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Julian Savulescu’s Posts

Abortion Should Be Decriminalised

Abortion remains a crime in Queensland and NSW in Australia. Queensland Parliament has just decided against decriminalising abortion. However, laws are obsolete and unclear, dating back over 100 years. Around 100,000 abortions are performed around Australia every year. In practice, early abortion is available on demand.

Abortion should be decriminalised. Early abortion should be freely and easily available on request. Late abortion should be freely and easily available at least for those who have a valid justification: significant fetal abnormality, threat to woman’s health or serious social reason, for example child pregnancy or rape. Family planning, including safe, free and open abortion services, is an essential part of a civilized society.

Failure to regulate abortion properly results in women being denied safe, effective abortion services, affecting their mental health and social welfare, as well as those of their family and society. It is stigmatising to women and health professionals to allow abortion to occur, while retaining it as a criminal offence. It is also moral hypocrisy.

Read More »Abortion Should Be Decriminalised

Should Russian athletes really be banned from competing in the Rio Olympics?

Julian Savulescu

Originally posted in The Conversation 

The audience vote is a resounding yes, all Russian track and field athletes should be banned from competing. But is the International Olympic Committee (IOC) justified in giving individual sports federations the right to decide whether athletes can participate in Rio 2016?

In the run-up to the IOC’s decision, anti-doping leaders from 14 countries signed an open letter demanding the Russians’ exclusion. A petition calling for the whole team to be banned was closing in on its aim of 10,000 signatures, while another arguing against a blanket ban had just managed eight.

The IOC decided to face the mob and take a more nuanced approach; it will allow each sporting federation to decide whether the evidence is sufficient to ban athletes in their discipline. Tennis players, who are regularly tested around the world, are in the clear, for instance, with cyclists set to follow.

But athletes in track and field are banned as a group, although individuals may compete as neutral athletes. Is this kind of “collective responsibility” – or “collective punishment” as Mikhail Gorbachev described it – fair?

Standards of evidence

There’s a genuine dilemma here and the situation is not nearly as clear everyone appears to think – and as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) pretends.

Read More »Should Russian athletes really be banned from competing in the Rio Olympics?

The Unfairness of Unattractiveness

In the job market being attractive is advantageous. According to economist Daniel Hamermesh, an attractive man can earn, over a life time, $230,000 more than an unattractive one[1]. Attractive solicitors raise more money for charities[2].  Very attractive individuals are less likely to engage in criminal activities, whereas unattractive ones have higher propensity for crime[3]. Attractive criminals are punished less severely than unattractive ones[4].

Both children and adults judge attractive people to be more helpful, more intelligent, and more friendly than their unattractive counterparts[5].

Cute infants elicit stronger motivation for care-taking than less cute ones[6]. Moreover, cute infants are rated as most adoptable[7].

Adults have higher expectations of attractive kids compared to non attractive ones[8] and mothers of attractive infants tend to be more affectionate, playful, and attentive when interacting with their children than mothers of less attractive infants[9]. Teachers expect better performances from attractive students[10]. Transgressions of unattractive children are judged more negatively than transgressions of attractive ones[11].

Being attractive is also an advantage in romantic relationships[12] as there is a positive correlation  between physical attractiveness and dating [13][14].

One response to unfairness is to get people to stop discriminating unfairly. This might work for some domains, such as employment where interviews could be conducted blind. But it won’t be possible to counteract all the potential downsides.

We can’t require people to like or fall in love with people they find unattractive. There are at least two possible responses:

  1. Assist people to find attractive what they currently find unattractive
  2. Assist people to be more attractive to those who currently find them unattractive

Both of these are reasonable solutions. The second is cosmetic enhancement.

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Article Announcement: Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a person?

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Professor Julian Savulescu has recently published an article on the treatment of Human-Pig Chimera in the online Aeon Magazine.  To read the full article and join in the conversation please follow this link: http://bit.ly/29NUj1c   Professor Savulescu has written on this topic in the Practical Ethics in the News blog previously: https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/06/organ-mules/.

Organ Mules

Julian Savulescu

While politicians wring their hands about sensible solutions to the organ shortage, scientists are progressing with genetic manipulations that may see human organs grown in pigs.

US scientists are creating novel life forms: “human pig chimeras”. These are a blend of human and pig characteristics. They are like mules who will provide organs to us. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). Horses and donkeys are different species, with different numbers of chromosomes but they can breed together.

In this case, they take a skin cell from a person and turn it back in time to make stem cells capable of producing any cell or tissue in the body, “induced pluripotent stem cells.” They then inject this into a pig embryo. This makes a pig human chimera.

However they do a modification to the pig embryo first. They use gene editing, or CRISPR, to knock out the pig’s genes which produce an organ, say the pancreas. The human stem cells for the pancreas then make an almost entirely human pancreas in the pig human chimera. It functions like an organ mule. (The blood vessels are still porcine.)

In this way, your skin cell could grow a new liver, heart, pancreas, or lung.

This is a technique with wider possibilities: other US teams are working on a chimera –based treatment, this time for Parkinson’s disease which will use chimeras to create human neurones.

CRISPR is also credited with enhancing the safety of this technique, with the BBC reporting  that a Harvard team were able to use the new and revolutionary technique to remove copies of a pig retrovirus.

Safety is always a major concern when science crosses new boundaries. But even if a sufficient guarantee of safety could be reached, are there ethical problems?

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Love by design: when science meets sex, lust, attraction and attachment

A version of this post was originally published in the Conversation 

You are on holiday with your partner of several years. Your relationship is going pretty well, but you wonder if it could be better. It’s Valentine’s Day and you find a bottle on the beach. You rub it. A love genie appears. He (or she) will grant you three special Valentine wishes. Here are some of your choices:

  • to have more or less sexual desire (lust);
  • to remain always as “in love” as you were when you first fell in love (romantic attraction);
  • to be more or less bonded to your partner emotionally (attachment);
  • to be (happily) monogamous or polygamous.

What would you choose? What should you choose? What would your partner choose? Would you choose together, if you could? What would you choose for your partner?

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Cross Post: Ideas for Australia: Rethinking funding and priorities in IVF – should the state pay for people to have babies?

Written by Professor Julian Savulescu and Professor Kelton Tremellen

This is a cross posting of an article which was originally published at The Conversation

How much should the state spend on helping people to have children? At present, government support for infertility treatment is approximately A$240 million a year. The success of fertility treatments such as IVF is good if you are under 35 years of age, but once a woman hits 40 it plummets, falling to an almost futile one-in-80 chance of producing a baby for women 45 years and older. This raises the question – is IVF a cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money? And what about for older women?

Decisions about funding are usually made on grounds of cost-effectiveness. In Australia, the cost-effectiveness threshold is about A$40,000 per “QALY”. A QALY is a quality adjusted life year. Thus the government will spend, for example, A$40,000 to add a year of full health, or improve the quality of life by 10% for 10 years.

Is IVF cost-effective? It depends on how we measure it.Read More »Cross Post: Ideas for Australia: Rethinking funding and priorities in IVF – should the state pay for people to have babies?

Shame on Sharapova? Time to Rethink the Banned List

Professor Julian Savulescu further discusses this subject at The Conversation

Maria Sharapova has been caught taking the banned performance enhancing drug Mildonium (Mildronate). It was added to the ever growing list of banned substances by WADA in January 2016. She claims to have not read the information sent via email informing athletes of the change of rules and says that she had been taking the drug since 2006 for a magnesium deficiency, an irregular EKG, and her family’s history of diabetes. Mildronate is marketed by the company as a performance enhancer (alongside other uses) and is one of Latvia’s biggest medical exports, accounting for up to 0.7% of its total exports.

Should we feel sorry for her?

Every professional athlete nowadays knows:

  1. Strict liability obtains – that is, they are responsible for everything they put into their bodies. Ignorance is no excuse.
  2. If you are taking any potentially, even vaguely performance enhancing substance you have to watch the WADA banned list like a hawk. It is added to on a regular basis. Indeed, substances may not even be specifically named but fall under a generic category of effect, such as accelerating tissue healing.
  3. If you are taking a banned substance for medical reasons, you need to get a therapeutic use exemption. These are very common: there were at least 550 in cycling from 2008-2014. For example, a cyclist with a diagnosis of asthma can take the beta stimulant, salbutamol. In 2011, 8% of baseballers had a diagnosis attention deficit disorder (and so are allowed to take ritalin, related to amphetamine). Of course, the distinction between health and disease is fuzzy, but that is another story. It is very possible that Sharapova would have been granted a therapeutic use exemption, if she had applied.

Sharapova is a professional. Even if her medical need for what is widely advertised as a performance enhancer is justified, she should have known how to handle the administrative burden around it. Strict liability obtains. She broke the rules and will face the consequences.

The more interesting question is: why was Mildonium placed on the banned list?

Read More »Shame on Sharapova? Time to Rethink the Banned List

Five ways to become a really effective altruist

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Written by Professor Julian Savulescu and Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

This is a cross-post of an article which was originally published in The Conversation

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement which aims not only to increase charitable donations of time and money (and indeed more broadly to encourage leading a lifestyle which does good in the world), but also encourage the most effective use of these resources, usually by looking for measurable impacts such as lives saved per dollar.

For an effective altruist, the core question is: “Of all the possible ways to make a difference, how can I make the greatest difference?” It might be argued, for example, that charity work isn’t the best use of time; a talented financier may be better off working for a bank, and use their earnings to pay for others to work for charities instead.Read More »Five ways to become a really effective altruist