s commentary about the dangers of solitude in Book IX of Paradise Lost that foreshadows the Fall.
- Following Walton’s assurance in his opening letter that he “shall kill no albatross” (i.e. avoid trouble by respecting nature), Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” to which this refers.
- Following my own usage of Percy Shelley’s writings in my essay, his “Alastor”: in which a “surpassing Spirit,” “Whose light adorned the world around it” forever alters “Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things.”
- Following Mary Shelley’s usage of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” in the third volume, his “Westminster Bridge,” which implores how “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by” the sight of the Earth that is “so touching in its majesty.”
Indeed, as the two of them know well, it is the potential for danger in navigating the unknown that demands sincere attention be paid to the ethics of such discovery, particularly alongside other, similarly ethically-minded scientists. While the concluding sections of Shelley’s text have a dying Victor urge Walton and his crew to “avoid ambition,” even the “apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries,” my Victor has the maturity to not abandon scientific ambition in the face of harmful repercussions but rather confront them directly as the subject of serious ethical discourse (whether or not they include framed homicide!).