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Charles Foster

Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford.

On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy

By Charles Foster

In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answers in Genesis’ is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s an expensive business. The total bill will be $24.5 million, of which $845,910 has been raised to date. ‘Partner with us in this amazing outreach by sponsoring a peg, plank or beam…’, pleads the website. A peg will cost you $100, a plank $1000, and a beam $5000. But if you buy a beam, you’ll also get a model of the Ark personally signed by Ken Ham, the President of ‘Answers in Genesis’.Read More »On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy

Education is child abuse

By Charles Foster

I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil.

Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and improving that power by education. It is a potent argument. Brains are very plastic things. Education increases the number of neuronal connections. You can see the effect of education with an electron microscope. Education produces change every bit as physical as the bruises produced by a violently abusive parent.

Read More »Education is child abuse

Palmistry for the genome: genetic fundamentalism fights on

by Charles Foster
A recent paper in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has the self-explanatory title Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: the role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism. 1. The German authors aren’t as cautious in their claims as they should have been. They should have noted, nervously, the reception given to the infamous ‘God gene’ hypothesis,2 and entitled the paper something along the lines of ‘Some not very statistically significant correlations (from which we can’t begin to infer a causative relationship) between the COMT Val 158 Met polymorphism and some behaviour that might be markers of, amongst other things, being nice, whatever that means, ignoring other non-correlations with other more plausible markers of being nice.’

Read More »Palmistry for the genome: genetic fundamentalism fights on

Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?

A colleague recently emailed me. Her daughter, just turned
12, had come back from school bearing an information leaflet about HPV vaccination
with the Glaxo Cervarix vaccine, and a consent form for the parent to sign.

The consent form nodded inelegantly to Gillick, asserting that ‘[t]he decision to consent or refuse is
legally [the girl’s], as long as she understands the issues in giving consent.’
There was no indication given, in the consent form or the accompanying
literature, as to whether and if so how that understanding would be tested. The
reality is that it won’t be tested at all.

Read More »Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?

Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation

Yesterday Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics at Queen Mary College, London, wrote in a Facebook update: ‘I am fed up with being asked to come into science/medicine projects, add a bit of ethics fairy dust, usually without getting any share of the pie, just to shut reviewers up. I am not doing it any more. If they think we are important, treat us with respect. Otherwise, get lost.’

Lots of people liked this. So do I. Ethicists have for too long been the invisible but essential backroom boys and girls of biomedicine; patronised by the practitioners of ‘hard’ science; seen as unimaginative but powerful bureaucrats who have to be kept sweet; as despised social scientists who wield rubber stamps made essential by other zeitgeist-dictating social scientists who want to keep their woolly-headed chums in a job; as factotums who don’t deserve to have their names on the papers any more than the temp who does the photocopying. Why is this? 

Read More »Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation

Greeks and geeks

At Harvard Medical School someone is screaming, reports the Boston Globe. ‘Death!’, he shrieks, ‘Why after all these years have you not appeared?’ He begs for euthanasia, tormented by his pain. Medical students listen to him.

His lines were written by Sophocles, and the students are listening because they have to: it is part of their curriculum.

The remarkable thing is not that Harvard medical students are being marinated in Sophocles, but that the Globe thought it worth reporting. Most medical students in mainstream western universities will get some ethics teaching. Sophocles is just one tool in the teachers’ toolkit. It’s a very effective one, by all accounts, but no different in kind from the lectures and seminars more conventionally deployed. Ethics teaching aims to teach students some problem-solving strategies, and to help them to recognise, evaluate, criticise, cull or cultivate the values that they themselves bring to the wards. 

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Mining your past to justify your terminal care: the idea of a ‘retrospective QALY’

There is no end to human suffering. There is a distinct end to the amount of money that governments will spend on reducing it. Someone has to make decisions about healthcare resource allocation. I am very glad it’s not me.

Many tools are used in the decision-making process. Not many emerge well from a viva with a philosopher.

Individual clinicians use intuition, experience, NICE
guidelines, the fear of hospital accountants and, no doubt, prejudice and the
tossed coin. But policy makers do not have the luxury of being able to account
only to their consciences and the local man in a suit. They have to say something in the minutes about the
reason for funding procedure X but not procedure Y. The real reason might be:
‘My grandma, whom I loved very much, had procedure X, and it did her good’, but
they can’t say that.

Read More »Mining your past to justify your terminal care: the idea of a ‘retrospective QALY’

Lord Justice Nero?

There is
a shrill, unpleasant new sound in the UK church. It is the sound of
conservative Christians saying that they are persecuted. It’s the voice of a
minority. And as Rowan Williams trenchantly observed: ‘The Church of England is
like a swimming pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end.’ The claim of
persecution is an insult to the vast numbers of Christians in the world who really
are persecuted. Please read the Bible and the history books before going on
prime time TV to say that you’re persecuted. 

Read More »Lord Justice Nero?

The Christian Right is Wrong

An interesting document has just dropped into my in-box. It is a ‘Declaration of Christian Conscience’, to be found at www.westminster10.org.uk

It is signed by a number of Christian leaders, all of them noted for their theological conservatism. Christians across the land are being urged to sign the declaration to demonstrate the demographic power of conservative Christianity.

Some of the lead signatories are my friends, and I agree with many of the principles articulated, but this document is a disaster. It will reduce significantly the ability of Christians to make a contribution to public life. And that’s a shame.

Read More »The Christian Right is Wrong