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?
Ferretting out fearsome flu: should we make pandemic bird flu viruses?
Scientists have made a new strain of bird flu that most likely could spread between humans, triggering a pandemic if it were released. A misguided project, or a good idea? How should we handle dual use research where merely knowing something can be risky, yet this information can be relevant for reducing other risks?
Water, food or energy: we won’t lack them
The world is full of problems. Pollution is a problem. The destruction of the coral reefs, the eradication of the rain forests, the mass extinction of animal species are problems, and tragedies. Loss of biodiversity is a problem. Global warming is a problem. Poverty and the unequal distribution of resources are major problems.
But lack of basic resources isn’t a problem. We’ll have enough food, water and energy for the whole human race for the forseable future, at reasonable costs. Take a worse-case scenario for all three areas, and let’s look at the figures.
Sam Harris is wrong about science and morality
By Brian Earp
I just finished a booklet by “New Atheist” Sam Harris — on lying — and I plan to write about it in the coming days. But I want to dig up an older Harris book, The Moral Landscape. Why? Because it still makes me grimace.
I say “still” because I read the book months ago. I just haven’t yet vented my bafflement. Permit me to gripe, then, about Harris’ (aging) “bold new” claim — presented in his book — that science can “determine human values” or “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” or “give us answers about right and wrong” or however else you package this fiction.
In his new book (the one about lying) Harris says, in effect, you should never, ever, do it — yet his pretense in The Moral Landscape to be revolutionizing moral philosophy seems to me the very height of dishonesty. What he actually does in his book is plain old secular moral reasoning — and not very well — but he claims he’s using science to decide right from wrong. That Harris could be naive enough to think he’s really bridged the famous “is/ought” chasm seems incredible, and so I submit that he’s exaggerating* to sell books. Shame on him.
*A previous version of this post had the word “lying” here, but I was told that my rhetorical flourish might be interpreted as libel. I hope “exaggerating” is sufficiently safe. Now onward to my argument:
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.
Geoengineering, Science, Consequentialism and Humility
The Uehiro Centre has recently hosted Clive Hamilton who was visiting from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. Hamilton is well known for his work on the politics of climate change. While here he presented a paper on the ‘Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering’, which he has now been revised and is available at his website: http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/ethical_foundations_of_climate_engineering.pdf.
Climate engineering is also known as ‘geoenginering’ and the ethics of geoengineering has recently been discussed in a joint paper by several members of the Uehiro Centre who take a view that Hamilton strongly disagrees with: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/21325/Ethics_of_Geoengineering_Working_Draft.pdf
Hamilton’s paper is an attack on consequentialist justifications for geoengineering – attempts to use technology to try to manipulate the Earth’s climate in order to ameliorate the effects of climate change. He sees such attempts as part and parcel of a world view which springs from the Scientific Revolution. He tells us that: ‘The consequentialism of climate ethics is built on an unstated (and mostly unrecognized) understanding of the natural world, one that grew out of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century and the European Enlightenment philosophy that went with it.’ According to Hamilton, people who are in the grip of this scientific world view, including consequentialist philosophers, lack ‘humility in the face of nature’. The ground for this humility is, ‘… acceptance of our limitations in the face of the superior power, complexity and enigmatic character of the earth’. Hamilton sees the presumption that we might be able to ‘master’ nature as fundamentally misguided: ‘Climate engineering represents a conscious attempt to overcome resistance of the natural world to human domination …’, however, ‘… the sheer complexity and unpredictability of the natural world resists attempts at total mastery’.
Shocking behavior: Government scare tactics, smoking, and public health
Coming to a mini-mart near you. The FDA has just approved nine very grisly looking warning labels—to be slapped on cigarette packs throughout the USA. But will they work to cut smoking … or will they backfire?
Here are some of the top reasons why these labels may not only fail to achieve the FDA’s desired outcome, but could actually do the opposite – leading to more smoking, not less. Continue reading
What is it like to be a bee?
Do bees have feelings? What would that mean? And if they do have feelings, how should we treat them? Do we have a moral obligation toward insects?
Honeybees “exhibit pessimism” according to a recent study published in Current Biology, and summarized in this Wired Science article. Pay attention to the Wired headline – “Honeybees might have emotions” – and to these choice clippings as well: “You can’t be pessimistic if you don’t have an inner life.” And, “invertebrates like bees aren’t typically thought of as having human-like emotions.” The implication, of course, is that these invertebrates have been shown to have them.
Inner life? Human-like emotions? Is there “something it is like,” then, to be a bee?
From an ethics standpoint, questions like these make a big difference. Continue reading
Would the End of the World really be so Bad?
As always, we sentient beings on earth are at risk of being wiped out by some global catastrophe. Some of the risks – diseases or meteorites – are old; others – nuclear weapons or global warming – are more recent. They are discussed very well in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic’s edited collection Global Catastrophic Risks:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198570509.do?keyword=bostrom&sortby=bestMatches
In one sense, a catastrophe is just major systematic change. It needn’t be bad. But of course many people believe that the ending of sentient life on this planet would be a catastrophe in the evaluative sense. It would be very bad for most of the sentient beings living at the time of the catastrophe, and bad in some more impersonal sense since it would prevent many potential sentient beings from becoming actual.
Clearly the ending of sentient life isn’t the worst outcome imaginable. That would involve the existence of sentient beings, in great agony. But the question remains whether this kind of catastrophe would be worse than its not happening, with things continuing much as they are.
It’s at least arguable that it would not be worse. Most would accept that it could be good for some individuals – perhaps those with only a short time of intense agony left. But they would also think that the overall suffering in the world is counterbalanced by the good things in the lives of sentient beings, considered as a whole.
This seems very plausible as a claim about the lives of some such beings. But some individuals have lives of an extremely low quality, consisting sometimes of nothing much more than great agony over a fairly protracted period. How are we to weigh the value of all these different lives against one another?
In his An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946), the American philosopher C.I. Lewis suggested that we might attempt such comparisons by imagining that we ourselves have to live the lives of all those concerned, in series. It might seem that such a comparison relies on some controversial theory of personal identity. But it need not. Imagine that by some means your own life could be extended hugely, and that you would then be plugged into some machine that would ‘play back’ into your consciousness all the experiences of all sentient beings until there were no more left.
Of course, many of these experiences would be wonderful. But many of them would be very bad indeed. It’s not clear to me that this stream of experiences would overall be better for me than no experiences at all, since the amount of suffering would be so great that perhaps no amount of good experience could counterbalance it. If this is the right view, then a global catastrophe might be something to be welcomed, at least from the impartial or moral point of view.
In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain
In the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, Oxford neuroscientists in Irene Tracy’s lab have published a new study of the placebo effect with dramatic results.
In their experiment, test subjects were subjected to pain in the form of heat, while inside an fMRI brain imaging machine, and asked to rate their subjective feelings of pain. After the pain was induced, a powerful opiate analgesic drug, remifentanil, was administered by a covert injection, leading the subjects to report a slightly lower level of pain. Next, they were informed that a drug had been given, and their reported pain fell much more. And finally, they were told (falsely) that the drug had been withdrawn, upon which their pain returned to the level it was at before the drug was injected.
The experiment is significant for three reasons: first, it provides the strongest evidence so far that our expectations of benefit significantly contribute to our experience of suffering. Second, it shows that the benefit of a powerful modern painkiller can be completely eradicated if the patient believes she is not getting a drug. And finally, the experiment’s fMRI data showed that the positive effects were associated with the same pattern of brain activation as inert placebos, but that the negative effects were associated with activity in unrelated parts of the brain that are associated with increase in pain due to anxiety. This last point proves that the total elimination of the drug’s effect was not simply due to the removal of the beneficial placebo effect—rather, our minds have the ability to entirely block the beneficial action of a real analgesic drug.
The experiment has deep implications both for the neuroscience of pain and for philosophical questions in phenomenology. But it has immediate implications for the ethics of clinical practice as well. It is essential that we start to understand the power that our expectations have over our experiences. Prescribing a patient a pill for pain is simply not enough on its own; in fact, if the patient expects the pill not to work, it might be better not to prescribe anything at all.
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