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Ethics

The immorality of public consolation in the face of ageing

In case you didn’t know: The EU is currently celebrating the “European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations”. The paramount aim of this initiative is to increase the well-being of the elderly by raising awareness that they can still contribute to society by ageing actively, that is, utilising their abilities for their own good and the good of society. In the best case, according to this initiative, not only older people will benefit from ageing actively but also younger ones who do not have the experience and wisdom of earlier generations. Although this is a noble aim, the answer to the question why there should be such a European Year is a gross and seriously immoral distortion of reality: “Because, too often, getting old is perceived as a threat instead of an achievement, both for individuals and for societies. […] Staying active as we grow older is key to tackling the challenge of ageing.”Read More »The immorality of public consolation in the face of ageing

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?Read More »Bold Private John Smith, VC, modified ‘t’ allele of TPH1 SNP rs2108977

Linguistic social engineering?

There are a few sure methods to get people into arguments. Gender equality works well. Correct language is even more potent. Add children to the mix, and everybody has an opinion. This spring the big debate in Sweden has been about “hen”, a new pronoun intended to mean “he or she”. Introduced broadly (?) in a children’s book, it has led to a widespread debate about gender neutrality, the power over language and (of course) whether those politically correct Swedes have gone too far.

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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.

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A Modest Proposal for the Media: The Science Haze

I love the BBC. Almost every day I browse the BBC News web site to catch up on current affairs. I especially love the BBC’s high quality TV and radio documentary output, and I confess that I am an avid Radio 4 listener.

Alas, my love for the BBC has not blinded me to one particularly jarring asymmetry in the Corporation’s (otherwise delightful) visage . It is manifested in a disconnect between its approach to programming on matters of science, and that on matters of ethics, or “Religion and Ethics” as the BBC officially categorizes the latter (in an undifferentiated glob) on iPlayer.

In the hope that some BBC types (preferably at the senior commissioning level) are also readers of Practical Ethics, I present to you a programme proposal that, if taken up, would go some way toward healing this deformity. In fact, if virtually all the BBC’s current science programming were scrapped and replaced with programming of the sort I am about to propose, the woeful gap between the BBC’s science programming and its ethics programming would all but disappear. I hereby present my modest proposal:

Read More »A Modest Proposal for the Media: The Science Haze

‘Please drink responsibly’: voluntary intoxication and generating responsibilities

A scenario:

You are with a group of friends in a bar on a Friday night and one of them has had rather a lot to drink – much more than he usually does. He seems happy, despite slurring his words and taking a few moments to get his balance. But, as he slurs his goodbye at the door of the bar, it flashes through your mind that maybe you should walk him home. ‘Nah’, you think, ‘he’ll be fine’ – and he would certainly protest. Ten minutes later he stumbles and falls into the river and drowns. Did you have a duty to walk him home? What about the others in your group? Moreover, might that duty have been a legal one?

 

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A Teeny-Weeny Baby Puzzle

I have been thinking about babies recently, for various reasons (let’s call them Saul).  It had always struck me that procreation was a classic example of a prisoner’s dilemma.  It was good for each couple to have children, but if everyone churned out these resource-chomping monsters it was disastrous for us all.

That was until friends (philosophers) kindly pointed out that study after study shows that having children actually makes people unhappy.Read More »A Teeny-Weeny Baby Puzzle

Nudge Drugs: should the social side-effects of medications weigh into public health?

You are a public health official responsible for the purchasing of medications for the hospitals within your catchment area in the NHS. Your policies significantly affect which, out of the serpentine lists of heart disease medications, for example, are available to your patients. Today, you must choose between purchasing one of three heart disease medications: Drug A, Drug B, and Drug C. They are pretty similar in efficacy, and all three have been being used for many years. Drug B is slightly less expensive than Drug A and Drug C, but there is emerging evidence that it increases the likelihood that patients will take “bad bets,” i.e. make large gambles when the chance of winning is low (and thus might contribute to large social costs). Drug C costs a tiny bit more than Drug A, but there is some evidence that Drug C may help decrease implicit racial bias. You have been briefed on the research suggesting that implicit racial bias can lead to people making choices that consistently and unintentionally limit the opportunities of certain groups, even when all the involved parties show explicit commitments to social equality.  Finally, there is emerging evidence that drug A both helps people abstain from alcohol and dissociates negative emotional content from memories.

Which drug should you purchase?

 

Let us begin to think about this question through the lens of the idea of the “Nudge,” which has exploded onto the public sphere (and blogosphere) since Thaler and Sunstein’s published their book, “Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness.”   (see the blog here). I briefly and incompletely introduce nudges here, in hopes that we may soon move on to discuss the kind of “nudge drugs” our thought experiment considers.

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Unbelievers are bad and have defective brains

By Charles Foster

You’d better believe that believers are better.

So far as religiosity is concerned, humanity, say Cooper and Pullig , is divided fairly neatly into three clusters: Skeptics, Nominals and Devouts. The bulk of the evidence suggests that there is a relationship between religiousness and moral reasoning. That relationship, though, is complex. Its anatomy needs a lot of exploration. Cooper’s and Pullig’s exciting and audacious paper, which concerns broadly Christian religiosity amongst marketing students in the US, suggests that narcissism is a factor in explaining why individuals make wrong ethical decisions. That in itself isn’t surprising. Narcissism, for instance, is a predictor of white-collar crime in business: narcissistic individuals tend to think that they are above the laws that govern the behaviour of lesser mortals. What is perhaps surprising is that ethical decision-making was affected by narcissism only in Nominals and Devouts. The reasons for that can be speculated about very entertainingly. But I want to highlight one almost incidental observation: ‘Notably, Skeptics in general exhibit worse ethical judgment than respondents in either of the other two clusters.’

Read More »Unbelievers are bad and have defective brains