sawyl | Entries tagged with ethics

A shift into something close to genuine intellectual territory with Donna Dickenson's breezy and informative Bioethics: All That Matters, as recommended by Steven Poole in the Guardian. I rather enjoyed it, although I had a couple of understandable and predictable quibbles with the closing chapter. I liked the refusal to accept the existing euphemistic jargon for various forms of reproductive technology and the clear and precise explanations of some of the technologies involved. So here are a few highly uncritical notes gleaned from first quick read through.
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From a post by the Philosophical Primate on how to respond when some asks you for the impossible — in this case, how to improve student success given a smaller budget:

When someone insists that you do something impossible, the only correct and sane answer is, “No.” Any response to their demands other than honestly telling them how and why their demands are impossible would simply reinforce their deluded conviction that they can create the results they want by simply insisting that the people and institutions they have power over produce them. Real-world results cannot be produced by fact-ignoring fiat, and hard problems cannot be solved by insisting that someone lower down the totem pole solve them — especially when that insistence is accompanied by a reduction in the resources available to carry out the work needed to fix those problems.

...

It is a fundamental principle of ethics (my field of study) that “ought implies can,” which simply means that one cannot be obligated to do something that is not in one’s power to do. Surely at some level the powers that be must be aware of the self-contradictory nature of their demands, and that those demands cannot be met — but if they are not aware, that does not obligate us to nevertheless try to meet those demands. If we are obligated to do anything, it is to make them aware that their demands *are* impossible, and to explain why. In other words, we are obligated to educate them — which, after all, is our calling.

An approach that holds true for anyone whose job it is to provide professional, impartial, scientific advice to their political masters...

As has been widely noted, the Dorries-Field amendment to the Health Bill is nothing if not deeply disingenous. Zoe Williams summarises it rather neatly in the Guardian:

The exact wording is this: the government should provide "independent information, advice and counselling services for women requesting termination of pregnancy to the extent that the consortium considers they will choose to use them". "Independent" is defined as "a private body that does not itself provide for the termination of pregnancies or a statutory body".

In other words, GPs decide how much counselling to provide, and it can be provided by anyone except those performing the abortion. There is no requirement that "independent" mean "not faith-based": we'd have to rely on the discretion of the Department of Health to keep out groups such as CareConfidential, whose "counselling" consists of misinformation aimed at discouraging women from having abortions.

So the use of the word independent in this context is not independent as in morally disinterested in the eventual outcome — as noted, the intention of the amendment is to reduce abortions by a third — but rather, it's a specious claim about the funding of the counselling service that is only being made in order put yet more (religious) obstacles in the way of women's rights to choose. So much, then, for religious ethics.

ETA: The government seem to have got cold feet and are now advising their MPs vote against the amendment...

Interesting piece by Jenna Woginrich on Cif which asserts that vegetarianism as a way to improve animal welfare conditions in the meat industry is ultimately a mistake. But while I admire Woginrich for having the courage of her convictions — for deciding to ditch her own vegetarianism and instead to concentrate on producing meat on a small-scale sustaining farm — I don't think her basic claim about vegetarianism holds up to scrutiny. ( Fighting words... )

An interesting overlap between the worlds of professional cycling and ethics over on the Guardian's bike blog.

Inspired by an event in the Tour de France, William Fotheringham discusses the unwritten rules that govern the event — you do not press an advantage when your nearest rival suffers a mechanical failure, stops for a pee, stops to say hello to his family etc. After describing the way these are enforced through peer pressure, he laments the fact that the code does not appear to cover drug taking.

However, the two problems are clearly not equivalent.

The behaviours governed by the unwritten rules occur in public and, thanks to ubiquitous TV coverage, can be scrutinised after the event. This means that a rider breaking the rules can easily be identified and subject to group punishment. In game theory, it's like a form of repeated prisoner's dilemma where the results of each previous round are available to each player. Thus, cooperation is extremely stable because as soon as a player defects for his own advantage, all the other players will know about it by the next round and will most likely take retaliatory action.

The behavioural rules governing drug taking are quite different. Firstly, there is a lack of public information; drug consumption occurs in private, so it other riders don't have direct knowledge of it but instead must rely on inferences. This means that the risks of discovery by another rider are much lower than in the unwritten rules case — remember that Fotheringham's point is that anti-doping should be enforced by peer pressure and not by an external agency. Secondly, if we accept as an axiom that the drugs do indeed provide some form of performance advantage, then the cost of not taking them is high.

So in this second case, we are presented with a completely different problem: the risks of getting caught are low while, benefits are substantial and neither party truly knows about the other's choices. Which, I think, means that it may not be rational to adopt the strategy of the cooperative player of prisoner's dilemma. Which, perhaps, explains the existence of the various anti-doping agencies...

We had an interesting discussion over coffee this morning about the precise moral problems raised by cannibalism. I, playing the devil's advocate, supplied a series of reasons why it might be better to eat a human being who had freely consented to being eaten than to eat animals which cannot give consent; and that allowing others to eat your body after death is morally equivalent to donating your body to a hospital for the edification of medical students.

I'm not sure that we really resolved the question, but it was interesting how poorly initial feelings of revulsion correlated with the real moral issues the problem raised.

Greta Christina has an intriguing post in which she argues that religious faith is often treated as a synonym for morality. While I have a lot of sympathy for such an interesting idea, one that may well turn out to be true, I'm not sure that conclusion follows from arguments. Let me try to explain.

Greta takes as her example the case of a high school principal in Florida. When one of his pupils reported that she had been subject to homophobic bullying, her principal acted on his religious views, telling her homosexuality was wrong and that she was a danger to children, before outed her to her parents. Friends of the victim who objected to her treatment were then subject to a campaign of harassment. When the case was brought to trial, the judge censured the principal for his actions and the man was subsequently demoted, but when members of the local community were asked for their views, they generally endorsed the man's behaviour, claiming that he was a "fine man and good principal, and we are a gentle, peaceful, Christian, family-oriented community."

This she sees as damning. And it's not hard to see why, given the harm the principal's actions caused to the individuals concerned — individuals to whom he might be expected to owe a special duty of care, considering his role in loco parentis. And so, we should expect his actions to be condemned by the other members of his community. But does it follow from their failure to condemn that they have conflated the principal's religious faith with his moral rectitude? Only if we cannot find a plausible moral explanation for their actions.

Greta, as I've just done, condemns the principal's behaviour because the consequences of his actions inflicted significant harm on his pupils. But is it likely that the principal himself would see his actions in this light? I think not given that Christianity has a long association with deontological morality; a theory which emphasizes that the rightness of the original act is more important than the consequences that it brings. Thus, if a Christian believes that homosexuality is wrong and also that they have a duty to correct error wherever they find it, then they will believe morally justified in acting against any hint of homosexuality, whether it be in a high school or elsewhere.

This rather dubious argument gives us a reason for thinking that it may be possible for the principal and his supporters to believe that their actions are morally justified. But does this justification require religion in order to work? I don't think so. Both original premises stand free of religious justification — although it's true that the condemnation of homosexuality is often associated with religion, it's quite possible for an atheist to hold a similar view, albeit for different reasons — which indicates that it is not necessarily the case that religion and morality are being used as synonyms in the Florida case, although it may be contingently true.

In summary, then, my problem with the argument as given is that it assumes that the actions can either be justified on consequentialist grounds or the people involved are guilty of equating religious rectitude with moral rectitude. But I've tried to show that this is false dichotomy: the individuals involved might believe, for peculiar deontological reasons, their actions to be justified regardless of the religion allegiances of those involved.

For no terribly good reason, other than idle curiosity, I've just read Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Tony Hope.

The book kicks off with an investigation of euthanasia and examines the effects of statistics the distributive justice of health-care before moving on to the problems surrounding reproductive ethics. After a brief hiatus to introduce various formal logical methods, the focus shifts to examine inconsistencies between our treatment of criminals and those judged mentally ill. Following an analysis of the issues of confidentiality and data ownership raised by genetic testing, there is a brief discussion of the ethical problems raised by overseas drug testing before things wrap up with a good thumbnail sketch of the Gillick Case.

As promised by its subtitle, the book provides a good basic guide to the most common problems of medical ethics. Hope is an excellent guide, cheerfully partisan but always explaining his arguments with clarity and brevity. Obviously, none of the areas mentioned is covered in great detail, but the recommended reading lists for each chapter are detailed and cite reliably good sources on each subject.

Highly recommended.

Current Music: Duruflé - Prélude et Fuge sur le nom d'Alain

Julie Bindel has a good essay in today's Guardian on charity sexism — the process of using borderline porn images of women to boost the profile of a cause. For example, Bindel points out the inherent contradiction of a naked Mel B posing in support the Helen Bamber Foundation, an organisation which works with people who've been trafficked, raped and exploited.

Particular criticism, however, is reserved for PETA:

In Peta's world, it seems that it is perfectly acceptable to reduce women to the status of animals, or meat: one Peta image shows a woman being clubbed "to death" by a man; another shows a woman wrapped in cling film to resemble cuts of meat in a supermarket. Perhaps the most egregious example of Peta's work occurred in London on Mother's Day this year, when it staged an event that was ostensibly to raise awareness about farrowing-crate confinement, a technique used in factory farming, in which sows are squeezed into narrow metal stalls barely larger than their own bodies. A heavily pregnant member of Peta's staff lent her body to the cause - naked except for a pair of pink underpants - by kneeling on all fours in a metal cage

While I agree with the point that PETA are trying to make about factory farming, I'm not really convinced by their methods. Surely, to paraphrase Tom Regan, the goal should be to put animal rights and welfare on a similar footing to human rights and welfare, not to drag humans down to the level of animals.

Perhaps we need to take a leaf out of Riding Hood's book:

The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument here hair looked white as the snow outside. Then went directly to the man with red eyes in whose unkempt mane the lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.

What big arms you have.

All the better to hug you with.

Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him.

What big teeth you have!

She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest's Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even as he answered: All the better to eat you with.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat.

No one should be anyone's meat. That's the point. Not pigs in cages. Not women pretending to be pigs in cages to raise awareness. And pretending otherwise diminishes everyone.

Current Music: Wagner - Lohengrin

I don't normally bother with dairy milk, so on the rare occasions that I do buy it, I almost always forget about it until it's just about to turn. Strangely, I think that this makes it taste better. Is this a sign of moral turpitude? Because eating eggs on the turn is definitely a bad sign:

The executioner insists his breakfast omelette be prepared only from those eggs precisely on the point of blossoming into chicks and, prompt at eight, consumes with relish a yellow, feathered omelette subtly spiked with claw. Gretchen, his tender-hearted daughter, often jumps and starts to hear the thwarted cluck from a still gelid, scarcely calcified beak about to be choked with sizzling butter, but her father, whose word is law because he never doffs his leather mask, will eat no egg that does not contain within it a nascent bird. That is his taste. In this country, only the executioner may indulge his peversities.

Carter, A., "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter" in Fireworks

For the record: no, I don't like omelettes; and yes, my dislike of them predates my first encounter with Angela Carter.

Todays reading recommendations? Pinker's The Moral Instinct in the NYT — yes I know it's from a couple of weeks back, but I've been busy and the passage of time has in no way invalidated the artile. Also suggested are Mark O'Connell's post on philosophy, which features some interesting links to philosophy blogs, and Carol Rumens' selection of two poems of the week by Emily Dickinson.

Current Music: Tippett - Piano Concerto

I don't have a problem with presumed consent for organ donation. In light of a letter in today's Guardian from Peter Ayton, I think it's morally unjustifiable to retain the current system:

Consent rates for organ donation in countries where the system is to opt in are far lower than consent rates where one has to opt out. In Germany (12%), the Netherlands (27.5%), Denmark (4.25%) and the UK (17.17%), where one must opt-in, consent rates are all well below those in Austria (99.98%), Belgium (98%), France (99.91%), Hungary (99.97%), Poland (99.5%), Portugal (99.64%) and Sweden (85.9%), where one must opt out.

Maybe I've got it easy. I'm not religious. I don't care what happens to my body after I'm dead. In fact, I think it's meaningless to talk of it being my body because, if I'm no longer around to own it — to assert some sort of right of ownership over it — then it has clearly ceased to be mine in any meaningful way. Thus, I actively want any bits and pieces of my body left after my death to be put to good use, in much the same way that I might want my nephew to have my comic book collection...

Current Music: Torke - Rapture

Today's Guardian included an interview with Peter Singer, who discussed his book Eating, written with Jim Mason. Always an interesting contrast with the majority of anti-corporate tub thumpers, he comes out in favour of large businesses:

The fact that a big chain has a national and international reputation to protect means they need to be a bit more cautious about what they are doing than someone who has no brand and is not going to suffer from any kind of disclosure.

And, in certain circumstances, he's also pro supermarket. He points out it might be better to buy food in supermarkets on the grounds that you're helping to support people in poorer parts of the world and a supermarket minimises your mileage in a way that traipsing round local stores in your SUV doesn't.

Interesting stuff. Makes me want to read the book.

Yet another entry on ethics I'm afraid, this one prompted by today's Guardian article by Jane Campbell. The piece provides insight into some tof the things raised by Jonathan Glover's recent essay and contrasts with Mary Warnock's recent comments on assisted dying, both of which I've mentioned before.

( A few random jottings )

So, summary: good points, but I don't buy into the assisted dying or good standard of living for the disabled/terminally ill dichotomy.

Current Music: Palestrina - Missa Sine Nomine

Again, nothing spectacularly ground breaking, but Mary Warnock's article provides a nice summary of Joel Joffe's bill on assisted dying and covers some of the implications.

The sun is shining, the weather is beautiful, the whole world is my oyster or whatever the vegetarian equivalent is, and how do I choose to spend my day? Cramming down John Harris's fascinating On Cloning, that's how.

Thankfully, the book is good enough that I've been recompensed for my devotion with a feeling of accomplishment. It elegantly outlines the problems with many of the standard reasons given for opposing cloning, point that some of the arguments advanced lack rational support, other fly in the face of the evidence produced by identical twins, the dodgy use of Kantian autonomy, etc. All in all, a clear, lucid, interesting book for anyone with even the slightest interest in the ethical questions of cloning.

Current Music: G&S - Trial by Jury

Interesting animal experimentation article by Jonathan Wolff in today's Guardian. He makes the point that although animal testing methods have become more humane over time, huge numbers of animals are still being killed in experiements or are being killed despite not being used in experiments, keeping their numbers off the Home Office lists.

Is it just me or is it an irony that animals are casually euthanised for experiements, as soon as they get old, as soon as they're perceived to be suffering, as soon as no one loves them anymore, and yet human beings who are sufficiently compos mentis to put forward comprehensive arguments about their wish to die are told, "Sorry, you've got to go into palliative care and wait till fate's good and ready for you." Yeah, that makes total sense.

Current Music: Poulenc - Concerto for Organ

For the curious, my latest magnum opus is going reasonably well. I'm currently blithering about Patrick Devlin and his slightly odd attitudes to homosexuality. For the uninitiated, in his response to the Wolfenden Report, he equates private, consensual acts of homosexuality with treason on the grounds that it undermines the shared morality of society. Others have pointed out the bogosity of this position: who you choose to sleep with does not, in general, change your views on murder or arson or whatever does it?

Exactly.

Current Music: JS Bach - B minor mass

The focus of today's Spotlight on the News feature is Madeleine Bunting's Grauniad article on the re-engineering of humanity, which was thought provoking, but distinctly limited.

The initial spiel about a hypothetical granddaughter left behind at school because, thanks to her neo-luddite parents, she lacks the more extreme enhancements of her classmates but who still loves Little House on the Prairy is all very Gattaca, but the trouble is, it seems to misses Niccol's key points: that no system is perfect and that the flaws that apparently make Vincent, the "natural" brother, unable to achieve his goal are the very things that cause him strive for it, while his "enhanced" brother Anton, relatively content with his superiority, becomes a policeman.

There then follows a nod to the Fukuyama view of transhumanism as a corrosion of the rights that make us human. Well, maybe, but only if you live in some kind of bizarre Hobbesian world where individuals basically want to screw each other over for personal gain but are only prevented from doing so by fear of what others may do to them, in which case the thought of some all powerful transhuman superman must induce a fit of fear and trembling. Actually, now that I think about it, that's actually pretty good description the basic neo-con position. No wonder they're so totally fearful about the whole thing — they think they've got everything to lose. If however, one subscribes to a more fundamentally optimistic set of moral beliefs, the absurdity of this position becomes clear. As Singer says, we don't treat people as equals because they necessarily are our equals in every respect, but rather we treat them in that way because we can ourselves into their position and give them equal consideration: "Equality is a basic ethical principle, not an assertion of fact." (see Ch. 2 of Practical Ethics for a more complete argument).

With something of a non-sequitur, the article then skips on to questions of privacy. If our thoughts can be manipulated, if our minds can be read, if we can have no reasonable expectation of privacy even within our own skulls, how will our notions of equality and ethics be affected? Surely, were that degree of tyranny to prevail, we wouldn't be able to function as moral beings in any true sense because we wouldn't be free, or even able, to make choices with moral implications. That's my basic take on the whole liberty thing: freedom of action and behaviour, within the reasonable limits of the Harm Principle, are necessary conditions for morality to prevail, however they are not sufficient to guarantee it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.

After returning to the original theme — enhanced cognitive abilities are just the intellectual equivalent of boob jobs, that research on the brain could be used to help people with Alzheimer's etc. — the article concludes with the belief that we should tread gently because there's no way to reverse large scale human re-engineering when it occurs and that we need to have a public debate over the issues before they become set in stone. It's a fair point: e should walk carefully, if only because science has shown itself possessed of a unique ability to turn around and bite us, just when we've think we've got it all locked down.

Current Music: JS Bach - Prelude and Fugue in C major BWV 531

I thought that Dr Averil Stedeford's letter in response to yesterday's Guardian leader on euthanasia summarised things very elegantly:

Illness is the real cause of the death - the doctor is only controlling the timing. Treatment (of cancer etc) can cure or delay recurrence, but it can also keep someone alive so that their tumour spreads in a way that causes a more miserable death than they would have experienced earlier. For patients who regard length of life as the greatest benefit, this may be acceptable, but some would rather die when it becomes apparent that the battle is lost, rather than be kept alive to the bitter end. Even the best palliative care cannot banish all suffering.

We used to think the timing of death lay in the hands of God. Now we know it is more often controlled by doctors. New powers bring new responsibilities. Should an oncologist now be able to say to some patients, "If I only treat your symptoms, you may die fairly soon. Active treatment may cure you, or prevent recurrence for a time. Even then I may be able to help. But if your cancer comes back in a way that is very unpleasant, I will not force you to endure to the end"?

Rather more helpful than one of the other contributors, who suggested replacing the emotive question, "do patients have the right to die with dignity?", with the equally but oppositely loaded, "do patients have the right to insist that their doctors give them poison to kill themselves with?" Presumably, in order to elicit the correct response from members of the public, this question is should asked cold and out of context: "Excuse me sir, but would you allow your wife or your servant to insist..." Yeah, like that's totally going to clarify the moral debate.

Current Music: Brian Eno - Against the Sky

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Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Entries tagged with ethics

Bioethics: All That Matters

Speaking truth to power

Health Bill Newspeak

Vegetarianism vs sustainability

Cycling and peer pressure

The rights and wrongs of eating people

Religion, morality and misdirection

Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction

Charity porn

Food as a moral signifier?

Random reading recommendations

Consent and organ donation

Singer on Eating

Assisted dying again

Warnock on assisted dying

Ethics of cloning

Life, death and animals

Essay update

Being all we can be

Means to ends: the debate continues