Each of the following chapters will be preceded by a page like this one that will provide an introductory summary of its contents. Since this first chapter is also an introduction to the rest of the book, I will use this space to provide a simple overview of the structure of the work as a whole (1-1)
The term "self determination" has become quite popular; it is frequently used in the field of medicine, for example, or perhaps I should say in the field of language related to medicine. It is considered to be a good thing, and I agree: self determination is good. But does it end there? Is all that remains the question of how best to realize this ideal? The term "private ownership", on the other hand, is not currently enjoying the same attention. In its modern sense, however, the term "ownership " implies not only the right to posses something but also to the right to deal with it or use it as one sees fit, and so to this extent the right of ownership is identical with the right to "determine" how something is treated. Therefore the "right of ownership" and the "right of determination" are the same. In the case of"self determination" an individual decides for his or her self, and in the case of "private ownership" an individual possesses something of their own. So to this extent the (right of)"self determination" and the (right of) "private ownership" are also the same. These two topics have not often been discussed together, but it seems to me that such a discussion is necessary. That is what compelled me to write this book. What belongs to me? The idea that"My body belongs to me"is considered to be self evident, but can we really state this with confidence if this right of ownership is asserted as the right to deal with something as one pleases? In this book I will often refer to the idea that "private ownership" entails that "the results of my work should belong to me". Should we accept this definition without any modification? If we define "private ownership?"as an (ultimate) distribution among individuals of the rights of determination and ownership, than the "private ownership" defined above is just one form of "private ownership?". This book does not reject "private ownership?". The confusion surrounding this term is addressed in chapter 2.
Since chapters six and seven deal with the kind of society we live in, it would perhaps have been more natural to connect them directly to chapter four. I was concerned, though, that this ordering might make the book's main argument too long and drawn out for readers to grasp; I suspected they might find it difficult to understand what exactly it was I wanted to say. I therefore decided on the current ordering that provides a rough outline of the main ideas in chapters four and five before moving on to chapters six and seven, and then in chapters eight and nine returns to some of the topics dealt with in chapters four and five to discuss them again in more concrete terms.
What do I own? In other words (see the discussion above), over what do I posses the right of determination? In considering only the right of self determination we may not normally be aware of this sort of question. This is because in most cases it is understood from the start what sorts of things we ought to have the right to determine ourselves. In practice, of course, these rights are not always recognized; patients have not had the right of self determination in regard to their own medical care, and disabled people have been stripped of many of their rights of self determination. These are problems that are currently receiving attention within Japanese society. For people who desire reform in this area, however, the meaning of "matters related to myself" is generally understood to be concretely defined in sentences like "I should have the right to decide in matters related to myself". It is taken as self-evident. But what is it that belongs to me? Someone decides, and if we call these various deciding agents "selves", what is it that each of these selves is to be given the right to decide? What sorts of things should I be able to decide for myself? In other words, what is it that I own? Without an answer to this question the term "self determination" is meaningless. For example, if the "I" in "I should have the right to decide in matters related to myself" refers only to me, the author of this book, then everyone in the world must do as I say. To say "I should have the right to decide in matters related to myself" raises the question of what constitutes "matters related to myself", that is, what is their scope or limit. There is then also the question of why this limit should serve as a basis for self determination. Private ownership, and ownership itself, are therefore concepts that require further consideration.
Some might suggest that who owns what, and by extension what it is that the rights of each individual ought to apply to, is already clear. For me at least, however, this is not the case; the extremely normal workings of this society are themselves problematic. Is it really clear that "the results of my labor should belong to me"? At the same time, is there any way for us to get away from this idea? There are those who have said that this system imparts an unfair disadvantage to people whose poor mental or physical condition makes it impossible for them to be productive. This actually is the case in our society, and it is absolutely correct to point this out; this fact is part of the basic structure of our society and as a result this claim of unfairness is a fundamental criticism of how our society is constructed. But where has this criticism lead in the end? It deals with such a fundamental issue that finding a way to address it has proved difficult. It is a question that seems left over from a much earlier era, but in fact it has not been around that long, having first received attention in Japan around 1970, where right from the start it was presented as a more or less irresolvable problem. I observed the emergence of this intractable issue first hand, but I was dissatisfied with its lack of resolution and decided to consider it further. Another narrative that emerged was the conclusion that after various other systems had been tried the "market economy" was the only viable option and should be pursued; any problems it might pose could be solved through methods like creating a "welfare state". But should this really be the end of debate on the question of the fundamental economic system? I cannot accept this assertion of uncomplicated resolution with no further conflict. But neither can I side with those who wantonly criticize the system without presenting a solution; i. If we take issue with meritocratic systems based on ability and performance, can we really just do away with them? What can we propose to replace them?
To what extent, then, has this issue already been considered? Sociologists (and other social scientists), for example, have described the shift from an attribute to an achievement based system as one of the characteristics of modernization. But why should an achievement based system be considered superior? Perhaps we should prefer it because individuals can control their achievement but not their innate attributes. However, neither our bodies nor our minds perform exactly as we want them to. If each individual could choose to have their minds and bodies perform to the extent they desired there would be no problem, but since that is not the case the issue of economic disparity arises.
In chapter two I examine this society's rules regarding ownership and the discourse surrounding them. One part of this discussion includes questions of the type "why do you believe that?", which I think are surprisingly important despite the fact that they may seem inordinately simple in the face of the long history of serious discourse on the topic of private ownership (see chapter two part two). I also examine the possibility that if a social relationship called "ownership" is indeed created under certain specific conditions, and if we accept these conditions and approve of the results brought about by this relationship, than to that extent private ownership may be justifiable. It may be possible to show that while private ownership is not necessarily correct it is unavoidable given certain fixed conditions (chapter two section three). I will also examine how some phenomena that are merely the results of particular circumstances are portrayed as correct in a more absolute sense (chapter two part two) and the ways in which individual people are made to believe in this correctness (chapter six part two). I will then move on to consider what should be proposed in opposition to the current system (chapter four) apart from what has already been discussed elsewhere(chapter seven), and how we are to live with the results of this inquiry(chapter eight). In this book I have tried to extend the discussion of this issue without looking for a tidy resolution, although the final conclusions reached may in fact seem like a kind of "finished story". Nevertheless, by extending this topic and considering its various aspects at length I have tried to offer something a bit different from previous discussions of these issues, or at least to shift the position of familiar ideas within the discourse.
In chapter three I examine the critical discourse surrounding reproductive technologies. In chapter five I address the artificial termination of pregnancy. In part of chapter six I discuss eugenics, and in chapter nine I attempt to address the question of how we ought to think about eugenics by focusing on the topic of pre-natal diagnosis. Much of this book is devoted to this kind of examination of technology as it relates to medicine and human life, and these discussions form the basis for many of its assertions.
I myself, incidentally, do not think that what has happened and what continues to unfold in this field is as shocking or revolutionary as is often asserted in discussions of these topics. The technology we develop is not truly revolutionary because it is in fact a product of the values we already hold. This is a position that I reaffirm repeatedly throughout this book. We have simply begun to contemplate and carry out activities that had previously been put aside as impossible but are now seen as problematic because they are no longer beyond the limits of our technological abilities. One of the results of our improving technology is that it has now become possible in principle to separate out and modify elements of what had previously been natural processes. In the past a heart removed from a living person would result only in their death, not in something that might be used by another person. Transplant technology, however, has made it possible to separate parts of our bodies whose ownership had not previously been considered (we were not conscious of them being our possessions, nor did we consider the question of to whom they should properly belong), and this has raised issues regarding social policy and decision making. We are now faced with questions of whether or not to accept transplants and the donating, buying and selling of organs, and if so on what scale and in what circumstances. This situation has given rise to some of the issues I raise in the third part of chapter one.
What resources can we draw on in attempting to think about topics like those discussed above? Most people writing about family and legal issues point out that whatever topic they are discussing, surrogate motherhood, for example, is "difficult". They conclude that the questions are difficult and pursue them no further. The observation itself is correct; the questions are indeed difficult. But as a conclusion it is deeply unsatisfying. The issues being dealt with involve whether certain activities should be allowed or prohibited; they are essentially normative problems. And yet most of the discourse on these topics does nothing more than describe the issues involved and show that they do indeed raise legitimate questions. This is not to say, however, that fields like ethics and legal philosophy, part of whose task is to address these kinds of normative issues, have not debated the ultimate resolution of such problems. So it might seem that I should have started by fully examining the various previous approaches to these topics before I began addressing them myself. I thought, however, that the best way to propose a new method of looking at these problems would be to try implementing it myself, and as a result I do not seriously address previous approaches in this book. I do sparingly employ ideas drawn from part of the field referred to as "bioethics". This is of course partly because the topics I am dealing with are related to this field, but this is not the only reason.
In most of what is said about "bioethics" in Japan, there is agreement on the importance of "self-determination" and "informed consent". In other words, the discourse that arises is primarily one of spreading this "enlightenment". There is broad agreement on most of what is asserted, but the discussion is unsatisfying. It is unsatisfying because surely there are things which cannot be so easily agreed upon that also need to be considered. Of course there are those who address difficult questions, but they usually do no more than point out the difficulties related to the topic in question in the manner I have previously described.
In this respect we must welcome the more radical approach being taken in the field of bioethics outside of Japan, particularly in the English speaking world. By this I do not mean that I think that any of the views being expressed in particular are correct, nor am I suggesting that we should accept the principles and conclusions being asserted just as they are. Indeed, the fact that most Japanese practitioners of bioethics would have difficulty accepting the work of their foreign counterparts is actually due to a certain kind of prudence and depth of thought. It is in fact this careful, circumspect attitude that prevents Japanese bioethicists from approaching these issues with the unrestrained zeal seen overseas, and so I am not in any way claiming that foreign bioethicists are somehow superior. It would even be fair to say that Anglo-American bioethicists only attract more attention because they make such straightforward and overbearing assertions. Their extreme claims can be useful, however, as raw materials for thought experiments which can elucidate a subtler approach that is not present in their discourse itself. Their extremism, when its application is appropriate, can also magnify and make visible to us parts of ourselves which are normally difficult to see. In any case these extreme assertions cannot be considered to bare no relation to our own beliefs; at very least it is important to understand them because they comprise a considerable part of the reality in which we live. Taking a lucid, logical approach to them can also show us the naked form of things we carry hidden inside ourselves. I have examined the writings of others from both of these angles in a variety of different settings.
What have the social sciences done? What has sociology (my own field of expertise) done regarding these issues? There has been, of course, the recording and description of reality. Relationships and changes in relationships, consciousness and changes in consciousness have all been recorded and reported on. The analysis of underlying factors, too, has not been ignored. There has not, however, been enough thought about the composition of the most fundamental elements of society and the assignation of value. Some may say that surely this is not the case. But it is. There have been formulations of the question of why human society is possible, and consideration of the conditions required for the formation of social structures, sometimes referred to as the "problem of social order". But once we enter slightly more concrete territory the discourse becomes full of immediately verifiable descriptions of phenomena, and there have not been many studies that touch on the composition of the various components (large, fundamental components) of society and the relationships and lines of demarcation between them. There has not been enough examination of the problems I raised in part one of this chapter. I want to investigate what kinds of rights and duties are assigned (and to whom) in various areas by our modern society, composed as it is by the numerous relationships that arise spontaneously between the market, politics, the family, and other social elements, and then consider how these rights and duties might be evaluated. This book is both a part of this endeavor and one of its premises.
Much has been written about the family, for example, concerning what kind of role it plays in society and the changes this role has undergone, but there has been little examination of how this structure arose, what should be done or need not be done to change it, and what the basis for such conclusions should be. Legal scholarship rarely strays from its own work of interpreting positive law. Economics, as has often been pointed out, proceeds from certain limited premises but is consistent within the scope of what those premises describe. Sociology, in comparison, deals more with our awareness of reality. A family is defined as whatever people think a family is. Discrimination is defined by what people perceive as discrimination. This is fine as long as we are concerned with questions of definition. But at the same time these words we define are also related to what we can and ought to do. There are, for example, a range of fixed rights and duties that have been established in relation to families. There are also people who believe that pets should be considered members of the families that keep them. I think this is a problem worthy of consideration on its own. But at the same time, whether pets are to be included as part of a family or not, we must also consider questions about who has what rights and obligations in regard to whom in the relationships between people and their pets. 9
We should therefore begin by taking a fresh look the conditions which make possible the formation of the target of our examination. Society is composed of various mechanisms. There are certain conditions that are required for these mechanisms to function, and we have at least some knowledge of these conditions. When these mechanisms operate there are certain objectives they are assumed to have. The operation of the mechanisms produces specific results. Opposition to the operation of the mechanisms also arises. What kinds of results occur when different mechanisms are combined? There is work to be done in thinking along these lines. For example, what underlies the mechanism of private ownership, and what does private ownership itself make possible? What kinds of words are attached to this subject? These are the sorts of things I want to examine. I want to describe what kinds of results follow from what kinds of premises.
At the same time I will also give the same kind of consideration to the evaluation of these premises and decisions and judgments concerning them. In part one of this chapter I stated that there are things we don't understand about what the targets and methods of evaluation should be in such cases, and about the basis or starting point from which this kind of evaluation can begin. There is work to be done in clarifying these issues. The process of making judgments about particular phenomena or events based on a set of principles can be considered the method of moral philosophy. The process underlying this approach involves beginning with something taking place in reality, following it up using logic and theory, elucidating whatever may lie within the topic being examined, and putting all of this into words. 10 Different people will of course consider different issues, so there will be some cases in which questions of value do not arise or in which the approach taken does not consider what is right or wrong. This is fine as far as it goes. At very least, though, a discussion of society is normally a discussion of a society that contains values concerning what people should or should not do. To consider these questions is therefore one part of a consideration of society. Most elements that currently exist within society are based on assessments of value that have already been performed, or at least exist in conjunction with such assessments, and therefore examining these determinations of value becomes part of what we must consider when attempting to clarify any particular phenomenon or issue within society. But it cannot be considered sufficient to look only at what has already taken place. By this I do not mean that we must offer our own assertions on matters of value. What we must do is clarify what the current values are, and, if we want to make assertions ourselves, clarify the premises which underlie the formation of our claims.
These two activities are connected. There is a direct relationship between knowing how things are formed and the subject of how they should be evaluated. If when the elements of a structure are clarified some of these elements are found to be variable, then it may also be possible to change the circumstances the current structure produces. If the elements are found to be immutable, on the other hand, they can then be taken as premises in further consideration of the issue. It is of course difficult in practice to distinguish the variable from the invariable. But we can widen our approach to an issue by clarifying the logical consequences the addition or subtraction of various elements might have. I can try to assert that it should be possible to remove something you have taken as a premise. It seems to me there are many cases where this approach is relevant. For example, if an object of criticism is taken to be a single entity then of course the criticism applies to it in its entirety. However, in some cases the object of criticism can be seen as being composed of a number of mutually independent components and examining the problem in this way may change the nature of the criticism.
It should be possible to carry out this process of breaking things down and putting them together, as a logical exercise, by breaking down the target structure into its elementary parts and then looking at each element in turn. By looking at the history of what now seem to be composite structures it may also be possible to see the points where several elements came together and points where other elements were rejected. It might also be possible to find the mechanisms by which previously distinct elements are conjoined. Chapters two, six and seven of this book pursue this approach (these sections may seem a bit like historical description, but to be genuine attempts at historical analysis they would have to be carried out with greater rigor. What is carried out in these chapters is limited to the tracing of a kind of broad outline)..
The sort of inquiries discussed above need to be carried out, but the current situation makes it difficult. I discuss this further in chapters six and seven. In chapter six I outline several strategies that exist in contemporary society. In chapter seven I look at several criticisms/proposed corrections of the structures described in chapters two and six. But as is shown in chapters six and seven themselves, however, the things they describe are not entirely different; on the contrary, the phenomena discussed in both chapters emerge from the same starting point, and one of my aims here is to show this commonality. In these chapters I lay out what the social sciences have given me. At the same time, I also give concrete expression to my "dissatisfaction" and explain how I intend to address it.
To begin with, private property was first discussed as a problem of structure. Assertions were made to justify or criticize capitalism and market economies, and for a long time these views were developed in opposition to each other. Put brutally simply, it is a dispute about "who gets what". If capitalism, at its root, contains an unavoidable exploitation of those who work hard, then a different system of production and distribution is required. It is not as though possible future systems that were not based on an assertion of "distribution in accordance with contribution" were not conceived of, but at a time when poverty was oppressive assertions like this dominated in practice. Discussion of the subject of private property has a long history in this setting, but, at the same time, the connection between production and ownership itself has not been questioned. I will take a different approach. This is not only because I have doubts about the appropriateness of calculations based on the formula "appropriate value - actual value = degree of exploitation", but also because the problem I want to address is not one that would be resolved even by assuming the implementation of a correct calculation of this kind.
Beginning in the 1960s, criticism of the current system turned towards "humanist" critiques (humanist ideas themselves can be traced much further back in the history of thought). The criticism is that the commercialization of labor has brought about the estrangement of an essential aspect of human nature. The problem has been expanded to include "meaning", and it is claimed that the present system is inhuman. A large part of what we say about contemporary phenomena, about technology or commercialization, for example, is not far from this argument. This is likely to remain true in the future, due to the fact that, if nothing else, this argument speaks to us about an aspect of the world in which we live. Since its introduction this criticism of commercialization has remained consistent and unabated. If we genuinely accept it, however, the change it requires is as difficult, or indeed even more difficult, than changing the economic system. If the root of the problem is the commercialization of labor, then surely we must ultimately abandon this approach in its entirety. This would appear, however, to be extremely difficult.
While these issues were being discussed in terms of a conflict mainly concerning the choice between different economic systems, this choice was framed as a broad, roughly defined "factional" debate. And this debate over standards, with no end in sight, has now been pushed aside by contemporary realities (though perhaps the intractable debate was more a reflection of the circumstances in which it arose than something that was derailed by them). The issue of choices related to the "structure" of society seems to have faded into the background, and as a result efforts to criticize the current structure as a whole have also stalled. At this point attention has focused on smaller aspects of social structure. Part of this focus has manifested as the "historical" and "political science" writings on actions regarding human life and the body.
One might see a lack of resolve in the decision to shelve these large problems because they are difficult or because of a realization that it is impossible to oppose the market system, and then for lack of anything better to do take issue with limited, marginal aspects of the social order. But there has also been a realization that perhaps the large narratives which have been constructed regarding history and production are themselves connected to our lack of progress. As part of this new approach issues which had not been considered social problems, either because they were private or personal or because they were thought to be self-evident, have now been taken up as questions to be addressed in thinking about society. Aspects of medicine, education, and welfare which had not previously been thought of as problematic have now become subjects of discourse. This marks the third stage in the development of this field.
These writings point out that the elements of our society are "systems" which result from "political power", and are not structures that arise naturally or are given to us by "nature". The authors themselves do not speak about larger values. This is an obvious result of a subjective methodology that tries to elicit the historical and social characteristics of the structures being examined.
This methodology pursues the examination of individual examples of phenomena and concrete studies of history. The analysis conducted is substantive and detailed. For me, however, this approach at the same time feels both too simple and overly broad; instead of nature or natural law we now have social, historical, attributed and given phenomena. This new arrangement is not incorrect. But to people who are trying to consider what is actually to be done its focus remains overly broad.
Simple errors can also slip in here. The question of which parts of social structures should be kept and which parts discarded should be considered separately from questions about which parts are given and by whom. Of course those writing in this area are themselves aware of this distinction, and as a result we cannot blame them. But where there is insufficient self awareness we have a tendency to think that whatever is familiar and close to home is better and more fundamental than anything else, and so just being told that something is "historical" or "social", or hearing words like "political power" or "bio-power", tends to make us mistakenly feel that we should perhaps oppose or criticize whatever is being suggested. But of course this is not the case. The fact that something is a historical structure is just that, no more and no less, and does not have any further or exceptional meaning. Nonetheless, discussing historical structures sometimes leads to the making of normative assertions that could not be put forward on their own or at least the perception that such assertions are being made. There are also claims that everything in society is a social construct, subject to the functioning of political power, and as a result there is no standpoint on which to base criticism or opposition, but this again follows from a binary contrast between things that are social and those that are not, or, in other words, things which are to be the targets of criticism and those which are to be its basis. It is impossible to say anything about how society ought to be from within this framework. Contemporary society also seems a bit too complicated for this approach; ideas of the "social" and "historical" are too broad to apprehend its intricacies. We cannot discuss this society properly using this schema.
There is a current of thought comprised of the status quo and those who support it, and there are various criticisms that oppose it. Critics have used the approaches described above as their purposes demanded. I have had the impression that, of the two sides, those who are critical of the current arrangement perhaps have more to say, and this feeling has been reaffirmed in the writing of this book. But I have never been satisfied with either approach. For a long time I have found myself stuck somewhere between them. This is an unpopular position to take, but it is the only one that makes sense to me. Criticisms that might appear to be thoroughly critical never seem to be anything more than empty clich?, because there is always some point where they do not appear to completely disagree with what their opponents are doing. This is what made me write this book. I wrote it while thinking about how to think about phenomena in our society we don't know how to think about. At the same time, in addressing the question of how we ought to think about these issues I have tried to find a foothold within the superficial layer of our actual social circumstances. Logically speaking, this does not contradict the approaches discussed earlier. Intuition is logical, it underpins logic, but this relationship between logic and intuition is hidden by what is publicly proclaimed to exist in modern society and therefore is not well described. Most of the keys to thinking and talking about this issue are ultimately to be found in the workings of the doubts and criticisms with which I have already expressed dissatisfaction. Just to set down the ideas contained in this book has taken me closer to twenty years than ten since I first began thinking about them. This is partly because my time has been taken up with other work and I have gotten sidetracked, but this has not been entirely a bad thing. In the process of this other work I have had the opportunity to think about many different issues. The things I learned during this process came more from what was muttered and what was done than from what was written; of course, during the process various concepts were discussed, but many times I had the sense that something was happening that was different from what became the public discourse. This book, however, contains only the skeleton of what I have drawn from these experiences and does not detail exactly when or how each idea arose. Events that took place not even thirty years ago, if left untouched, are likely to be forgotten without even leaving a vague sense that they once occurred, and an attempt to document this history would become a separate undertaking of its own.
As I have already stated, the purpose of this book is to attempt to bring to light things which are present in this society but have not received enough attention. I do not deny the possibility that these things which are said to be present in are in fact "relative". This is natural because part of what I am examining is the question of what kind of things these social phenomena are. While I cannot say that nothing in the book is complicated, most of what I have to say is extremely straightforward. Throughout the book I mention "the other" several times. This term has become very popular in the last few years, and no doubt there are important things that have been written concerning it, but in this book I do not refer to them. This is because I felt the things I was writing about should not require outside help to explain. I would also have had to deal with the question of which sources to cite and problems regarding differences in interpretation. In any case, it is possible to consider what follows from pursuing a certain line of thought; this is all I could do, and in this book I have attempted to document this process.