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What Moral Virtues Should We Enhance?

What Moral Virtues Should We Enhance?

Yesterday evening in front of a record audience in the OxfordMartinSchoolbuilding, Dr. Molly Crockett delivered the Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: “Moral enhancement? Evidence and challenges” (a podcast of the lecture will soon appear in the events archives here)

In her engaging talk, Dr Crockett spoke of the emerging body of neuroscience research she and others have been conducting on neurobiological modifiers of moral behavior and how manipulations in neurotransmitter systems can affect that moral behavior.

For example, in a study where subjects were presented with two classic trolley problems, whether they had previously received an antidepressant that increased the availability of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the neuronal synapse (in this case, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor – SSRI) significantly shifted peoples decisions into a deontological, as opposed to consequentialist framework. Namely, the group that had received the SSRI was less likely to say it was ok to push a very large man off of a bridge in front of a trolley in order to save five workers who would certainly otherwise die.

From a deontological point of view, this increased aversion to harming others after taking the SSRI might be thought of as a moral enhancement, but might be thought of as impairment to a consequentialist.

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The NHS should Stop Wasting Money on Homeopaths and Homeopathic Hospitals and should Offer Placebo Pills to Patients Requesting Homeopathic Treatments

The NHS spends three to four million pounds per year on homeopathic remedies, despite conceding that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies actually work. They justify this expenditure on the grounds of patient choice: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/July07/Pages/nhs-homeopathy.aspx. In a post on this subject, on August 20th 2010, I took the view there is something right about this line of reasoning. If people want to choose homeopathic remedies that are known to be no more effective than placebos, rather than conventional medical alternatives, then they are making a foolish choice, but it is their choice to make and provided that they are not harming others it should be respected. However, I also argued that the NHS has a duty to manage its budget carefully. They should only pay for homeopathic remedies when these are cheaper than the conventional medical alternatives that they are replacing and they should not spend more money on homeopathic remedies than is necessary. Given that the NHS spends three to four million pounds on approximately 25,000 ‘homeopathic items’ per year, I calculated that the NHS spends an average of £140- per homeopathic item prescribed. This figure could easily be reduced. In the earlier post I offered two suggestions to help the NHS save money on homeopathy. First, on the grounds that homeopathic training makes no difference to the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, I suggested that the NHS should pay homeopaths minimum wage. Second, I argued that the NHS should reduce the cost of homeopathic remedies by making its own homeopathic remedies, or outsource the job to a competitive supplier who can reduce the price of homeopathic remedies.

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Sam Harris is wrong about science and morality

By Brian Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.)

WATCH MY EXCHANGE WITH SAM HARRIS AT OXFORD – ON YOUTUBE HERE.

I just finished a booklet by “New Atheist” Sam Harris — on lying — and I plan to write about it in the coming days. But I want to dig up an older Harris book, The Moral Landscape, so that I may express my hitherto un-expressed puzzlement about Harris’ (aging) “bold new” claim — presented in this book — that science can “determine human values” or “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” or “give us answers about right and wrong,” and the like.

In his new book (the one about lying) Harris says, in effect, you should never, ever, do it — yet his pretense in The Moral Landscape to be revolutionizing moral philosophy seems to me the very height of dishonesty. What he actually does in his book is plain old secular moral reasoning — as non-religious philosophers have been doing for a very long time — but he claims that he’s using science to decide right from wrong. That Harris could be naive enough to think he’s really bridged the famous “is/ought” chasm seems unlikely (Harris is a very smart writer and researcher, and I tend to like a lot of what he publishes), and so I submit that he’s exaggerating* to sell books. Shame on him (or his publisher).

*A previous version of this post had the word “lying” here, but I was told that my rhetorical flourish might be interpreted as libel. I hope “exaggerating” is sufficiently safe. Now onward to my argument:

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The cost of living and the cost of dying

X, a patient with reliably diagnosed PVS, lies in a hospital bed for years, fed via a nasogastric tube. He has not, and by definition never will have, any capacity for pain, pleasure or any sort of sensation. Devoted family members come each day to sit by his bedside, but he has no idea that they are devoted, or that they exist.
It is expensive to keep him alive. He occupies a bed and consumes a good deal of nursing time.
The NHS Trust responsible for his care has a limited budget. It decides that the money spent on maintaining his merely biological life would be better spent on dialysis machines. It can, and does, justify its decision in purely utilitarian terms. It writes in the minutes of the relevant committee meeting: ‘For the money we spend keeping X alive, we can save the lives of 10 kidney patients, each of whom will have a good quality of life for many years. The QALY arithmetic makes X’s continued existence nonsensical.’Read More »The cost of living and the cost of dying

Cabs, censorship and cutting tools

The smith was working hard on making a new tool. A passer-by looked at his work and remarked that it looked sharp and dangerous. The smith nodded: it needed to be very sharp to do its work. The visitor wondered why there was no cross-guard to prevent the user’s hand to slide onto the blade, and why the design made it easy to accidentally grip the blade instead of the grip. The smith explained that the tool was intended for people who said they knew how to use it well. “But what if they were overconfident, sold it to somebody else, or had a bad day? Surely some safety measures would be useful?” “No”, said the smith, “my customers did not ask for them. I could make them with a slight effort, but why bother?”

Would we say the smith was doing his job in an ethical manner?

Here are two other pieces of news: Oxford City Council has decided to make it mandatory for taxicabs in Oxford to have CCTV cameras and microphones recording conversations of the passengers. As expected, many people are outraged. The stated reason is to improve public safety, although the data supporting this decision doesn’t seem to be available. The surveillance footage will supposedly not be made available other than as evidence for crimes, and not stored for more than 28 days. Meanwhile in the US, there are hearings about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, laws intended to make it easier to block copyright infringement and counterfeiting. Besides concerns that critics and industries most affected by the laws are not getting access to the hearings, a serious set of concerns is that they would make it easy to censor websites and block business on fairly loose grounds, with few safeguards against false accusations (something that occurs regularly), little oversight, few remedies for the website, plus the fact that a domestic US law would apply internationally due to the peculiarities of the Internet and US legal definitions.

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Celebrity Culture

Every Saturday evening, and often on other evenings too, my daughters sit goggling at the TV talent show X Factor. Am I witnessing the long tentacles of the dreaded ‘celebrity culture’ we are said to inhabit reaching into my living room? I think not. I confess I find the show tedious, but as part of… Read More »Celebrity Culture

What is feasible?

Climate change raises questions of global distributive justice and I am interested in what kinds of actions might be considered as fair responses.  Recently, I have observed that some accounts of climate justice have been dismissed for being “infeasible”.  I have started to wonder what this means.   In ordinary language, “feasible” might mean “possible” or “likely”, even “easy” or “inexpensive”  – with infeasible meaning the opposite.   What kind of criticism is it to say that an account of climate justice, for example, the distribution of equal per capita shares of greenhouse gas emissions is “infeasible”?  It might be presented as an empirical claim: that such a proposal will not be acted upon, or, at least, is unlikely to be acted upon.  This does not mean that the account is lacking on normative grounds.  People are not always that good at being good.     Read More »What is feasible?

World funds: implement free mitigations

The future is uncertain and far. That means, not only do we not know what will happen, but we don’t reason about it as if it were real: stories about the far future are morality tales, warnings or aspirations, not plausible theories about something that is going to actually happen.

Some of the best reasoning about the future assumes a specific model, and then goes on to explore the ramifications and consequences of that assumption. Assuming that property rights will be strictly respected in the future can lead to worrying consequences if artificial intelligence (AI) or uploads (AIs modelled on real human brains) are possible. These scenarios lead to stupidly huge economic growth combined with simultaneous obsolescence of humans as workers – unbelievable wealth for (some of) the investing class and penury for the rest.

This may sound implausible, but the interesting thing about it is that there are free mitigation strategies that could be implemented right now. Read More »World funds: implement free mitigations

Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?

Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen. Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10.

 Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16 patients diagnosed as being permanently unconscious. They used an EEG machine, capable of being deployed at the bedside. Is this good news?

This important scientific study raises more ethical questions than it answers. People who are deeply unconscious don’t suffer. But are these patients suffering? How bad is their life? Do they want to continue in that state? If they could express a desire, should it be respected?

The imporMan in Prisontant ethical question is not: are they conscious? It is: in what way are they conscious? Ethically, we need answers to that. Life prolonging treatment has been and legally can be withdrawn from patients who are permanently unconsciousness. We need guidelines for when life-prolonging treatment should be withdrawn in these minimally conscious states. Paradoxically, it could be worse for some than being permanently unconscious. And in countries like the Netherlands, we need guidelines on whether and when active euthanasia should be performed. For some of these patients, consciousness could be the experience of a living hell.

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Holier and happier than thou?

Are ethical people happier? Many philosophers have claimed this, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. A new study claims it is empirically true, or more exactly that ethical people are more satisfied with life.

The 2009 study looked at cross-country data from the World Values Survey from the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. It looked at  people who agreed with the view that it is never justifiable to engage in ethically questionable behaviours like avoiding fares on public transports, cheating on taxes or taking bribes (35%) compared the rest. Controlling for things like gender, income, age, health, being married etc. the study found being ‘ethical’ by this standard increased the likeliehood of being very satisfied with life fairly significantly. The effect size is like a modest increase in income. A good reason to try to become a better person, or (as the paper suggests) for governments that are trying to increase subjective well being to do it by improving moral conduct… or is it?

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