‘Marriage is ONLY between a Man and a Woman’
A series of events have brought the issue of gay marriage to the fore. Nudged by the Vice President, Barak Obama came out in support. North Carolina, by contrast, voted to prohibit it. Closer to home, Mayor Boris Johnson recently put his foot down to prevent a religious group running the slogan ‘Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it!’ on London buses. This was in response to an earlier ad from Stonewall which read ‘Some people are gay. Get over it.’ These events, of course, have triggered rekindling of the debate. What strikes me most about opposition to gay marriage is how bad many of the arguments against it seem to be. Continue reading
Bold Private John Smith, VC, modified ‘t’ allele of TPH1 SNP rs2108977
By Charles Foster
There’s a significant association of PTSD symptoms with a particular allele, according to a recently published study from UCLA and Duke. Some of the ethical consequences are already being discussed. One consequence might be military. One might be able to detect and filter out PTSD-vulnerable recruits. Perhaps that’s a kindness. It would certainly seem militarily prudent. There might be legitimate qualms about creating a biologically callous warrior-class, but you’re not creating its components – you’re just collecting them together. You might not want to go to their parties, and you might wonder about the mutually brutalizing effect of corralling them in a barracks, but the exercise is really only a scientifically more informed version of the selection that goes on in any event. It’s not very interesting ethically.
But what if a gene for PTSD-resistance could be inserted or artificially switched on? It doesn’t seem fanciful. Should the military be permitted (or perhaps even required) to PTSD-proof their personnel? Continue reading
When the Law Should Ignore Incest
Worldwide media have been all over a case at the Strasbourg human rights court this week as it dismissed a man’s complaint over convictions for incest with his sister. Faced with a delicate moral question, the court ducked the issue, saying it fell within the ‘margin of appreciation’ (ie the area of discretion that the court leaves to member states in some areas of law). I think the law’s involvement in this case is a problem.
Psychiatric drugs to enhance conformity to religious norms, and conscientious objection
An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports on the (alleged) frequent use of psychiatric drugs within the Haredi community, at the request of the religious leaders, in order to help members conform with religious norms. Haredi Judaism is the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism. It is sometimes referred to by outsiders as ultra-Orthodox. Haredim typically live in communities that have limited contact with the outside world. Their lives revolve around Torah study, prayer and family.
In December 2011, the Israel Psychiatric Association held a symposium entitled “The Haredi Community as a Consumer of Mental-Health Services”. One of the speakers was Professor Omer Bonne, director of the psychiatry department at Hadassah University Hospital. Professor Bonne is claimed to have said that sometimes yeshiva students (yeshiva is a religious school) and married men should be given antidepressants even if they do not suffer from depression, because these drugs also suppress sex drive.
A moral argument against the war on drugs
By Julian Savulescu and Bennett Foddy
Former Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has argued that the war on drugs has failed and cannabis should be decriminalised. He argued that the hardline approach has brought “disastrous” consequences for Latin America. Having just returned from Rio, one can only agree. One of us was staying with an eminent professor of philosophy. We were returning to her house with her 11 year old daughter, only to have our way blocked by police with machine guns. They were hunting a drug lord in the local favela – this road was the only escape route and they were preparing for possible altercation.
Cardoso highlights the practical failure of a zero-tolerance approach. A zero tolerance approach to a crime like taking drugs must always fail, in the same way as a zero-tolerance approach to alcohol, prostitution or drugs in sport will always fail. Paradoxically, the worst thing you could do to the drug lords in Rio is not to wage a war on them, but to decriminalise cocaine and marijuana. They would be out of business in one day. Supplies could be monitored, controlled and regulated – the harm to users and third parties significantly reduced.
The case for legalizing drugs has been made often, most recently by Cardoso and by Australia’s foreign minister, Bob Carr, who this week co-signed a report declaring that ‘the war on drugs has failed’. The argument is nearly always put forward in terms of the burdens that the drug war has imposed on us in terms of crime and public health. And it is true that these things give us good reason to abandon Nixon’s war on drugs. But we so rarely hear a moral argument in favour of liberalizing drug laws. This is a mistake. Although experts have told us time and time again that things would be better without the drug war, politicians have ignored the expert advice because voters do not want drugs laws to be loosened. And voters feel this way not because they think they know better than the experts, but because they have moral objections to drug use. There is a hidden moral debate driving the war on drugs that we never seem to bring out in the open.
New Study Detects Free Will in the Prefrontal Cortex (UPDATED)
An impressive study to be released in the journal Science on Monday uses new imaging techniques to reveal exercises of free will occurring in the brain. The authors scanned participants in their experiments who were choosing a playing card from a freshly shuffled deck. One group of subjects were asked to: “Pick a card, any card” (using their free choice), whereas a control group were asked to select various specific cards (simply obeying a command). The explanation of how precisely free will was detected is somewhat technical, but it can be roughly understood this way: by subtracting the brain activity of the control group from those in the free will group, the experimenters were able to observe free will in the differences. They found numerous traces of free will occurring in the prefrontal cortex, which has traditionally been thought to be the seat of executive control.
Kony 2012 and Saying What You Mean
Kony 2012 has become the highest profile issue of international justice on social media by far. For those without a Facebook account, Kony 2012 is a slick 30-minute YouTube film about Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. The video explicitly seeks to mobilise support for efforts to arrest Kony, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, particularly against children. As I type, the video, released Monday, is approaching 70 million views. The video has also attracted a fair share of criticism, much of which I’m not sure is honest.
Arbitrary Execution: Why the Law Needs Help from Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy
On February 29th, 2012, Robert Henry Moormann was executed in Arizona for murder. Back in 1984, he was in prison for kidnapping and molesting an eight year old girl, when the state gave him three days of compassionate leave. His elderly adoptive mother took a long bus trip to go and meet him. After an argument in a motel room where she was staying, he beat, stabbed and suffocated her, then dismembered her body. He asked a number of local businesses if he could dispose of “spoiled meat and animal guts” in their refuse containers, before disposing of most of her remains in bins and sewers around town. He also asked a prisoner officer to dispose of a box of what he described as “dog bones”. This behaviour raised suspicion. Moormann claimed not to remember the details of the crime, and at the original trial, Moormann’s lawyers mounted a defence of insanity. The jury rejected it. Since 1985, he had been living on death row while his appeals process was gradually exhausted.
In light of the gruesomeness of his crime, it is easy to think that if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, Moormann did. But the contention of Moormann’s defence lawyers that he was intellectually disabled casts a new light on the case.
Is it OK to have an affair if your partner is asexual?
I am desperate to start a sexual relationship with an old acquaintance but his wife, who has no interest in sex, would be appalled if she knew. Does that matter?
I read this in the Guardian’s ‘Life & Style’ section. Every week, a reader can present a dilemma she/he is faced with in her/his ‘private’ life and ask other readers for advice.
The full story goes like this:
I recently reconnected with an old classmate from my teens, and we fell in love almost immediately. We are in our early 50s and both in long marriages to good people whom we love. Leaving our spouses is not an option [....] Despite our desire for each other and the fact that his wife and my husband may be asexual, my friend and I have not slept with each other. My husband has given me permission to have a lover, but my friend’s wife would be appalled if he asked for the same set-up. Shouldn’t someone with no interest in sex and minimal romantic attachment to their spouse (they are like roommates) allow that spouse to fulfil her or his needs for stimulation and affection (discreetly) elsewhere without calling it “cheating”? My friend and I are moral people, but life is short.
Some of the readers’ replies are:
Whose word do we have for it that his wife is asexual?…Oh, only his… What a surprise.
Of course it is ok! Go and fuck with everyone in sight and don’t bother!
Fortunately, other replies are more sophisticated. Most people seem to acknowledge the dilemma is real. None of the proposed options are ideal. For example, those who suggest asexual married couples should never have extramarital sexual relationships at the same time acknowledge that this solution is not ideal as sexual frustration may build up and may have devastating effects on the marriage. Those who suggest the individuals who are attracted to each other (henceforth ‘sexual’ individuals) should be honest about it to their partners, and that the ‘affair’ (consented to by all parties concerned) may be justified, realise this will make their ‘asexual’ partners unhappy, with potentially devastating effects for both marriages. Perhaps some will find it obvious that one of these alternatives is better than the other, but surely we must except that whichever option one chooses, there is some harm, or risk of harm.
Could what Savulescu and Sandberg, in their 2008 paper, have called ‘love drugs’ help resolve the dilemma?
Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages
By Brian Earp
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Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages
Valentine’s day has passed, and along with it the usual rush of articles on “the neuroscience of love” – such as this one from Parade magazine. The penner of this particular piece, Judith Newman, sums up the relevant research like this:
It turns out that love truly is a chemical reaction. Researchers using MRIs to look at the brain activity of the smitten have found that an interplay of hormones and neurotransmitters create the state we call love.
My humble reckoning is that there’s more to “the state we call love” than hormones and neurotransmitters, but it’s true that brain chemistry is heavily involved in shaping our experience of amour. In fact, we’re beginning to understand quite a bit about the cerebral circuitry involved in love, lust, and human attachment—so much so that a couple of Oxford philosophers have been inspired to suggest something pretty radical.
They think that it’s time we shifted from merely describing this circuitry, and actually intervened in it directly—by altering our brains pharmacologically, through the use of what they call “love drugs.”
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