On the eve of his confession, Armstrong is apparently ruined. The International Cycling Union (UCI) has stripped Lance Armstrong of his titles. Sponsors and Tour organisers want millions of dollars returned. UCI president Pat McQuaid said, “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten.” But doping will always be present in… Read More »Armstrong Confesses: What Now?
In light of the fact that many readers will have an assortment of Christmas treats tempting them, I thought a post on impulse control would be timely.
In the now paradigmatic Stanford marshmallow experiment, children were given an option – one marshmallow which they could have immediately, or two marshmallows, provided they could wait 15 minutes. This option presents a problem of sorts. Is it better to have a small reward immediately, or a larger one after some delay? Common sense says that waiting is the better option. Doubling your reward whilst only paying a marginal cost of your time seems like the rational thing to do. Children who fail to wait are, therefore, seen as succumbing to temptation. A deficiency in self control leads them to make a poor decision.Read More »When to eat the marshmallow: new perspectives on impulse control
This week there were reports of the amazing advances being made in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Following just weeks of training, a 52-year old woman, paralysed from the neck down, was able to use her mind to control a robotic hand to pick up objects on a table, including cones, blocks and small balls, and put them down at another location. She was even able to use the hand to feed herself chocolate.
Having had two arrays of microelectrodes surgically implanted into her left motor cortex, Jan is wired up to a computer that has been programmed to interpret the signals her neurons emit. This computer then passes on the interpreted signals to the robotic arm, which moves in accordance with the signals in real time.
Aside from the awesomeness of the technology, the use of neuroprostheses such as this raises a whole host of interesting philosophical and ethical questions. Particularly as the technology gets more sophisticated and more integrated, the distinction between the machinery being used and the person using it will become increasingly blurred. In the video, Jan already describes how she went from having to ‘think’ the commands (‘clockwise, up, down, forward, back…’) to merely having to ‘look at the target’ to effect accurate movement of the arm. This phenomenon is sometimes labeled ‘transparency of use’, where a tool serves a person’s goals without itself being an object of effortful control.Read More »Mind-controlled limbs and redefining the self
In the final Uehiro Seminar of 2012, Brian Earp provides an absorbing analysis of the science and ethics of anti-love biotechnology. You can listen to the seminar here.
While some personal distress as a result of love may be an important means of self-development, certain forms of love may be particularly perilous. Examples given by Earp include an older person’s sexual love for a child, incestuous love, and the love that prevents an abused spouse from leaving their partner. In these cases love can become like an ‘interpersonal heroin’ – an individual may recognise the harm their love is causing them, but be unable to stop feeling it.Read More »Brian Earp on Anti-Love Drugs
UPDATE: AUDIO NOW AVAILABLE HERE.
Forthcoming talk: If I could just stop loving you: Anti-love biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical break-up
| Date & Time: | 30th Nov 2012 4:00pm-5:30pm |
| Description: |
Abstract: “Love hurts” – as the saying goes – and a certain degree of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since, as it is often argued, some types (and amounts) of suffering can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other essential components of a life well-lived. But other times, love is downright dangerous. Either it can trap a person in a cycle of violence, as in some domestic abuse cases, or it can prevent a person from moving on with her life or forming healthier relationships. There other cases of problematic love as well: |
The agency that regulates fertility treatment and embryo research in the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has asked for public views on two possible new forms of fertility treatment that promise to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial diseases to children. These diseases can be extremely severe, leading to (among other things) diabetes, deafness, progressive blindness, seizures, dementia, muscular dystrophy, and death.
Read More »Do we want “genetically modified children”? Yes, of course!
The International Cycling Union has stripped Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France wins . UCI president Pat McQuaid said: “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten.”
The UCI is acting in response to a “Reasoned Decision” by USADA , which claims Armstrong presided over “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”.
The decision includes the findings that:
“He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team, he enforced and re-enforced it.”
And the conclusion that, with their disposal of Armstrong:
“So ends one of the most sordid chapters in sporting history.”
Public condemnation has been swift, and harsh:
“Lance Armstrong has made it hard for anyone to trust cycling”
(British Cycling boss Dave Brailsford) .
“LANCE Armstrong is a creep. A liar, cheat and a bully. So awful is Armstrong, you are right to question whether all his work for cancer patients is not just calculated camouflage to protect his abuse of drugs, his competitors, teammates and supporters.
He is not just part of the drug regime that saturated cycling when he was at his peak, but he has been that culture’s bodyguard. Its enforcer. And he remains so today, arrogantly dismissing the US Anti-Doping Agency findings by telling the world through Twitter that he was “unaffected” by the release of the 1000-page investigation findings. No one in sport has lived a bigger lie.”
It is hard in the face of the evidence presented to imagine that Armstrong rode clean. Nevertheless, he has become a scapegoat for endemic problems in cycling and sport that go far beyond the purview of any one rider, however successful and charasmatic.
Tonight at 8.30 p.m. Australian Time, SBS will be airing a show on Deisgner Babies. I’ll be live tweeting during the show, and in the meantime, here are a few links to some opinion pieces, media and papers I’ve written on the topic. To join the live tweeting, use the hashtag #insightSBS Recent Opinion Pieces… Read More »Designer Babies
Lance Armstrong may be stripped of his 7 Tour De France wins after he announced today that he will mount no defence against USADA’s charges of doping throughout his career.
USADA have claimed this as a victory, calling the result “a reassuring reminder that there is hope for future generations to compete on a level playing field without the use of performance-enhancing drugs”.
If Armstrong is stripped of his Tour victories, the new list of “winners” will contain many names familiar to those who have followed cycling’s infamous doping scandals: Jan Ullrich (banned for doping), Ivan Basso (banned for doping), Andreas Klöden (accused of blood doping- the case was closed when he made a 25000 Euro payment to settle the charges, without an admission of guilt. NADA, the German anti-doping agency, have recently expressed an interest in re-opening the case), and Joseba Beloki (implicated though not charged in Operacion Puerto investigations). Of the new victors, only Jaan Kirsipuu has been neither implicated nor proven to be doping. If he is the hope that USADA is banking on, it is a slim one. Along with many who have previously been banned for doping, Basso and Klöden are still riding, still performing at a competitive elite level (5th in Giro d’Italia 2012 and 11th in Tour de France 2012 respectively). The Olympic gold medal in road cycling was won by Vinokourov, another convicted doper.
Read More »Why Does the USADA Want Convicted Dopers to Win the Tour de France?
‘I was always the life and soul of the party, flirting with everyone’, wrote Lucille Howe, in ‘Fabulous Magazine’, (22 July 2012), ‘but I wanted John to fall in love with the real, quieter me’. In the same article, Charlotte Ruhle notes how her psychotherapy helped her to recover from a broken relationship. ‘[My] friends started saying I….seemed more like my old self.‘
The media, and indeed our ordinary conversations, are awash with this sort of language. Not only are we conscious – having a sense that there is an ‘I’ that is in some sort of continuity with the ‘I’ that existed yesterday, will hopefully exist tomorrow, and to whom things happen – but we have firm convictions about the nature of the ‘I’. When it is not allowed to express itself – to ‘be itself’, we complain. Depending on our education, we say that we’re ‘out of sorts’, ‘not myself’, or ‘ontologically vertiginous’.Read More »On being yourself
