The 2Oth Bioethics Summer Course “Bioethics, Death, and Immortality” will take place July 4-8, 2022. The course will be taught in Italian and English, with simultaneous translation available in both languages. The course is organized by the Faculty of Bioethics in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights established at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum and the European University of Rome.
This Summer Course will address the themes of human mortality and the aspiration to immortality in light of current bioethical issues. Death is a reality common to all of us. Philosophers have reflected on the question of suffering and our eventual demise over the centuries. Many cultures and religious traditions have also addressed the quest for immortality since time immemorial. Current debates about emerging technologies, health care costs, and transhumanism are more recent manifestations of these age-old bioethical questions.
Structure of the Course
The Course consists of lectures, question and answer sessions, seminars, film forums, and interactive group activities. Bioethics faculty members and other experts will participate as speakers and moderators of group dynamics. The course proposes an interdisciplinary study of the phenomenon of death and the search for immortality in order to promote knowledge and understanding of life span extension techniques, the benefits and risks involved in such techniques, and their impact on the vision of human nature today and for future generations. The course will offer participants the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills for the proper ethical evaluation of these cutting-edge technologies and effective guidance for wise use of these technologies in the context of the life sciences and the medical profession. In addition, the course will provide orientation for the use of this knowledge in the daily professional practice of those who work in the scientific, medical, political, legal, social, communication, or educational fields.
The objectives of the course are especially important for doctors and health personnel; biologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists; educators, especially secondary and high school teachers; priests, catechists and other agents of pastoral care; lawyers, jurists, journalists, communicators, and sociologists and all those who are interested in the cultural and social dynamics of the present day and wish to have an informed and critical perspective on the cutting edge issues in the ethics of biotechnology.
Topics are covered by members of the Faculty of Bioethics and external experts from different countries.
All participants in the full sessions will receive a certificate of attendance.
Attendance is mandatory for 80% of the course to be eligible for a certificate of attendance (upon request).
The webinar is worth 1 ECTS credit.
Simultaneous translation is available in Italian and English.
For other language groups, simultaneous translation will be offered if the number of students is greater than 10.
Academic Fees
The payment is made once the student has registered and according to the instructions that will be provided by e-mail. Payment can be made by credit card, bank transfer, or at the Athenaeum desk by appointment.
Standard Fee:
Five sessions (5 days)
270€
Five sessions (5 days) + 1 (ECTS) through an exam
275€
Special Category: Priests, Religious, APRA Bioethics Students, APRA Alumni, PhD in Bioethics, RIU Professors
“And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts,
and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.”
by Oscar Wilde
The Bioesthetics Study Group of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights is an interdisciplinary and international network that works as part of the “Bioethics Global Art” project of bridging art and bioethics. While Bioethics moves us to confront ethical challenges, the arts enable us to reflect on the human condition and on ourselves by triggering a change in moral attitudes and inspire us to embark on a journey of inner transformation. Thus, the universal values within bioethics are opening to aesthetic explorations due to a growing recognition of the arts as an effective way of engaging people in a stimulating debate and an interdisciplinary search of social, cultural and ethical issues around contemporary science and its more recent developments.
Throughout the history of human artistic expression we can observe how the issues concerning human health and its frailty have been visually depicted to engage the audience.
For instance, Byzantine and Medieval art were focused on representing moral values and virtuous actions through allegories or the delineation of figures in an idealized, flat form. Moreover, subjects of artistical expression were biblical characters, placing emphasis on the relationship to the divine and manifesting the glory of a heavenly world.
Renaissance artists introduced new degrees of realism; indeed the realistic depiction of the material world mirrored the corporeality of the human body, thus exposing the fragility of human psycho-physical constitution by portraying physical flaws that we can today recognize as a medical condition. Among the stigmata of disease afflicting the subjects of portraits, we can notice syphilis, tetanus, disability, hypertrichosis, Paget’s disease, mental insanity, plague and Spanish flu.
Finally, Modernism and contemporary art exposed all the limits of the human body and the separation of the mind from the body. More recently, hybrid and bio artists experiment with their own bodies and seek to engage audiences in challenging ethical dilemmas and assumptions about life and existence. By deconstructing the embodied nature of the human being, contemporary art has shaped the concept that “the human body is obsolete”, as in, it is just a vehicle of the mind and therefore can be used as a canvas for art on the very edge of human experience.
Among the numerous perspectives and methods to express and analyze bioethical issues as well as ethical concerns, it is through the language of art that such topics emerge not only as a rational process but as an experiential process and emotional internalization.
Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO presented Thursday the first ever global standard on the ethics of artificial intelligence adopted by the member states of UNESCO at the General Conference.
This historical text defines the common values and principles which will guide the construction of the necessary legal infrastructure to ensure the healthy development of AI.
AI is pervasive, and enables many of our daily routines – booking flights, steering driverless cars, and personalising our morning news feeds. AI also supports the decision-making of governments and the private sector.
AI technologies are delivering remarkable results in highly specialized fields such as cancer screening and building inclusive environments for people with disabilities. They also help combat global problems like climate change and world hunger, and help reduce poverty by optimizing economic aid.
But the technology is also bringing new unprecedented challenges. We see increased gender and ethnic bias, significant threats to privacy, dignity and agency, dangers of mass surveillance, and increased use of unreliable AI technologies in law enforcement, to name a few. Until now, there were no universal standards to provide an answer to these issues.
In 2018, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, launched an ambitious project: to give the world an ethical framework for the use of artificial intelligence. Three years later, thanks to the mobilization of hundreds of experts from around the world and intense international negotiations, the 193 UNESCO’s member states have just officially adopted this ethical framework.
The world needs rules for artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. The Recommendation on the ethics of AI is a major answer. It sets the first global normative framework while giving States the responsibility to apply it at their level. UNESCO will support its 193 Member States in its implementation and ask them to report regularly on their progress and practices. Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General
The content of the recommendation
The Recommendation aims to realize the advantages AI brings to society and reduce the risks it entails. It ensures that digital transformations promote human rights and contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, addressing issues around transparency, accountability and privacy, with action-oriented policy chapters on data governance, education, culture, labour, healthcare and the economy.
Protecting data
The Recommendation calls for action beyond what tech firms and governments are doing to guarantee individuals more protection by ensuring transparency, agency and control over their personal data. It states that individuals should all be able to access or even erase records of their personal data. It also includes actions to improve data protection and an individual’s knowledge of, and right to control, their own data. It also increases the ability of regulatory bodies around the world to enforce this.
Banning social scoring and mass surveillance
The Recommendation explicitly bans the use of AI systems for social scoring and mass surveillance. These types of technologies are very invasive, they infringe on human rights and fundamental freedoms, and they are used in a broad way. The Recommendation stresses that when developing regulatory frameworks, Member States should consider that ultimate responsibility and accountability must always lie with humans and that AI technologies should not be given legal personality themselves.
Helping to monitor and evaluate
The Recommendation also sets the ground for tools that will assist in its implementation. Ethical Impact Assessment is intended to help countries and companies developing and deploying AI systems to assess the impact of those systems on individuals, on society and on the environment. Readiness Assessment Methodology helps Member States to assess how ready they are in terms of legal and technical infrastructure. This tool will assist in enhancing the institutional capacity of countries and recommend appropriate measures to be taken in order to ensure that ethics are implemented in practice. In addition, the Recommendation encourages Member States to consider adding the role of an independent AI Ethics Officer or some other mechanism to oversee auditing and continuous monitoring efforts.
Protecting the environment
The Recommendation emphasises that AI actors should favour data, energy and resource-efficient AI methods that will help ensure that AI becomes a more prominent tool in the fight against climate change and on tackling environmental issues. The Recommendation asks governments to assess the direct and indirect environmental impact throughout the AI system life cycle. This includes its carbon footprint, energy consumption and the environmental impact of raw material extraction for supporting the manufacturing of AI technologies. It also aims at reducing the environmental impact of AI systems and data infrastructures. It incentivizes governments to invest in green tech, and if there are disproportionate negative impact of AI systems on the environment, the Recommendation instruct that they should not be used.
Decisions impacting millions of people should be fair, transparent and contestable. These new technologies must help us address the major challenges in our world today, such as increased inequalities and the environmental crisis, and not deepening them.
Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences
Emerging technologies such as AI have proven their immense capacity to deliver for good. However, its negative impacts that are exacerbating an already divided and unequal world, should be controlled. AI developments should abide by the rule of law, avoiding harm, and ensuring that when harm happens, accountability and redressal mechanisms are at hand for those affected.
The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture held its 21st annual Fall Conference, “I Have Called You by Name: Human Dignity in a Secular World,” November 11–13, 2021, in person at the University of Notre Dame.
What do we mean by “human dignity”? What are its foundations, contours, and entailments? Is a unified understanding of human dignity possible in a fragmented secular culture? Is a just society possible without it? This interdisciplinary, three-day event engaged the theme of human dignity from a variety of points of departure in more than 100 presentations.
Our Research Scholar, Dr. Fr. Michael Baggot, LC, was among the speakers presenting “Procreative Beneficence’s Disregard for Dignity in the Pursuit of an Improved Humanity.” Proposals for procreative beneficence endanger human dignity and present incoherencies. Respect for autonomy would seem to prohibit one group (parents) from imposing their personal opinions about the good life upon others (children). Moreover, the harm principle is fundamentally violated through the rampant destruction of embryonic life. Further, marginalized groups will be disproportionately reduced due to social pressures to have children with the characteristics of the privileged class. Proponents of a new eugenics often exalt radical self-definition while ironically embracing an extreme form of domination at the expense of the autonomy of the youngest and most vulnerable members of society.
“Thoroughly wash away my guilt; and from my sin cleanse me.”
Psalm 51:4
“Cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be pure; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.”
Psalm 51:9
Regular handwashing with soap is promoted as an effective approach to disease prevention. Moreover, handwashing has been an important religious and cultural custom for millennia. The link between handwashing and health issues was first made less than two centuries ago by Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician and scientist working in Vienna, known today as “the father of hand hygiene.”
In 1846, the Hungarian obstetrician noticed that maternal mortality in his hospital, due to childbed fever also known as puerperal fever, was significantly higher than in similar hospitals nearby. He decided to investigate, seeking differences between the maternity clinics. And soon enough he noticed that doctors and medical students in his hospital often visited the maternity ward right after performing an autopsy. Semmelweis surmised that infectious particles of some kind were being passed from cadavers to women; in fact, puerperal fever is a form of bacteria-caused sepsis, commonly referred to as blood poisoning. Thus, after instructing the students, as well as all the hospital staff, to always wash their hands in a chlorinated disinfecting solution before each examination, the number of deaths plummeted dramatically. Nevertheless, some doctors were disgruntled and angry that Semmelweis was implying they were to blame for the deaths, this would have been admitting that physicians, instead of saving lives and healing patients, were the unwitting cause of so much death. Therefore they refused washing their hands, arguing in support of the prevailing, at that time, belief that water was the potential cause of disease or blaming such diseases on miasma, a kind of toxic atmosphere.
In the end, Semmelweis suffered from severe depression and went mad. He turned every conversation to the topic of childbed fever. He was involuntarily confined to an insane asylum, where he died after two weeks. Later in time, in 1862, he was vindicated by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur and his “Germ Theory” of disease.
Before the establishment of handwashing as a hygiene practice, physical cleansing has been a pivotal element in various religious ceremonies for thousands of years for either ritualistic reasons during religious ceremonies or for symbolic reasons in specific everyday life situations. A gesture that was previously considered as a religious ritual, a divine precept without rational explanation, had now become scientifically valid and a crucial practice in public health.
In particular, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism have precise rules for handwashing specified in holy texts, and this practice marks several key moments of the day. For instance, Jewish law and custom prescribe ritual hand washing immediately after awakening in the morning, before and after each meal, before praying, as well as before the beginning of Shabbat. Islam places great emphasis on cleanliness, in fact it is prescribed to repeat ablutions at least 3 times with running water before prayers (5 times/day). The Christian faith gives indication for ritual handwashing before consecration of the bread and wine and the washing of hands after touching the holy oil (the latter in the Catholic Church) (Allegranzi et al., 2008).
Furthermore, beyond the spiritual behavior or a mere physical gesture, handwashing has wider meanings, referring to interior and exterior purity, suggesting a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity.
The “Lady Macbeth effect” or “Macbeth effect” is a priming effect said to occur when the response to a cleaning cue is increased after having been induced by a feeling of shame or a threat to one’s moral purity. The effect is named after Lady Macbeth, the character in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth; she imagined bloodstains on her hands after she goaded her husband into murdering the lawful king. Scientists studied the “Macbeth effect”, which revealed itself through a greater desire for cleansing products and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. In a widely-publicized set of studies, participants who were primed to recall past unethical events preferred cleansing products more than those primed with ethical events (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Several subsequent efforts did not replicate this relationship, not excluding, however, the close association between guilt and atonement by “washing away one’s sins” (Siev et al., 2018).
One of the main areas of interest of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights is Bioethics, Multiculturalism & Religion, an interdisciplinary project whose mission is the promotion and recognition of the academic and scientific commitment in the field of life sciences and medicine. It highlights the importance of dialogue, creative cooperation and mutual understanding in our challengingly globalized and diverse world.
Today, if we can fight Covid-19, if we have eradicated typhoid and cholera, if the plague is only a disease of the past, we owe it to hygiene and hand cleaning in particular. And therefore also to Ignaz Semmelweis and his intuition. With this in mind, we must not “wash our hands” as Pontius Pilatus did, with the aim of clearing his conscience and rubbing off his share of responsibility for the martyrdom and death of an innocent. Instead, we must courageously assume our share of individual responsibility by reconsidering handwashing as a gesture of love and care for our own health and that of others’.
“Everything is in the hands of man. Therefore, they must be washed often.”
