Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an 'ought' from a series of mere 'is' statements, a mistake pointed out by David… Read More »Science and Morality
by Rebecca Roache
The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine. Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, this points to the worrying conclusion that some parents who have chosen a homeopathic alternative to the MMR vaccine believe that their children are immune to measles, mumps, and rubella, when in fact they are unprotected against these diseases.
This development marks another blow for the ongoing campaign to ensure that children receive the recommended vaccinations. Sir Sandy Macara, ex-chairman of the British Medical Association, has claimed that the UK has lower immunisation rates than some developing countries in which people have poor access to healthcare. The percentage of the UK population currently vaccinated against MMR falls well below the level needed to achieve ‘herd immunity’ – where the number of immune individuals in the population prevents the spread of disease, thereby protecting those who are not immune – and recent outbreaks of measles in Wales has led the Welsh Assembly to consider making the MMR vaccine compulsory. Such a move would be highly controversial, but is this a price worth paying to protect public health?
Read More »Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead
A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to report something useful. Not unexpectedly the anti-CCTV groups really dislike the idea. The Information Commissioner is somewhat sceptical but allowed a beta test to go ahead, as long as users had to pay for using it – this would allow their details to be checked and would reduce risks for misuse. However, at least one subscribe "thought it was his civic duty to sign up". Civic duty or profit-making voyerism?
Other things being equal, killing two people must be worse than killing one, and killing three people worse than killing two. Right?
But a new study by Loran Nordgren and Mary McDonell, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, suggests people don’t respond in such a rational way to the scope of a criminal act.
The study finds that people judge criminals who’ve harmed more people less harshly than criminals who’ve harmed fewer people. What’s more they’d punish them less severely. What’s more more, subjects turned out to be less willing to blow the whistle on a crime if there are more victims. What’s more more more, these results were not just produced with hypothetical examples in the laboratory: when the authors examined how juries in the US had reacted in real court cases they discovered a similar pattern. Juries handed out more lenient punishment to those responsible for harming more people.
The article recently published by J. McMahan on The New York Times provoked, quite unsurprisingly, both enthusiastic and polemic reactions. Alexandre Erler wrote an interesting post discussing some of the questions arose by the article and illuminating comments to the post helped to develop some relevant arguments.
McMahan proposal is not entirely new to the ones who are familiar with the debate about vegetarianism, as for instance David Pearce brilliantly discussed the same topic in his on-line book “the abolitionist project”. Pearce, as McMahan, starts from the idea that we should consider the suffering that happens in the natural world, as in the wild many animals are killed by predators in horrible and painful ways.
One possible solution is to reprogram those predators in order to turn them into “vegetarians”. The idea of “vegetarian” lions or tigers (Vions and Vigers, as Alexandre calls them) sounds a bit odd at the beginning, but then, when one thinks carefully about the issue, it makes much more sense. If pain is a bad thing, and we have a way to avoid it, why shouldn’t we? Leaving aside other problems, my intention is to focus on the question if we should reprogram not just predators, but also humans.
A new study from the Mayo clinic in the United States points to a frequent problem in certain types of medical research. When healthy volunteers or patients with a given condition take part in research studies they may have brain scans, CAT scans, blood tests or genetic tests that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. These tests are not done for the benefit of the individual, they are designed to answer a research question. But sometimes, quite often according to the authors of this new study, researchers may spot something on the scan that shouldn’t be there, and that could indicate a previously undiagnosed health condition. These ‘incidental findings’ generate an ethical dilemma for researchers. Should they tell the research participant about the shadow seen on their scan? Do they have an obligation to reveal to a research participant that they have found them to carry a gene increasing their risk for breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease? There is much agonising by ethics committees, ethicists and researchers about the problem of incidental findings, but there is a simple way of avoiding the problem. Anonymise research databases and tests so that there is no possibility of determining which participant has the breast cancer gene, or the lump in their kidney.
Read More »Incidentally… avoiding the problem of incidental findings
by Alexandre Erler
In a provocative piece for the New York Times, Jeff McMahan remarks that cruelty pervades the natural world: he stresses the vast amount of suffering and the violent deaths inflicted by predators on their innocent victims. He then invites us to consider a daring way of preventing such suffering and deaths: “Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy. If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?” McMahan’s conclusion, which he describes himself as “heretical”, is that we do have a moral reason to desire the extinction of carnivorous species, and that it would be good to bring about their extinction if this could be done “without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation”.
Read More »Should we rid the world of carnivores if we could?
In 2009 an article by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy (Volune 17, 2, pp. 202-227). Among other things, the authors argued that governments should engage in ‘cognitive infiltration of groups that produce conspiracy theories’. According to them, this involves governments developing and disseminating arguments against conspiracy theories, governments hiring others to develop and disseminate arguments against conspiracy theories and governments encouraging others informally to develop and disseminate arguments against conspiracy theories (2009, p. 218). In particular they suggest that government agents enter chat rooms and online social networks to raise doubts about conspiracy theories and generally introduce ‘cognitive diversity’ into those chat rooms and social networks.
Read More »An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
The Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York recently released a report that found that social services are often too quick to return maltreated children to the family home. These children may be better in care, the report claims. Reflecting on this question raises the related matter of the procreative liberty of individuals who are at highly elevated risk of having children who will be very aggressive.
The Pope arrived in Britain today, held out his “hand of friendship” and called on all the British people to remember:
Your forefathers’ respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity come to you from a faith that remains a mighty force for good in your kingdom, to the great benefit of Christians and non-Christians alike.
So far, so respectable. Many (though by no means all) historical British leaders were of course Christians, and Christianity does teach respect for truth and justice, mercy and charity, in broad terms at least. (Some will disagree that the Pope’s faith teaches justice or respect for truth when it comes to contraception, HIV, gay rights, and women’s rights, and some may point out that historically this faith was neither particularly merciful nor just – but let us put these quibbles aside.) It is not unreasonable to think that historical Britons drew their morals from their faith, and that this benefitted us in the present day, even if it is debatable whether faith was or remains a “mighty force for good”.
My problem is with what the Pope then went on to say:
