There have been dramatic headlines in the media ('Coma Man. I think…I’m alive') following the publication yesterday of a new study using brain scans to detect consciousness in profoundly brain damaged patients. For the first time scientists and doctors have demonstrated that some patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state may be able to communicate using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
You’ve stumbled upon a group of beings. For all you can tell, these beings are self-aware, intelligent, have emotions, solve complex problems, and call each other by name. They have thoughts and feelings and probably experience life in a way that is very similar to your own. Are they persons? And do you have moral obligations towards them?
Thomas White, Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has made news claiming that we have found such a group of beings. In fact, we’ve been living alongside them for a while now. They’re dolphins, and they’re people too. At an upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, White will be arguing that dolphins deserve the status of “nonhuman persons”. The research in marine science now overwhelmingly shows that dolphins have a highly sophisticated type of consciousness and inner world – and their cognitive capacity is second only to humans (yes, they beat chimps). With such high intellectual and emotional abilities, White claims they are entitled to special moral status and protections. The implications for current practices involving dolphins (in the context of fishing, entertainment, research and the military) are serious, since they would be considered chillingly unethical if they involved human persons.
Much attention has been paid over the last week or so to An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, a government-sponsored study which has taken over ten years to produce: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/27/unequal-britain-report
The study contains a huge amount of data, much of it on the gaps between richer and poorer groups. It turns out, for example, that the richest 10% own about one hundred times as the poorest 10%. Many appear to think that such inequality is obviously, in itself, a bad thing — something any government, especially one with its roots in socialism, ought to be doing something about. But in fact this is far from obvious. Imagine that each person in the poorest group were earning £100,000 p.a., and each in the richest group £10,000,000. Such a result would be described as an economic and political miracle. Or imagine that the government sought to deal with the real gaps between rich and poor merely by 'levelling down' the income of the rich to that of the poor. Given the absence of any trickling down, and the effects on incentives, the outcome of such a policy might well be to make everyone, both existing rich and existing poor, even poorer than they are now. The fact that the gap would have disappeared seems irrelevant in a situation when all have been made worse off.
Some of us know Professor Robert George as the ultraconservative Catholic bioethicist from Princeton. It could hardly be said that his writings have dominated discussion in contemporary ethics. It is thus slightly surprising to find out, in recent profile in the New York Times, that Professor George is a thinker of immense influence—the mastermind of the conservative side of the culture wars in the US, having the ear of rightwing political leaders and religious authorities, even of TV commentators. What is Robert George’s exciting new idea? There is nothing terribly surprising about his views. He is of course vehemently opposed to abortion, stem cell research, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. What is supposed to be exciting is that he claims to demonstrate the truth of these familiar conservative views using natural reason alone. Finally conservatives can conclusively prove that liberals are dead wrong, and they don’t even need to mention tradition and religion. Well, Professor George’s arguments might have awed George W. Bush, but on inspection they turn out less than impressive.
Now we move on to what is owed to other enquirers
The global temperature record produced by the CRU is one of the four sets of data on which the IPCC has relied, and in the opinion of many commentators it has been the most influential record and for that reason the most important one. It is therefore a matter of very grave concern that raw data on which it is based no longer exists. It means that no one can check whether the CRU global temperature record is well founded. The fact that it is in line with other records is not the help it appears when we remember that the tuning of the data manipulation underlying those records, and hence the claims for their veracity, has depended significantly on taking the CRU global temperature record as correct. Consequently our acceptance of it depends entirely on the epistemic integrity of the CRU, an integrity which has now been significantly impugned, and is further impugned by the loss of this raw data.
What, then, is their attitude to the obligation to share data? This quotation is illuminating ‘The two MMs [critics of Mann’s statistical techniques] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…..We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.’.[1]
Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 4: what is owed to other enquirers.
The days following the devastating
earthquake in
saw a surge in fundraising efforts from organizations all over the world. In
this charitable climate, the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins set up an aid
campaign of his own: Non-Believers
Giving Aid. Why donate through his group? In addition to rallying fellow
non-believers, Dawkins claims this offers a chance to “counter the scandalous
myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.” There are a host
of issues that could be discussed in relation to the aid effort and belief –
why we feel compelled to help distant strangers, the problem of suffering, the
idea of natural disasters as divine punishment – but I’ll concentrate on two
main objections to Dawkins.
One objection would be that the
entire project is simply a shameless propaganda scheme to get more “data” on charity
giving among non-believers. Its purpose is to give the non-believers some
numbers to point to, some “proof” that they give lots of money to charity. And
for that reason, it is just an opportunistic ploy that is deeply inappropriate in
a time of real crisis and tragedy.
There has been a good deal of discussion about obesity recently, since the Royal College of Surgeons criticized access to weight loss operations in the UK as a ‘postcode lottery’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/21/morbid-obesity-gastric-bands-nhs-costs
One common response – for example by Catherine Bennett in The Observer ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/24/homeopathy-obesity-gastric-bands ) has been that the question of unfairness shouldn’t be permitted to arise in the first place. Obesity, since it is self-inflicted, should not be treated by the NHS at all. Rather, the money should be spent on treatments for involuntary ailments, such as cataract operations or hip replacements.
Against this, it could be argued that interventions to cause weight loss, such as gastric bands, are in fact a highly effective use of NHS resources, since (a) they tend to work pretty well and (b) they save the costs of further treatment down the line for conditions which would otherwise have been caused by the obesity. This argument, however, fails to deal with the original deflection of responsibility for obesity onto the sufferers themselves. If they bring obesity on themselves, which then gives rise to further medical problems, then plausibly they have brought those problems on themselves as well. The NHS should refrain from treatment throughout.
Is the traditional jury system in trouble? The first crown court criminal trial in England and Wales without a jury in 350 years is being held right now, dealing with the Heathrow robbery of 2004. The Guardian discusses the problem of keeping potentially prejudicial Internet information from modern juries. Are we seeing an erosion of having fair trials by one's peers, or the start of updating an old system to modern standards?
In a recent article, “Sure, It’s Treatable. But Is It a Disorder?” the New York Times warns its readers to “brace yourselves for P.E. – shorthand for premature ejaculation”. If the pharmaceutical industry is to be believed, that may not be bad advice, since according them, “One in three men actually have the condition.” But the advice is not meant to be taken literally. What the reporter really meant was, “brace yourselves for ‘P.E.’ – shorthand for ‘premature ejaculation’”. According to the article, just as the makers of Viagra have in recent years introduced into the popular lexicon the name of a “modern man’s malady” and it’s acronym – ‘erectile dysfunction’, or ‘E.D.’, we can expect a similar effect as a result of the development and marketing of Priligy: a new pill for “men who ejaculate before copulating or within seconds of beginning.”Read More »The Disease Industry
In the
headlines this week is the tragic story of Frances Inglis, whom a jury at the Old Bailey found guilty of murdering her disabled son Tom
and sentenced to nine years in jail. Tom Inglis had been left severely
braindamaged after falling from a moving ambulance in 2007, throwing his mother
in a state of deep distress. She refused to believe an (apparently isolated)
encouraging prognosis from one of the doctors at the hospital, and concluded
that it was her duty to release her son from the “living hell” in which he found himself. Horrified on learning that the only legal way of
allowing her son to die was an application to the High Court for Tom’s food and
water to be withdrawn, Frances Inglis decided to take action on her own. After
a first unsuccessful attempt 14 months earlier, she took her son’s life by
injecting him with a lethal dose of heroin in November 2008.
