Masahiro Morioka (森岡 正博, Morioka Masahiro; born September 25, 1958) is a Japanese philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of philosophy of life, bioethics, gender studies, media theory, and civilization studies. He is a professor of philosophy and ethics at Waseda University, Japan. He coined the term "life studies" for an integrated approach to the issues of life, death, and nature in contemporary society. Since 2006 he has proposed a new philosophical discipline he calls "philosophy of life". He has published numerous academic books and articles, mainly in Japanese, and has regularly contributed commentaries and book reviews to major Japanese newspapers and magazines. His books include Painless Civilization, which criticizes the incessant attempts to escape from pain and suffering in modern civilization, Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher's Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men's Sexuality, which illuminates some of the darker sides of male sexuality such as the "Lolita complex" and male frigidity, and Lessons in Love for Herbivore Men, one of the books that helped popularize the term "herbivore men". He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Philosophy of Life, an associate editor of Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, and a steering committee member of the International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life.
Biography Morioka was born in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan, in 1958 and entered the University of Tokyo in 1977. In the beginning he studied physics and mathematics but he later turned to philosophy and ethics. In graduate school he specialized in bioethics and environmental ethics, a newly emerging field at that time as well as Wittgenstein's later philosophy. He published two books on bioethics, An Invitation to the Study of Life and Brain Dead Person, and moved to the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, in 1988. There he wrote several books including How to Live in a Post-religious Age and Consciousness Communication; the former is a philosophical and psychological analysis of Aum Shinrikyo's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that occurred in 1995 and the latter discusses subconscious interactions in the age of computer communications (Consciousness Communication won The Telecom Social Science award in 1993). He spent one year as a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, US, in 1991. In 1997, he moved to Osaka Prefecture University where he taught philosophy and ethics. In 2001 he published Life Studies Approaches to Bioethics, in which he discussed brain death and organ transplantation, feminist bioethics and abortion, the disability rights movement, and new forms of eugenics from the perspective of "life studies". In this book he introduces concepts such as "the fundamental sense of security" and "the reality of a deeply shaken self", which he discovered through an examination of Japanese bioethics literature written in the 1970s. He published Painless Civilization, mentioned above, in 2003. This is considered by many his most important and influential book to date. His books on men's studies, also mentioned above, have been frequently referred to in the field of gender studies. He published Manga Introduction to Philosophy in 2013. He played an important role in the revision of the organ transplantation law in Japan in the years 2000–2009. He asserted that organs should not be harvested from small children who have been declared brain dead but his proposal was ultimately rejected by the Diet. He moved to the School of Human Sciences, Waseda University, in 2015. A critical study of antinatalist philosophy, Would It Have Been Better Never to Have Been Born? sparked much discussion in Japan in 2020.
Key concepts
Brain death as a human relationship Morioka defines brain death not as a material process occurring inside the brain but as a human relationship formed between a comatose patient and his/her family members or others who surround him/her. He calls this a "human relationship oriented analysis" approach to bioethics. He claims that brain death is not necessarily human death.
Consciousness communication In his 1993 book Consciousness Communication he distinguished "consciousness communication", communication for the purpose of social interaction itself, from "information communication", communication used as a tool for conveying information. He predicted that consciousness communication would play a central role in the coming information society, and put forward the concepts of "community of anonymity" and "dream navigator".
Life studies Morioka calls his comprehensive approach to the issues of life, death, and nature "life studies". The ultimate goal of life studies is to help people to live their lives without regret. Morioka asserts that the most important aspect of life studies is never to detach ourselves from the problems we are tackling and never to think of ourselves as exceptions; He encourages us to keep our eyes on our own desires and the evil that he believes is deeply engraved in our hearts.
Fundamental sense of security The fundamental sense of security is one of the central concepts in Morioka's philosophy. In the book Life Studies Approaches to Bioethics he describes this as "a sense of security that allows me to strongly believe that even if I had been unintelligent, ugly, or disabled, my existence in the world itself would have been equally welcomed, and whether I succeed or fail, and even if I become a doddering old man, my existence will continue to be welcomed". He asserts that this is a precondition of our being able to live our lives without regret.
Painless civilization Morioka asserts that our contemporary civilization is developing in the form of a "painless civilization". He asserts that this civilization's limitless penchant for eliminating pain and suffering makes us completely lose sight of the meaning of life that is indispensable to human beings and deprives us of the joy of life in exchange for pleasure, pleasantness, and comfort. He further claims that people in advanced countries know that they are drowning in the tide of their painless civilization but do not know how to escape from it.
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