Michael Ruse begins a recent short essay on what Darwin might teach us about morality with a striking question and an even more striking answer: ‘God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to… Read More »Is Morality Flimflam?
One of the consequences of the epistemic corruption of the climate issue is that by criticising the failings in epistemic duty of these scientists I will be seen as having taken a side. But there are no sides on factual issues: there are just the facts. Once we see a factual question in terms of sides to belong to, as if it were a matter of politics or war, we have allowed our vision to be distorted—usually by an ideological approach to value.
On the first order issue of the facts of the climate I do not feel obliged to take a position. Both hawks and skeptics offer evidence and arguments. The evidence is sometimes murky and the inferences subtle. Both sides can exploit our ignorance of the complex statistical techniques needed for analysing the data; either may use them to reveal the truth or torture the evidence till it says what they want, and we can’t tell the difference. Even where methodology is not complex, it is very hard for us laymen to weigh the relative significance of the points and counterpoints. For example, we have records of increasing temperature readings from measuring stations, significant numbers of which are poorly maintained and sited, such as being sited next to air conditioning outlets. Clearly there is a problem with that data, but it is a further empirical question to determine to what extent the data is degraded by the faults and whether that degrading merely weakens or substantially defeats the claim of warming based on it. And this is about the simplest example. The whole issue is riddled with such imponderables for anyone who is not going to learn a great deal more about climate science than most of us can or should. For these reasons, laymen should not hold strong opinions about the first order facts at issue. Insofar as we must have some opinion, we must. attend not only to the first order claims and counterclaims but also to the epistemic character of those making the claims, to the epistemic character of the environs within which they are working, to question of the reliability of expert testimony and finally, to the epistemic character of the public debate. Here I have been concerned with epistemic character, but I note before moving on that expert testimony is considerably less reliable than we might hope, and especially unreliable about complex systems (see Tetlock Expert Political Judgement).
The evidence I have summarised is, I believe, sufficient to conclude that climate science has fallen prey to a corruption of its epistemic character. Not only did the individuals fail in various epistemic duties; they did not regard their faults as vices, but rather, as virtues, and knew that their activities were quite acceptable with the field. The individuals concerned are eminent in the field and the institution is a central one within climate science. The same faults have been manifested by other climate scientists in other circumstances. So this is not a matter of individual human foible and weakness. The epistemic virtues of science, when practised, are sufficient to protect science from those. No. The defects are sufficiently severe and pervasive to have resulted in epistemic corruption.
Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion
Homeopathy is form of alternative medicine which was first developed in the late 18th Century and has been hovering on the fringes of medicine ever since. Homeopathic remedies are prepared by a process of extreme dilution of a harmful substance and it is claimed by homeopaths that a substance taken in very small amounts will actually cure the symptoms it tends to cause when taken in larger amounts. This is the homeopathic principle that ‘like causes like’. Some homeopathic remedies are diluted to such a degree that it is hard to see how they could possibly cause anything, even if the principle of ‘like causes like’ was accepted as a principle of conventional science. The Society of Homeopaths concedes that this is mysterious and gestures at quantum physics as a possible means of integrating homeopathy with mainstream science: http://www.homeopathy-soh.org/about-homeopathy/what-is-homeopathy/./. The author Jeanette Winterson, who is an advocate of homeopathy, gestures to nanoparticles to integrate homeopathy with mainstream science: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/nov/13/healthandwellbeing.health.
In Australia, Norrie is understood to be the world’s first person to have ‘Sex Not Specified’ on their birth certificate. The NSW government has legally recognised that Norrie is neither male nor female. “Norrie, 48, was born in Scotland and registered as male at birth. At age 23 Norrie commenced sex and gender conversion to… Read More »Choose Your Sex: Male, Female or Neither … or Both
Over at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses some new books on the policy implications of so-called 'positive psychology'. Positive psychologists set out to use scientific methods to study, not suffering, depression and psychopatholoy, but the good things in life: what makes people happy, and what doesn't. The most remarkable set of findings of this growing body of research is that many of the things that we expect would make us happy — or unhappy — don't really, or not in the way we believe. For example, winning the lottery has a very short lasting positive effect on people's happiness levels; being seriously handicapped in a car accident only a short lasting negative effect. And above a certain level, economic growth and material wealth do not seem to have much of an effect on people's happiness or 'subjective well-being'. What are the policy implications? In one of the books discussed, Derek Bok makes suggestions that would make people on both the left and right unhappy (though probably not for very long). He concludes that relentlessly aiming at economic growth is a waste of time — but similarly that we should not worry much about growing inequality. It does not make people at the bottom of the scale unhappier, so why care about it?
Once upon
a time, there were a queen and a king who had three children, all of them boys.
They both loved their children dearly and made sure they had everything they
might need to flourish. Nevertheless, the queen and her husband still felt that
their family was incomplete without a daughter. They had hoped to have one
after the birth of their first son, but both of the queen’s subsequent
pregnancies had produced boys. As she was now getting close to the age when she
could no longer reasonably hope to have more children, she and her husband were
worried that their wish for a daughter would never be fulfilled. Finally,
deciding not to leave what might be their last attempt to chance, they traveled through the
kingdom to solicit the assistance of an eminent enchanter. He was a wise man
renowned to have produced many miracles. Feeling sympathy for the royal couple,
the enchanter granted their request and prepared a special brew for them to
drink. Nine months later, the queen gave birth to a
beautiful daughter.
Read More »Should parents be allowed to pick their children’s sex for non-medical reasons?
Israel has come up with a new answer. In Israel, many orthodox Jews will accept an organ but have religious objections to donating one. It has one of the lowest organ donation rates. So there is a move to change this: sign a donor card, and you and your family move up in line for… Read More »How should we address the organ shortage problem?
Is it true that “everyone’s a winner”, as Julian Savulescu suggested recently on this blog , if we price life and body parts? Let’s accept that if there is a valid objection to buying and selling body parts, it must be grounded in the recognition of a harm that would come to some person or group of people. Consider, then, Savulescu’s suggestion that we should price body parts, and engage in buying and selling of them. We could categorize the potential harms that it might generate under the following headings:
(1) Harm to the participants in the transactions: donors, recipients, or facilitators
(2) Harm to specific third parties
(3) Harm to society at large
Read More »I Don’t Care Too Much for Money, Money Can’t Buy Me Lungs
When doing something is worse than doing nothing
By: Julian Savulescu
According to a study reported in the Guardian, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics". The article came under the wonderful heading, “How going green may make you mean.”
How should an ethicist respond to yet another psychological study of human limitations? Some would no doubt argue that personal ethics should global, not local. Living ethically is a way of life, not an individual choice. That ethics should infuse all our choices, etc, etc
By: Julian Savulescu
Imagine someone offered you £1 000 000 to cross a busy road. There is a small chance you might lose your life or a limb. But most people would accept the chance. I certainly would. We do that kind of thing every day for trivial reasons, such as to buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer that might also kill us.
Would you be exploited if you crossed the road for a million dollars? Hardly. You were lucky to get such an offer that you judged made it worth crossing the busy road. After all, you could have stayed put or even crossed the road for nothing.
Read More »The Great Egg Raffle – Why Everyone’s a Winner If We Price Life and Body Parts
