Skip to content

The incoherence of Obama’s position on marijuana

The incoherence of Obama’s position on marijuana

           U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent interview in the New Yorker was surprisingly interesting.  While some have noted his disapproval towards a (hypothetical) son playing pro football out of concussion concerns, the more remarkable comments concern marijuana:  he says it’s “not very different from…cigarettes” and “I don’t think it’s more dangerous than alcohol.”  He did not come out in favour of legalisation, however, and this makes his views (and, to a certain extent, the position of the executive branch charged with carrying out federal law) incoherent – by which I mean, his various positions taken together are inconsistent.  Obama may well ‘evolve’ further as he did with gay marriage, but any such evolution will likely come too late in his term to lead to an effective, permanent change in policy. Read More »The incoherence of Obama’s position on marijuana

Doctors: turn off your computer and listen to your gut

‘Between the NHS and social care, there must be total commitment to ensuring that interaction is paperless, and that, with a patient’s consent, their full medical history can follow them around the system seamlessly.‘ So said Jeremy Hunt,the Health Secretary, on 16 January 2013. And NHS England say that: ‘Our vision is for a fully integrated digital patient record across all care settings by 2018’.

It sounds like a good idea. It’s not. Or not in its present form. Many of the concerns that have been expressed relate to privacy/confidentiality. Those concerns are real. But even if they can be satisfactorily addressed, electronic health records have the potential to do great harm. They divert attention from the patient to the screen, and they cause clinical skills to atrophy.

David Loxterkamp recently observed that the computer in the consulting room is a Frankenstein-like creature: ‘….we have created a place in our exam rooms for a computer that needs our care and feeding. It now directs the flow and purpose of an encounter that once unfolded organically according to the particular needs of the patient.’ The electronic servant becomes the master. Read More »Doctors: turn off your computer and listen to your gut

Computer consciousness and ethics

Nature, the prestigious international science journal, often publishes short science fiction stories in a column called “Futures.” According to Nature, “Featuring short stories from established authors and those just beginning their writing career, Futures presents an eclectic view of what may come to pass.” (see here)

As many philosophers and ethicists have recognized, eclectic views of what may come to pass can be philosophically and ethically useful. They may, for example, suggest possible future scenarios that raise difficult ethical questions – questions we ought to begin to sort through now. They may also stimulate insight into important ethical and conceptual questions at the heart of current ethical debates. Consider, for example, a story recently published by Eric Schwitzgebel and R. Scott Bakker. I won’t spoil the story (do read it here), but I want to lift an element of the plot out of context, so I need to say something about it. It involves the creation of consciousness on a computer. More specifically, it involves the generation of a whole society of interacting conscious agents – people like you or me, living in a world they experience, pursuing goals and relationships and all the rest.Read More »Computer consciousness and ethics

Three Arguments Against the Belgian Child Euthanasia Bill Criticised

By Luke J Davies. Follow Luke on Twitter.

Last week the upper house of the Belgian Federal Parliament voted (50 to 17) that euthanasia should be legal for children suffering from a terminal illness that is causing severe physical pain. [1] The bill legalizing the practice requires that the child understand what euthanasia is, and that parents provide their written consent. Unlike the Netherlands, which allows euthanasia for children over the age of 12, there will be no minimum age in Belgium. (Find the story here, here, here, and here.)

The passing of this bill, which has yet to be turned into a law [2], has been met with severe criticism in Belgium and abroad, mostly from religious and conservative groups. From what I have read, there are three main lines of argument against allowing euthanasia for children. The first maintains that allowing euthanasia for children is the first in a long series of steps that will lead to some Third Reich-like eugenics program. The second maintains that children do not have the capacity to make a decision to be euthanized. The third maintains that the legalization of euthanasia for children would lead to parents or health care professionals putting pressure on children to opt for that choice. I believe that each of these arguments fails to demonstrate that the bill should not pass, and will spend the remainder of this post explaining why.  

Read More »Three Arguments Against the Belgian Child Euthanasia Bill Criticised

Kissing Grandparents and Consent

It has been reported that the co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum in the UK has advocated that parents ought to refrain from forcing their child to kiss a grandparent against their will, since this could lead to confusion over sexual consent. Kate Emmerson claims that children should be taught that their bodies are their own from “age zero”, and that the practice of forcing children to kiss a relative against their will is in tension with this message.Read More »Kissing Grandparents and Consent

Oppressing smokers for fun and profit

According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (Prabhat & Peto 2014),

Tripling tobacco tax globally would cut smoking by a third, and prevent  200 million premature deaths this century from lung cancer and other diseases. (here)

This should, of course, be instituted immediately. It is almost the perfect public policy: self-interest dressed up as sanctimony. Not only will we make the lives of non-smokers better at the expense of smokers, but we can do so whilst telling smokers we are doing it for their own good!Read More »Oppressing smokers for fun and profit

Tis’ the season of pardons

This year Alan Turing got a posthumous royal pardon for his conviction of homosexuality. Justice Minister Chris Grayling said: “Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man.” Last year I blogged here on why asking for a pardon of Alan Turing might be a mistake. I still stand by my criticism: the fact that Turing was exceptional doesn’t mean he was above the (unjust) law or that he is more morally deserving than any other victim of that law.

Meanwhile in Russia, an amnesty has been called for 20,000 prisoners. This includes plenty of political prisoners, most notably members of Pussy Riot and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The official reason for this seems to be the 20th anniversary of the adoption of Russian constitution, but in practice it might of course be a festive way of defusing some criticisms before the winter Olympics. Should the freed dissidents and their supporters now feel grateful to Putin?

Read More »Tis’ the season of pardons

Emergence’s devil haunts the moral enhancer’s kingdom come

It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.

I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose “the X factor”, not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.

Read More »Emergence’s devil haunts the moral enhancer’s kingdom come

Happiness, meaning and well-being

If someone were to ask you what you want from life, how would you reply? Plausible answers might include: ‘to be happy’, ‘to be successful’, ‘to make a difference’, or perhaps ‘to experience as much as possible’. Whatever these aspirations mean in their detail, they capture various implicit assessments of what we think it means to live a life that is good for us. A recent psychological study presents interesting data that suggests that two of the things we might want in our lives – happiness and meaning – sometimes do not go together. In fact, some of the things that lead to a life being happy are negatively associated with it being meaningful and some of the things that seem to confer meaning detract from happiness. If this occasional incompatibility is in fact the case, does this mean that we must sometimes make a decision about which to pursue?Read More »Happiness, meaning and well-being