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How many friends do you need?

How many friends do you need?

The title of Robin Dunbar’s recently published book asks a good question: How many friends does one person need? (http://www.faber.co.uk/work/how-many-friends-does-one-person-need/9780571253425/)

Dunbar suggests that a human being can’t have more than about 150 friends (or ‘acquaintances’, as the book itself somewhat revealingly puts it). But of course it all depends on who we count as a ‘friend’. If we are talking about people with whom one spends a good deal of one’s time, then the number would usually be significantly lower; whereas if we allow friends to include what Aristotle called philoi, it could be much larger. People are philoi when they have some kind of goodwill to one another, and are mutually aware of that goodwill (Nicomachean Ethics VIII.2). On this generous view, even Facebook ‘friends’ one has never met might be genuine, if those extending and accepting the invitation do have some real concern for one another.

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Shall Ape be Allowed to Kill Ape?

It is widely accepted that it is immoral to cause gratuitous harm to animals, and indeed there are many charities that have been set up around the world, such as the RSPCA (see: http://www.rspca.org.uk/home) to prevent harm to animals and to promote animal welfare. Some organisations want to go further than mere protection of animals, however, and seek to promote the idea that we should recognize various ‘animal rights’. For example, the participants in the ‘Great Ape Project’ argue that non-human ‘great apes’ – chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos – should share the human right to life, the human right to the protection of individual liberty and the human right not be tortured. See: http://www.greatapeproject.org/en-US. Advocates of rights for great apes have had some modest success. In 2007 they convinced the parliament of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous province of Spain, to grant some rights to the great apes (See: http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_rose/20070802.html).

 

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Eugenics or ‘reprogenetics’? Call it what you will, but let’s do it

As The
Times recently
reports:

 

“British couples are to be offered a groundbreaking genetic test that
would virtually eliminate their chances of having a baby with one of more than
100 inherited diseases. The simple saliva test, which identifies whether
prospective parents carry genetic mutations that could cause life-threatening
disorders such as cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy or sickle-cell
anaemia in their children, is to be launched within weeks in Britain… If the
procedure, which will cost about £400 per person or £700 for a couple, is
widely adopted, it could dramatically reduce the incidence of 109 serious
inherited conditions that collectively affect one in every 280 births.”

 

Surely we should be delighted at such great news?
Surprisingly, not everyone agrees. Some experts object that the test, devised
by the Californian company
Councyl, could lead to “back door eugenics”.
They also argue that the
diseases it detects are too rare for most people to need screening, and that it
will cause needless alarm. Finally, they fear that it will raise demand for
embryo screening and abortion.

 

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Cognitive enhancers: unfair at any dose?

How should universities tackle the use of cognitive enhancement drugs by students? Professor Barbara Sahakian raised the issue in a recent talk. While hard numbers are hard to come by, it is likely that at least a few percent of university students take drugs believed to improve cognitive ability. This may give them advantages that could be unfair (if some have access while others haven't) or would have coercive effects (if you don't take the drug but your classmates are, you will be at a disadvantage). Are enhancer use among students inherently unfair and coercive?

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Coma Confusion Resolved

Back in November, I blogged about the case of Rom Houben, a man who after more than two decades in what was apparently a persistent vegetative state was found to be conscious. Following the newspaper reports of the time – as I noted at the time, I had nothing to go on except newspaper reports – I described it as a case in which the locked-in state was misdiagnosed as vegetative state. These mistakes do, tragically, occur. But we now know that Rom Houben is not in the locked-in state at all. The diagnosis of locked-in state was made on the basis of the use of facilitated communication, a technique in which someone is supposedly helped to communicate. Usually the facilitator guides the hand of the person they aim to help; the idea being that they can compensate for the muscular weakness by sensitively interpreting the person’s movements. Facilitated communication became notorious in the 1990s, when it was found that in most cases in which it was used (mainly to communicate with severely autistic individuals) the facilitators were producing the message. The test is simple: put headphones in both the facilitator and the person they are trying to help, and ask them questions simultaneously. Sometimes both receive the same questions, sometimes they receive different questions. The finding is that answers are always to the questions asked of the facilitator (obviously the fact that the facilitators have gladly participated in this research is good evidence of their sincerity. How we can mistake our own movements for someone else’s is a fascinating question, explored interestingly by Daniel Wegner in The Illusion of Conscious Will).

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Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 5: virtue in testimony.

We now consider a couple of testimonial virtues.

Sincerity of testimony

There has been reason to be worried about the sincerity of public testimony by climate scientists for twenty years, ever since Professor Schneider of Stanford (now a senior member of the UN’s IPCC) said that scientists should ‘offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have’. So the recommendation is to give us distorted presentations of the science aimed at achieving the political effects the scientists deem best. For scientists to testify thus is a serious derogation of their epistemic duty towards us. On the contrary, we should be able to rely on scientists to tell us the true state of the science on an issue irrespective of the political import. Furthermore, to offer testimony distorted in this manner is to make an illicit power grab, based in an abuse of their role as experts, in which they seek to substitute their judgement of what should be done for ours.

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What is the most moral way to use embryos?

By: Francesca Minerva

Reading this news  about a couple that donated two embryos to another sterile couple, I started to ask myself if embryo donation is really the most moral way to use embryos. Some people, indeed,  suggest that this choice is the one that people who take into account human life should take. We read “The concept of donating embryos to other couples got a push eight years ago under President George W. Bush, who dedicated federal funding to promote, in his terms, “embryo adoption.” The federal funding has since increased to $4.2 million. Now, Georgia has passed the nation's first state law symbolically recognizing embryo adoption”. I am especially skeptical about two issues connected to embryo donation.

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Ending It, in Paternia

In the Republic of Paternia there has, of late, been a vigorous debate on the question of whether the law should change to permit marital separation in some circumstances. Some desperate Paternian couples have been illegally travelling abroad to engage in marital separations in Switterland (where they are permitted for now, though the Switts are becoming uncomfortable with their country’s renown for so-called “separation tourism”). Some of these couples have been dragged through the Paternian courts on their return. Sympathetic juries have often chosen to acquit, recognizing that their situations had become unbearable, that they had separated consensually, and that legal enforcement of their cohabiting marital relationship would only have prolonged their suffering. Moreover, prosecutors in Paternia have for a long time only selectively prosecuted cases of marital separation that illegally took place abroad.

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Renaming a Disorder

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, considering the huge commotion over proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Almost a thousand pages long, this psychiatric bible is
used all over the world to classify and diagnose mental patients – it’s
the definitive authority on that nebulous concept known as “normal”.
The implications of any revisions are tremendous, and the American Psychiatric Association, publisher of the manual, has attracted support as well as harsh criticism.
Could these revisions actually cause more harm than good? I’m not sure,
but I want to explore the implications of just one of the proposed
revisions – that concerning EDNOS, or “Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.”

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The worth of a life and a life worth living

There has been a lot of discussion about health care rationing in the North American media over the last year, much of it hysterical and barely coherent. A number of respected ethicists have tried to make the case for rationing, including Peter Singer in the New York Times last year, and recently John Freeman.

This week Newsweek Science Editor Sharon Begley asked ‘What is a Life Worth?’ drawing on a recent study presented at the American Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine meeting. Begley noted

“This is the kind of news that unleashes hysteria about "death panels" and "health-care rationing," but here goes: an analysis of genetic screening for an incurable, untreatable disease called spinal muscular atrophy shows that it would cost $4.7 million to catch and avert one case, compared with $260,000 to provide lifetime care for a child born with it. So here's the question: do we say, "Damn the cost; it is worth any price to spare a single child the misery of being unable to crawl, walk, swallow, or move his head and neck"—or do we, as a society, put on the green eyeshades and say, "No, sorry, we can't afford routine screening"?”

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