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?
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withdrawn at the last minute.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?
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.
Read More »Same species, different needs: could ‘genes for’ improve the way we treat animals?
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.
Today, British
MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend
pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still
fairly sparse, on Britain’ s
headlong way towards a surveillance state (see for example this editorial
in the Guardian).
of private life are not in the realm of science fiction anymore. This is
highlighted by the widespread
use of network monitoring and data mining suites, which are readily
available from major international companies involved in the standardization of
processes ensuring the lawfulness of the
monitoring. Emerging technologies like nanotech might significantly enhance
these existing possibilities and threats to privacy.
The Food Standards Agency in the United Kingdom has released the results of a study it commissioned on public sentiment about cloned animal meat, reports James Meikle in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/06/foodtech.food. It seems that the majority of the British public are resolutely opposed to the commercial use of cloned animal meat. The study reported a range of concerns about the possible harms of farming and consuming cloned animals, as well as a lack of appreciation of any benefits other than additional profits to farmers, biotech companies and food retailers. The views reported in the study are roughly in accord with a recent opinion of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), presented to the European Commission, which suggested that cloning animals for food is unethical. See http://ec.europa.eu/european_group_ethics/activities/docs/opinion23_en.pdf.
Abortion remains a crime for most Australians. Laws are inconsistent between states. In contrast, long ago the UK Abortion Act 1967 repealed and replaced its antiquated legal statutes on which much of Australian abortion law is still based.
The government in the state of Victoria asked the Law Reform Commission to provide legislative options to decriminalize abortion. Law reform is expected later this year.
The Daily Mail reports this morning that 8 clone-offspring cows have been born in the UK. Also today, the first survey of public opinion on ‘clone farming’ has been released indicating significant unease and opposition to the idea of meat products or milk from cloned sources.
There are strict prohibitions on reproductive cloning for humans in most countries (for example, the recently debated HFEA bill in the UK, and the Human reproductive Cloning Act 2001). However there are few, if any, constraints on the cloning of animals. Is this the start of a new era of animal exploitation?
Personal DNA testing is here. For $1,000 you can send off a DNA sample to an american company and find out your genetic predispositions to a wide variety of illnesses and problems, from male pattern baldness to cancer. The Telegraph is running a story by a woman who has just ordered such a test and has seen her predispositions. The story makes many of the issues quite vivid and shows how one can use the bad news in such tests, say a predisposition to a certain illness, to make special efforts to guard against that illness, or at the very least to be ready for the effect it might have on your life. There is, however, a problem with these cheap, voluntary tests. It is not a problem for the individual taking them, but a problem for society.
The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”. Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counterbalance the accelerating impact of our species on the natural environment, while their opponents think we should be getting that species to make radical changes in its way of life before its home becomes uninhabitable. The article was mainly about plans for carbon capture, but there had been another piece a few days before about much further reaching ideas of geoengineering or ‘ecohacking’ – “using science to change the environment on a vast scale” by such means as screening the whole planet from the sun – which, it seems, might become feasible sooner than we realize.
