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The Clash of Environmental Values

The Clash of Environmental Values

GMO
and climate change seem currently one of the more upsetting issues not only for
environmentalists, but for the wider public as well. Carbon tax proposals like
the one released by Canada’s opposition party last week (e.g Financial
Times) or requests to the
EU by Britain to embrace a more liberal attitude towards GM crops (e.g. The
Independent) are the order
of the day in many newspapers. 

Precautionary
arguments of any sort regarding the release of GMO or greenhouse gases commonly
invoke the complex and still badly understood entanglement of different parts
of the environment: Present greenhouse gas emissions may trigger a catastrophic
runaway climate change: An initial global
warming may yield to, say, the release of vast amounts of methane that so far
was bound in the permafrost of the Russian or North American tundra; the
methane further increases the initial warming.  We simply do not sufficiently understand such
type of feedbacks. The same holds true for releasing GMO into the atmosphere:
Via horizontal gene transfer to wild
types or feral relatives, for example, GMO may yield unpredicted and unwanted side
effects.

Releasing
greenhouse gases or GMO are both interventions in the complex environmental
system. But how, if at all, do these two issues, commonly discussed as separate
and isolated questions, interrelate?

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“Reanimation” and Taking Organs from Living People

One of the greatest fears associated with organ transplantation is that the person from whom organs are taken is not really dead.

That nightmare was almost realised in France last week when a French patient “came back to life” after 30 minutes of unsuccessfully heart massage. In 2007, in order to address the shortage of organs for transplantation, French authorities allowed the trial of using people whose hearts have stopped beating, but who have not met brain death criteria for being dead, as organ donors. These are called Non-Heart Beating Donors. Organs can also be taken from such donors in the UK. Such patients’ hearts have stopped beating but they have not met brainstem criteria for death.

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My Genes, not a Doctor’s

California has sent cease-and-desist letters to firms offering Web gene tests to consumers. The legal reason is that California law requires a licenced physician to order any lab tests. This follows from a similar crackdown in New York. Wired responds by top 10 reasons that regulators should not hinder genetic testing. Is there any good reason to limit public access to genetic testing besides protecting incumbents and gatekeepers?

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Setting a Minimum Price for the Sale of Organs

Professor Maqsood Noorani, a leading surgeon made the headlines asking for legalisation of the sale of organs to prevent the exploitation that exists in the black market. Yet his comments show that he is uneasy with the concept of a market in organs. He believes that the sale of organs in richer nations would ‘tarnish the process’, and suggests that even in poorer countries accommodation or education should be offered in exchange instead of cash. 

When two people want to freely exchange some good or service, we need good reasons in a free market to prevent the exchange. Moreover, when it comes to a market in organs, the good in question is life saving. Why then should we prevent such exchanges when there are willing buyers and sellers?

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Helping others to save the rainforest

The Congo basin rainforest is a natural resource of staggering scale, second only to the amazon in size. It stretches across six countries in the centre of Africa and provides shelter, food, income and fuel for millions of local people. However, like most of the world’s remaining forests, it is being destroyed at an unsustainable rate. Like all the world’s major rainforests, it lies in developing countries which are desperate for any small income it can provide. This adds to the sense of tragedy: these great resources are being destroyed for what is a relative pittance to conservationists in the rich countries. Happily, this tragic element is starting to be turned around and may give us our best chance at preserving the forest.

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A pill-full of sugar helps the medicine go down

A medicine for children that has been shown to be effective in a wide range of conditions is to be released soon in the UK and is already available in the US. It has been exhaustively studied, and has no side effects. It is extremely cheap to produce, and will be readily available. Yet GPs, academics and ethicists are up in arms about the new drug. What is all the fuss about?

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Lex Orwell: When is a Surveillance Society OK?

The current Swedish debate about a bill to
allow military intelligence to intercept phone and Internet
communications has produced something most unSwedish: a grassroots
"blogquake" that has upset the staid logic of traditional politics. Given the threat that the bill may fall because of MPs disobeying their party whips
(normally unheard of in Swedish politics) there is a real chance the bill is even
withdrawn at the last minute. But even if it is, this is
an issue that will return again and again: exactly how much
information should the government be allowed to gather and for what purposes?

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Same species, different needs: could ‘genes for’ improve the way we treat animals?

The New
Scientist recently reviewed a variety of studies showing that many traits often supposed unique to humans are in fact shared by
animals. There is evidence that apes, dolphins,
songbirds, elephants, and monkeys share with humans some of the
most important aspects of behaviour associated with speech; killer whales have
distinct cultural groups; great apes and some monkeys have a degree of
understanding of the minds of others, enabling them to deceive; chimpanzees,
gorillas, and crows use tools; and there is suggestive evidence that elephants,
magpies, baboons, whales, and chimpanzees demonstrate emotional behaviour, and
that monkeys and rats are capable of drawing primitive moral distinctions.

Claims that animals have capacities usually thought
unique to humans are controversial, and those who make them are often accused
of anthropomorphising animal behaviour. Plausibly,
there is often more to such accusations than concern for explanatory
parsimony. As humans, we profit from
using animals—for food, research, sport, and so on—in ways that we would not
use other humans, and suggestions that animals are more like humans than we
usually suppose place an unwelcome demand on society to rethink its ethical stance
towards animals. This suggests that a
clear division between humans and other species is important to us in justifying
the discrepancies between what we view as ethical treatment of other humans and
what we view as ethical treatment of non-human animals. Pragmatically speaking, if we
humans wish to retain a privileged moral status, and if our privileged moral
status is at least partly due to our being different to other animals in
certain important (usually biologically-based) respects, then it is in our
interests to resist attempts to draw similarities between humans and other
animals.

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Is there a duty to execute prisoners humanely?

An article published this week in PLoS Medicine discusses the ethics of research on US lethal objection protocols. The authors conclude:

While lethal injection and the death penalty present a host of ethical questions, the specific, pressing issue now faced by 36 US states, the federal government, and the 3,350 prisoners on death row is the movement to amend lethal injection protocols to comport with Eighth Amendment requirements and to minimize the potential for pain and suffering, in itself a commendable goal. As jurists demand lethal injection protocol changes, however, corrections officials, governors, and their medical collaborators are left in a legal and ethical quandary. In order to comply with the law and carry out their duties, they are employing the tools and methods of biomedical inquiry without its ethical safeguards. Given the current guidelines for human experimentation, it is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which lethal injection research activities could be carried out in a fashion consistent with these ethical norms, and yet those engaged in such research would seem to be required to do so.

This passage raises many questions. Is is the movement to amend lethal injection protocols really the pressing issue? Can a movement to execute prisoners more humanely really be commendable? But let’s focus on the authors main claim: namely that the states in question face a legal and ethical quandary since, (i) they are under "duties", as well as legal requirements, to execute more humanely, but (ii) they cannot do so without breaching the ethical and legal requirements.

The authors devote most of their attention to the second claim, (ii), but arguably (i) is more problematic.

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