Animal antibiotics
Suppose that a despotic political regime is keeping its citizens in cramped and unhygenic labour camps. The survival and and economic productivity of the incarcerated individuals is sustained only through the widespread administration of antibiotics which helps to prevent epidemics. It is difficult for international organisations to do anything about these work camps, but one thing they could do is cut off the supply of antibiotics. This would risk the lives of thousands of inmates in the short term, but can also be expected to put an end to the work-camp system in the longer term, since it would render the camps uneconomic.
Should the international organisations cut-off the supply of antibiotics? It is doubtful whether they should.
But now suppose we replace the work-camps with chicken houses and sow stalls, and the citzens with farm animals. Many farm animals held under cramped and unhygenic conditions are kept alive, and economically productive, only through the widespread administration of antibiotics. Restricting access to these antibiotics would force the agricultural industry to reform these practices. In this case it seems more plausible that antibiotic use should be restricted. At least, this is what Robert S. Lawrence writes in The Atlantic.
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.
Should the government have policies to deal with fear of zombies?
From the always sublime Dara O’Briain:
I give out when people talk about crime going up, but the numbers are definitely down. And if you go, “The numbers are down”, they go, “Ahh, but the fear of crime is rising.” Well, so fucking what? Zombies are at an all-time low level, but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. It doesn’t mean you have to have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies.
But let’s look at this in more detail. If there was a large demand for it, should the government have policies to deal with the fear of zombies? By zombies, we do mean non-existent flesh-eating fictional undead monstrosities that don’t exist.
What are ethical and unethical intentions to conceive a child?
In today’s blog, I want to ask you for your opinions on a question that has been bothering me for some days now. The question relates to the potential motivations of couples who try to have a baby. My question is: What are ethical – and what are unethical – intentions to conceive a child, and how do we asses whether these intentions are ethical or not? The reason why this question came to my mind is that I read reports on a legal case in German media that gave rise to very strong emotional reactions both in the court and in the media – and in me, to be honest. So, I want to warn everybody who is about to read on, because the case I am about to depict is truly shocking.
Last Monday, the District Court in Essen (Germany) convicted a couple for sexual abuse of their own baby (case number: AZ.: 23 KLs 148/11). What makes this case so particular is that they conceived their child out of the clear intention to sexually abuse it later.
The couple first got to know each other on a web forum, on which both were looking for casual sex. They acted out their mutual sexual fantasies over web chat and later met for sexual encounters. At some point, the man told the woman to be sexually interested in children. They agreed on the plan to have a mutual child on the purpose to involve it in their sexual encounters. To put their plan into action, they systematically met for sexual intercourse whenever the woman had her most fertile days; she got pregnant and carried out a boy. When he was five weeks old, the women took the boy to introduce him to the man. Then, as the woman’s lawyer describes it, when she changed the child’s diapers, the man held his erect penis besides the naked baby and took a picture. Later, the man sent this picture to one of his other sexual partners, via which it was passed on to the police, and the couple was arrested before any more harm could be done to the child. Both parents confessed. Also, their fantasies on what to do with the child once it was born were well documented in web chat histories. Hence, the court convicted the couple to 5 years (the woman) and 8 years (the man) in prison. Fortunately, the actual sexual abuse that took place was – as the court stated – comparably harmless, and the baby was neither physically nor mentally harmed.
When I read about this case, it deeply horrified me. It still does. Of course, the actual sexual abuse that took place is not to be played down. However, what makes this case so extremely disturbing is less the actual abuse but rather the intention out of which the couple wanted to have a child. However, from a legal point of view, the motivation out of which somebody conceives a child is not accusable. “Everybody can have a child for whatever reason they want” was explicitly stated by the court. Hence, the parents were convicted for the actual abuse (and related crimes). This huge discrepancy between our psychological reactions on the intention to conceive a child to abuse it (deepest disgust) and the juridical implications of this intention (none) made me wonder about the ethical implications of this case. I want to ask the question: It is unethical to conceive a child with the intention to abuse it? Or, on a more general and less provocative level, what are ethical and what are unethical motivations to have a baby and how do we distinguish them?
As a psychologist, so I am not familiar with the philosophical “toolkit” of how to approach such a case from an ethical perspective. My gut feeling is conceiving a child with the intention to abuse it is morally wrong – even if this intention is never put into practice later and no actual harm is done. However, I am not able to clearly pinpoint why this mere intention is unethical. Hence, I wonder about how we should ethically assess people’s intentions to give birth to children.
One idea that comes to my mind is that it might be the incredible degree of selfishness that makes the doing of the convicted couple’s morally wrong. Having a child to abuse it for one’s own sexual desires is one of the most selfish reasons thinkable So is it selfishness we should argue about to asses whether intentions to conceive a child are morally right or wrong? However, I think that the minority of children are conceived for entirely unselfish reasons. Some people might have children to serve their religion or their community, but having a child often is motivated by wishes related to self-fulfilment. So, is it unethical to have a baby to simply fulfil your personal dream of life? Or to conform to your society’s role expectations? Or in the hope that the child will feel morally obligated to support you financially when you are old? Although these motives do not reach the massive degree of selfishness described in the case above, would this mean that selfish reasons for conceiving a child are unethical (to a degree)?
Or, related to selfishness, is the attribute critical for ethical assessment that the intention was to do something harmful to the child? Does this make this intention particularly unethical? However, again, I think that also other intentions out of which babies are conceived in everyday life might be potentially harmful for the child – of course in far more subtle (and often unconscious) ways. For example, from my psychologist’s point of view it may well be (mental) harm doing if you use the child as a lever to keep your partner from leaving your violent relationship.
What are your suggestions on this issue? Are there any clear criteria of what makes motives to conceive a child unethical?
A World without Advertising?
Recently , UNICEF launched their Children’s Rights and Business Principles, the sixth of which says that businesses should ‘use marketing and advertising that respect and support children’s rights’. This is hard to deny, as is the claim that many companies are seeking unjustifiably to manipulate children and their parents for profit. Indeed there seems little reason to restrict only advertising inflicted on children. All of us are subject daily to ever more invasive and insidious targeted advertising, much of it online.
Some advertising – such as that outside my village for a Cub Scout jumble sale at the weekend – is not only harmless, but useful. It informs us of things we didn’t know and which we often find it helpful to know. But most advertising is not like this. It is what is often called ‘persuasive’ rather than informative, aiming at directing our choices in ways of which we’re often quite unaware. This is clearly true of ‘subliminal’ advertising, where the image in question is not registered by consciousness at all. But it is true also of a vast amount of persuasive advertising. We may be consiously aware of it, but it leads us without our realizing it to make purchasing decisions on the basis of considerations which we could not accept as relevant were they made transparent to us. There are various reasons for favouring one after-shave over another: aroma, price, healing properties. The fact that a link between the after-shave and excitement has been established in my mind through exposure to ads showing, alongside images of the product, someone surfing is not one of them.
Persuasive advertising, then, undermines our capacity for autonomy or rational self-government. It might seem remarkable that citizens of modern democratic societies allow businesses to do this to them. But it is not, since the very success of the practice depends on people’s not being fully aware of what is going on.
There are various possible defences of persuasive advertising. One is hedonistic. If I enjoy using the advertised after-shave more, because of the frisson I get when I splash it on, why does it matter what the source of my pleasure is? This response is likely not to persuade those who attach independent value to autonomy. But even hedonists might claim to take pleasure in the knowledge that they are able to make their own decisions rationally, knowledge which of course none of us can now have.
Another defence is economic. Advertising encourages consumption, and increased consumption is necessary for growth. This is a poor argument. Growth itself is undesirable, once an economy has reached a certain level (as all economies in the developed world have), since (see books such as Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and Wilkinson & Pickett’s The Spirit Level) wealth above a certain threshold does not greatly benefit its possessors, and also causes harmful inequality. The argument is especially implausible in the context of global warming.
Advertising also supports many worthwhile ventures, such as newspapers or art exhibitions. And doubtless there are other things that can be said in favour of it (it can be amusing, or aesthetically valuable in itself, for example). But its subversion of our autonomy is so great that any goods it produces are insignificant in comparison, and there are of course other ways to learn about the world, be amused, or encounter aesthetic value. Fortunately, philosophical suggestions don’t have to be feasible. So I recommend a world-wide ban on persuasive advertising from now, for one year. Then we could see how much we missed it.
Censoring Foetuses
In the US, Randall Terry is challenging Obama for Democratic leadership. Strangely, his reason for doing so is in order to be able to show graphic anti-abortion adverts featuring aborted foetuses, holocaust victims, and a black person being lynched. Continue reading
Experimenting with oversight with more bite?
It was probably hard for the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to avoid getting plenty of coal in its Christmas stockings this year, sent from various parties who felt NSABB were either stifling academic freedom or not doing enough to protect humanity. So much for good intentions.
The background is the potentially risky experiments on demonstrating the pandemic potential of bird flu: NSABB urged that the resulting papers not include “the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm”. But it can merely advice, and is fairly rarely called upon to review potentially risky papers. Do we need something with more teeth, or will free and open research protect us better?
Killing With Drones, Proportionality, and Trolley Problems
Reports of killing by drones are increasing. Initially they were exceptional, now they are commonplace. Every few weeks there is a report of another killing, invariably by the US, in some far off country. With the rapid pace of technological development, the investment being made into more and more autonomous systems, and little sign of this trend being checked, it can only continue. The ethicality and legality of such practices outside international armed conflict is extremely dubious. In the context of international armed conflict the practice is checked only by the concept of ‘proportionality’, a concept that is problematic generally, and is almost entirely unable to discharge the heavy burden that is imposed on it by the practice of drone killing. Continue reading
Ban on ES Cell Patents Deeply Immoral
Procedures that involve human embryonic stem cells cannot be patented, the European Court of Justice recently declared. Apparently on the basis that patents “would be contrary to ethics and public policy”
“The decision from the European court of justice is a legal clarification for a court case brought by Greenpeace against a German scientist, Oliver Brüstle, who patented a way to turn stem cells into healthy brain cells. The environmental group argued that Brüstle’s work was “contrary to public order” because embryos were destroyed to gather the stem cells used.
“The judgment effectively supports the Greenpeace view and imposes a ban on patenting work that uses embryonic stem cells on the grounds that it represents an immoral “industrial” use of human embryos.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/18/european-patents-embryonic-stem-cells)
This ruling is deeply immoral. In effect, it shuts down embryonic stem cell research by the back door. This ruling is only supported by a narrow, controversial position on the moral status of the human embryo. It imposes a conservative morality on all Europeans to the detriment of their future health.
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