Is your mobile phone part of your body?
by Rebecca Roache
The Frontline reports that sensors carried on the body of mobile phone users could soon be used to boost the UK’s mobile phone network coverage. If only half of the 91% of the UK population who owns a mobile phone carried such sensors, then nearly half of the UK population would become part of a ‘body-to-body’ mobile phone network.
When technology becomes as wearable and ubiquitous as this, it raises some interesting questions about what sort of things people are, and about the division between the body and the surrounding environment. What, after all, is a body? At first glance, a person’s body is that mass of flesh, blood, and bone that we point to when we point to him or her: all very simple and straightforward. Things get more complicated when we consider someone who has received an organ transplant. Does a transplanted organ become part of the body of the person who receives it? I would say so. Assuming that the transplant is successful, it functions just like the organ it replaces; and an injury to the transplanted organ would be considered an injury to the recipient. What about artificial devices that replace or supplement organs, like cochlear implants: do these count as body parts too? I would imagine that most of us would be less willing to view such things as body parts. However, if transplanted organs are to count as parts of the recipients’ bodies, refusal to accept cochlear implants as body parts seems mere prejudice. Both enable the recipient’s body to perform a familiar and normal bodily function; and whilst a transplanted organ is – unlike a cochlear implant – undeniably a body part, it is pre-transplant no more a part of the recipient’s body than a cochlear implant. So, perhaps we should consider cochlear implants to be body parts too. If we accept something like a cochlear implant as a body part, though, what else might we feel bound to include? What about less permanent replacement body parts, like false teeth and prosthetic limbs? Tools that are not intended to replace body parts, but which nevertheless enable certain people to perform something like a familiar and normal bodily function, like wheelchairs? Tools that enable people to perform functions that are not familiar and normal bodily functions, like pencils and screwdrivers? Where do we draw the line between the body and the surrounding environment?
Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead
by Rebecca Roache
The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine. Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, this points to the worrying conclusion that some parents who have chosen a homeopathic alternative to the MMR vaccine believe that their children are immune to measles, mumps, and rubella, when in fact they are unprotected against these diseases.
This development marks another blow for the ongoing campaign to ensure that children receive the recommended vaccinations. Sir Sandy Macara, ex-chairman of the British Medical Association, has claimed that the UK has lower immunisation rates than some developing countries in which people have poor access to healthcare. The percentage of the UK population currently vaccinated against MMR falls well below the level needed to achieve ‘herd immunity’ – where the number of immune individuals in the population prevents the spread of disease, thereby protecting those who are not immune – and recent outbreaks of measles in Wales has led the Welsh Assembly to consider making the MMR vaccine compulsory. Such a move would be highly controversial, but is this a price worth paying to protect public health?
Is it criminal not to breastfeed?
by Rebecca Roache
The Brazilian
model Gisele Bundchen recently—and controversially—claimed that mothers should
be required by law to breastfeed their babies for the first six months of their
lives.
A few days later, she partially retracted the claim on her blog, insisting that her talk of a breastfeeding law should
not be taken literally. It was simply a way of expressing her belief in the
importance of doing the best for her child.
After all, legally enforcing breastfeeding would be madness, right?
Not
according to the Indonesian government.
It recently passed a law giving babies the right to six months of
exclusive breastfeeding,
except in cases where medical problems prevent their mothers from breastfeeding. Mothers who do not comply face a year in
prison or a fine of 100,000,000 Rupiahs (around £7,100), and those who prevent
mothers from fulfilling their breastfeeding obligations also face punishments. Scientists and health professionals generally
agree that breastfeeding is healthier for babies than the alternatives (see,
for example, here),
that not enough mothers do it (see here),
and governments around the world invest huge sums trying to get mothers to
breastfeed. But is criminalising non-breastfeeding mothers a good idea?
Do we harm our children by revealing their sex?
by Rebecca Roache
I am over a
month late reading the news of the Swedish couple who have chosen to keep the
sex of their toddler a closely-guarded secret, but the story is too interesting
to pass up the opportunity to write about it here.
The parents
of the two-and-a-half year old child, known as Pop, explain, ‘We want Pop to
grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the
outset. It's cruel to bring a child into
the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead’. The wish to protect one’s child from gender
stereotyping is understandable, but is refusing to reveal Pop’s sex going
too far?
Why public health campaigns should not promote enhancement
by Rebecca Roache
Human
enhancement is a hot topic in bioethics.
Typically conceived as the use of technology to raise human capacities
above what is merely healthy or normal, it attracts questions such as, Is it
ethical? Is it desirable? Is it cheating? and, Should the state
subsidise it? A common view is that,
whilst therapy—which aims to restore human capacities to what is healthy or
normal, but not to raise them above this level—is desirable; enhancement is at
best unnecessary [1], and at worst unethical [2]. Human enhancement, one might be tempted to
think, is for oddballs only: the average person is content merely to be
healthy.
How much should we care about MPs’ expense claims?
Few people
in the UK could have missed the furious storm about MPs’ expense claims that has dominated the news headlines for the past several weeks. A steady flow of stories has revealed not
only which MPs bent the rules on expenses, but also that many of the rules are themselves objectionable and arguably
facilitate a misuse of taxpayers’ money.
Of course,
few of us enjoy paying tax, but most of us grudgingly accept that it is
necessary if we want certain social goods like decent healthcare and a fair
justice system. None of us likes to
think of our money instead being directed towards those who already enjoy a
higher income and better job perks than we do.
What is most striking about the current focus on MPs’ expense claims,
however, is the fact that we are in the middle of a serious recession.
And the amount of taxpayers’ money used to finance MPs' bogus
mortgage payments, luxury goods,
and furniture is but a drop in the ocean compared to the financial losses suffered by
homeowners due to falling property prices, by the half-million workers who have lost their jobs in the past nine months, and by those still employed whose tax payments must help support the newly jobless. Given that the impact of a recession on
ordinary people is at least partly the result of government decision-making,
why does the recession consistently take second place in the headlines to the
relatively trivial matter of MPs’ expense claims?
Is doodling a form of cheating?
The public
often complains about the fluctuating and conflicting attitudes of scientists. So often do things heralded as good for us
one week turn out to be deadly the next (consider, for example, this recent
report about vitamin pills) that there seems little point in
trying to follow the advice of scientists.
Some recent
news stories raise the question of whether the public is inclined to dismiss
the conflicting views of ethicists, too. Ethical
concerns about pharmacological cognitive enhancement have regularly been
reported in the press (see, for example, here,
here,
and here);
whilst at the same time—as Dominic Wilkinson has noted on this blog—the
public has embraced non-pharmacological cognitive enhancement in the form of software designed to improve brain power, and the media
currently abounds with docile, non-panicky reports of how instant messaging,
texting,
taking short naps,
taking long naps,
listening to The Beatles,
and doodling can all enhance cognition in various ways.
So far, there have been no reports of ethical concerns about these
activities: nobody is suggesting that students who doodle during lectures are cheating. It seems that, despite the concerns of some, the public is willing
to embrace cognitive enhancement in a variety of forms.
Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?
Following
the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical
Sciences building
is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues
surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been
revisited in the media—see, for example, here ,
here,
and here.
The number
of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated
at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue
to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal
experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the
most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in
importance. So, what is being done to address
this issue?
Why the cheating objection to smart drugs doesn’t work
The BBC reports today
that increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin—intended
as a treatment for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD)—to boost alertness and brain power. Reports of the increasing popularity of ‘smart
drugs’ are synonymous with concerns about cheating (see here, here, and here):
surely, the worry runs, taking drugs that help you do well at college is
equivalent to bribing your examiners into awarding you high marks? Those who take cognitive enhancement drugs,
just like those who bribe their examiners, are better placed to beat their
peers in the competition for the best educational qualifications and jobs, and
so cognitive enhancement is unfair. In
this case, shouldn’t cognitive enhancement be banned in schools and colleges?
Knowledge may be power, but is it healing?
The
explosion of medical information on the internet is a good thing,
right? Patients worried that their condition
is not being taken seriously, those who want a second opinion but are worried
about upsetting their GP by asking for it, and those with symptoms too trifling
or embarrassing to take to a doctor—all these people who, fifteen years ago, may
have felt at a dead end with the medical profession can now use
the internet to research their conditions from the comfort of their own homes.
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