Are there neuroethical issues in sports? Dr Judy Illes thinks so, in a talk given in Canada on September 17. People are using neuroimaging to assess ability (which may also pick up unsuspected pathologies in the brain), intervening against depression in athletes, and perhaps using deep brain stimulation for enhancing motor performance. Does enhanced training methods pose a new problem for sport?
As a result of a court ruling requiring clarification of the law, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, yesterday issued some guidelines concerning the legal grey area of assisted suicide. The DPP published a list of factors that will weigh in favour of and against prosecutions for assisted suicide.
Care Not Killing (CNK), a UK umbrella group for organisations and individuals that oppose legalising assisted suicide and euthanasia, says that under the new guidelines:
This kind of objection crops up frequently to laws that make special provision for some groups of people and not others. But does it hold up to scrutiny here? The guidelines do not state that the terminally ill, severely and incurably disabled, and those suffering a severe degenerative physical condition (hereafter, for brevity: The Unfortunate) are less deserving of anything than others, so if they do indeed imply that The Unfortunate are less deserving of the law's protection than others, it must be because the DPP's justification for the guidelines presupposes this judgment.
Chris Packham has recently (and not for the first time) suggested that we should stop trying to save the panda — an expensive exercise — and instead put our efforts and resources to ‘better use.’ This suggestion is worth some unpacking.
His argument is a familiar one about cost-effectiveness and resource allocation: we should use our resources so as to maximise their beneficial effects. This kind of argument relies, of course, on an estimation of the value of pandas (and so the disvalue of their extinction) with the cost-effectiveness of saving them being this value divided by the cost of doing so. This is then compared to the value and cost-effectiveness of other environmental concerns like protecting “biodiversity hotspots”.
Importantly there is a range of ways of valuing pandas and biodiversity that each may give different answers to the question of what we should do. It is instructive to consider a number of combinations of these to see how they might pan out and affect Packham’s claims.
Economists have long used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita as a proxy measure for the average level of wellbeing within a country. GDP is a measure of the goods and services produced in a country and is a fairly good proxy for material wealth. However, it fails to capture many other factors that are clearly important for wellbeing: for example, amount of leisure time, health, quality of one's environment, wealth distribution, employment rates, and changes in wealth over a lifetime. Some negative influences on wellbeing – such as crime – may even contribute positively to GDP since the costly government responses to them are included in a country's GDP. The gap between GDP and wellbeing obviously has important practical implications since policies correlated with higher (lower) GDP are likely to be adopted (rejected) for that reason.
On 14 September an expert group commissioned by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and and including no less than five Nobel prize laureates released a report recommending that official statisticians should move to a wider measure of wellbeing that takes into account some of the factors that GDP leaves out. This move away from 'GDP fetishism' has long been championed by the commission's chair, Joseph Stiglitz.
Everyone seems to acknowledge the problems with GDP, but the commission's report gets a cool response from some of the business press, with the adjective 'Orwellian' cropping up here and there. The Economist admits that 'broadening official statistics is a good idea in its own right', but emphasises that 'these are early days' and remains sceptical about the practicalities of moving away from GDP. The primary concern is about potential abuse of a less well defined measure by governments or interest groups and a resulting lack of public trust. The message seems to be that it's fine to research broader measures and to start collecting figures, but until something robust is found, GDP per capita should remain the gold standard. Policymakers shouldn't put any credence in the broader measures yet.
A recent article in the New Scientist raises the prospect that alongside ‘gluten-free’, ‘GM free’, ‘sugar free’, and ‘dairy free’ our supermarket shelves may soon contain ‘pain-free’ meat. American philosopher Adam Shriver, writing in Neuroethics, argues that everyone concerned with animal welfare should support the replacement of animals used in factory farming with livestock genetically modified to have reduced sensitivity to pain. (See here and here for blogs discussing Shriver's suggestion). However, many find the idea of developing ‘pain knockout’ animals disquieting or frankly disturbing. In a survey of attitudes towards the development of pain-free animals (for laboratory experimentation) vegetarians and members of the animal protection community were strongly opposed to such an idea. The strongest opposition to the development of pain-free animals may, paradoxically, come from those who have traditionally been most concerned about animal suffering.
Read More »Anaesthe-steak™: pain-free meat and the welfare paradox
Should scientists be allowed to publish anything, even when it is wrong? And should there be journals willing to accept everything, as long as it seems interesting enough? That is the core of a debate that has blossomed since the journal Medical Hypotheses published two aids-denialist papers. Medical Hypotheses is a deliberately non-peer reviewed journal: the editor decides whether to publish not based on whether papers are true but whether they are bold, potentially interesting, or able to provoke useful discussion. HIV researchers strongly objected to the two papers, making the publisher Elsevier withdraw them. Now there are arguments for removing Medical Hypotheses from PubMed, the index of medical literature. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science and Bruce G Charlton, editor of Medical Hypotheses, debate the affair on Goldacre's blog. Are there scientific papers that are so bad that there should not be any journal outlet for them?
The Times (as well as a slew of other newspapers) reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams is complaining that financiers have, in general, failed to feel repentance for the ‘excesses of the boom that led to financial meltdown’ (See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6836496.ece ). The Archbishop does not present evidence to back up the claim that bankers have, in general, failed to feel repentance, but it seems like a plausible enough claim, so let us assume that it is correct. The Archbishop also appears to assume that bankers should repent for the financial crisis and this assumption seems open to question. To repent is to express remorse or regret and to do so sincerely. No doubt some financiers, such as the famous swindler Bernie Madoff have committed acts for which it is appropriate that they express sincere regret or remorse. Madoff also broke the law and is currently in jail. But what might ordinary law-abiding bankers have done to warrant the Archbishop’s wrath?
In the BBC Radio program Jeopardising Justice (here) Helena Kennedy QC spoke about the rise of ‘the victims’ movement’. The 1970s saw a legal reform that marked a watershed in the treatment of victims throughout the judicial system. Once marginalised and passive, victims are now centre-stage in many a judicial process. Kennedy, a fervent champion of the movement in her early career, set out to explore whether the victim’s voice had become so strong that it now threatens the rights of the defendants. The program feeds into the broader debate on whether or not this well intended reform has gone too far and now it is the defendants who risk being marginalised.
Earlier this month the related discussion on whether or not police should have to visit every crime victim flared up again (here). In Sweden there is currently a very heated debate on how rape victims are treated in the courts and the rights of the defendants (here and here) involving, for example, a District Prosecutor saying that there are different types of rape some of which he labels as ‘scarier’ than others. Meanwhile, in the wake of the resent release of the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds (here) it has been argued that the Scottish Government lost sight of the real victims and that the appropriate display of virtuous compassion would have been better directed at their families rather than a convicted mass-murderer (here).
An article in the Times argues that life extension will bring us problems: long-lived people will bankrupt the NHS, pensions would become expensive, the pension age would need to be changed, there would be a pressure for resources and life would become meaningless. It is a surprisingly common criticism that would never be levelled at… Read More »Longer life, more trouble?
During the summer, much research about the nature of attraction
between opposite sexes has been published in various newspapers. I have tried
to make some sense of them. Here I hope to show you the conclusion I have reached
after wading through this stream of information. Since this is a blog on practical
ethics, and I confess that I do believe that we have some kind of moral obligation to be happy. So, I hope that
readers will find some useful tips for having a more successful and happy relationship.
