The so-called Hippocratic Oath (“first, do no harm” – “primum non nocere”), which, by the way, is wrongly attributed to the Greek doctor Hippocrates, is particularly popular amongst those involved in the field of healthcare, medicine, or bioethics.
Alas, the expression It is probably more the reflection of a wish of having a clear and simple rule that tells us how to act, rather than a practical reality, since if it is taken literally, no one would have surgery, even if it was lifesaving.
But as Robert H. Shmerling, Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publishing says, it is useful as a reminder that “we need high-quality research to help us better understand the balance of risk and benefit for the tests and treatments we recommend. Ultimately, it is also a reminder that doctors should neither overestimate their capacity to heal, nor underestimate their capacity to cause harm”.
We take these recommendations —translated to our area— very seriously: one of our obsessions is to practice a methodology that ensures that we avoid as much as possible the possibility that the fruit of our work would be misused, while we maximize the chances of reducing future suffering.
But the harsh reality is that we are not going to have a clear and simple method to tell us for sure if something that we do is going to have a positive effect. Yes, we do believe that this project has the capacity to prevent astronomical amounts of suffering, but there is also the possibility of our findings being used to create suffering.
So, not only it seems impossible to control every bit of thing and ensure that the fruits of this research are not going to be used to create suffering, but also, it’s going to be complicated to demonstrate that the project as a whole is not going to generate more suffering than it prevents.
On the other hand, the situation is already desperate and we have the conviction that it is necessary to act, or at least, to get a better understanding of sentience (and particularly, suffering), in order to prevent and minimize useless and involuntary suffering.
We live in a world with obscene amounts of suffering. Not only there are in the contemporary world millions of humans with a “compass that is perpetually stuck on South“, victims of chronic pain or depression. There is also an overwhelming number of animals suffering on this planet, in nature itself or in horrific conditions on factory farms. Quoting the OPIS’ website, “although we naturally have the strongest feelings for those closest to us and value their lives most, we consider it self-evident that suffering matters for its own sake, regardless of who experiences it, and that equal degrees of suffering therefore matter equally.”
In summary, we want to systematically address one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem in the world. The project needs a “security mechanism” that reasonably ensures the proper use of its results, but unfortunately it is not perfectly clear what this mechanism can be. We would like to have a Hippocratic Oath that calm our conscience and reassure us that everything we do will have a good end, but this will not be so easy.
Therefore, the control of the assurance of the positive impact of the project needs to be a transversal part of the project, incorporated in every little aspect of it, and at the same time it will be one of its greatest challenges.
At this point we can say that we will make the biggest efforts to combine as much as possible our spirit of openness and plurality of views and the highly desired principles of accountability and transparency in our activities with the security requirements, prioritizing in case of doubt the assurance of the positive impact, and that we will constantly review and monitor this procedure to ensure as much as possible the positive impact. This is the closest thing to our Hippocratic Oath.
Also, since our work is highly theoretical and conceptual, there are many conflicts that will not occur in any case. Still, it can be clarifying to specify some red lines that we have no intention of crossing. As deontological rules to follow: we will never do any experiment that may involve harm or suffering, either to humans or non-human animals; and we will not publish information that can clearly be used to harm or to make the suffering even worse.
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