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Guest Post: JABBING, PLAYING, AND PAYING – HIGH SEASON ON ANTI-VAXXERS

Guest Post: JABBING, PLAYING, AND PAYING – HIGH SEASON ON ANTI-VAXXERS

Christopher Chew
Monash University

In the strange, upside-down world of the Southern Hemisphere, cold and gloomy Winter is quietly slinking away, and raucous Spring in all his glory begins to stir. Ah, Spring! The season of buds and blooms and frolicking wildlife. One rare species of wildlife, however, finds itself subject to an open hunting season this Spring – the anti-vaxxer.

In April this year, the Australian Federal Government announced a so-called “no jab, no pay” policy. Families whose children are not fully vaccinated will now lose subsidies and rebates for childcare worth up to almost AUD$20,000 per child, except if there are valid medical reasons (e.g. allergies). Previously, exemptions had been made for conscientious and religious objectors, but these no longer apply forthwith.

Taking things a step further, the Victorian State Government earlier this week announced an additional “no jab, no play” policy. Children who are not fully vaccinated, except once again for valid medical reasons, will additionally now be barred from preschool facilities such as childcare and kindergartens.

I should, at this point, declare my allegiances – as a finishing medical student, I am utterly convinced by the body of scientific evidence supporting the benefits of childhood vaccination. I am confident that these vaccines, while posing a very, very small risk of severe side-effects like any other medicine, reliably prevent or markedly reduce the risk of contracting equally severe diseases. And finally, I believe that the goal of universal childhood vaccination is one worth pursuing, and is immensely beneficial to public health.

Despite my convictions, however, I still find myself wondering if the increasingly strict vaccination regime in Australia, and every-increasing punishments for anti-vaxxers, is necessarily the best means to go about achieving a worthy goal. It’s not clear, to me, that the recent escalation will have significant positive effects beyond a mere simple political stunt.

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Vote Selling Versus Vote Swapping

Joseph Bowen (@joe_bowen_1)

Lets begin with a pair of cases:

Pub Swap. Suppose Ann endorses Political Party A and Ben endorses Political Party B. Both would place Party C as their last choice. Ann lives in constituency 1 and Ben lives in constituency 2. In constituency 1 there is a close race between Party B and Party C. In constituency 2 there is a close race between Party A and Party C. Sitting in the pub the night before the election, Ann and Ben decide to vote for each others respective parties in their own constituency.

Votes for Beer. Suppose Carl endorses Political Party A and Dana endorses Political Party B. Carl lives in constituency 3 and Dana lives in constituency 4. In constituency 3, Party A is certain to win. In constituency 4, there is a close race between Party A and Party C—Party B cannot win. Sitting in the pub the night before the election, Carl offers to buy Dana five pints in exchange for her voting for Party A.

Is there a difference between Pub Swap and Votes for Beer? Read More »Vote Selling Versus Vote Swapping

Clone me up, Scotty: A brief satirical history of cloning and ethical progress

Julian Savulescu
@juliansavulescu

The 90s was a terrifying decade. Boris Yeltsin with his finger on the button. Fortunately he was too drunk some of the time to move. The Spice Girls. And Y2K. I bought plenty of water.

Civilisation came to the brink in 1997 when Ian Wilmut managed to play God and clone a mammal, a sheep called Dolly. International chaos ensued. The German Prime Minister said it would lead to “xeroxing people.” The European Parliament beat its breast, proclaiming cloning an affront to human dignity. It proudly asserted that every human being had a right to genetic individuality (let’s conveniently forget that 1/300 live births involve clones or identical twins that lack genetic individuality).

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Guest Post: No fortune of birth

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Nick Shackel
Cardiff University

Suppose you are born with valuable talents or to wealthy parents. What is added if we say that your talents or wealth are a fortune of birth? I say, nothing! This is merely a misleading way of repeating that you were born with good possessions. It is misleading because it seeks to insinuate what requires proof and in fact, as I shall now show, cannot be proved.

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Brain in a Vat: 5 Challenges for the In Vitro Brain

Julian Savulescu

@juliansavulescu

In Roald Dahl’s short story, William and Mary, William dies of cancer. But a novel procedure allows his brain, with one eye attached, to be kept functioning in a clear plastic vat. His wife convinces William’s neurosurgeon to allow her to take William (or rather his brain and eye) home with her.

When home, Mary places William in a prominent place in the sitting room from where he can survey all her actions. He had been a domineering and controlling husband. He forbade her to have a TV and to smoke. Now, Mary purchases a TV and takes up smoking, blowing smoke in the direction of William. She will punish him for his abuse and his brain may stay alive, utterly powerless, for up to 200 years.

This story was science fiction. But yesterday, the first step to creating the brain in a vat was reported in the US. Back in July 2013, scientists reported the first organ grown from stem cells: a liver. A kidney, heart and other organs have followed. The potential of these technologies to eventually provide replacement organs is also an opportunity to sweep away complex ethical issues: most obviously in avoiding the need for organ donation, but also in enhancing the ability to test drugs on lab grown organs before testing in humans- reducing the risk of harm to research participants, hopefully some day to a negligible amount.

Now, just 2 years later, the first brain has been grown in a laboratory. The organoid has been grown for 12 weeks, the equivalent of a 5 week old foetus.

Lead researcher Professor Rene Anand, from Ohio State University in the US,
said:

“It not only looks like the developing brain, its diverse cell types express nearly all genes like a brain.”

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Facebook and political polarization.

There has been a lot of concern expressed about the role that social media might play in political polarization. The worry is that social media users might only expose themselves to news stories with which they agree and have friends that reinforce their own views, and thereby become more extreme in their views and less understanding or tolerant of those who disagree with them. A recent paper seems to show that the phenomenon is real, but less extreme than we might have thought; at least among those people who identify their political orientation. This group is likely to be more politically aware than other users and may be thought to be more extreme in their exposure to self-reinforcing stories. On average, this group had about 23% of friends with an opposing political viewpoint, and about 29% of the stories they read presented views that were opposed to theirs.Read More »Facebook and political polarization.

Guest Post: ‘I don’t want to die, but I am too scared to be anything different’: The role of identity in mental illness

Anke Snoek
Macquarie University

If you break a leg or have a cold, it probably wouldn’t affect your identity at all. But when you have an invasive, chronic illness, it will probably change your way of being in the world, and the way you perceive yourself. Our body is the vehicle with which we interact with the world. There are many personal accounts in the disability bioethics literature on how a chronic illness affects one’s sense of being. For example, in the work of Kay Toombs, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or Havi Carel, who was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare lung disease. Both describe how their illnesses gradually changed their identities, their senses of being.

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Guest Post: Agree to disagree? Why not?

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Pedro Jesus Perez Zafrilla.
(University of Valencia)

In a previous post on this blog, David Aldridge questions the social convention of ending arguments by “agreeing to disagree.”, arguing that doing so “ends the dialogue at precisely the point where what is really at issue is beginning to emerge” . He also questions the motivations of those who seek to end an argument by offering to “agree to disagree” However, I think agreeing to disagree is a good idea and I will try to argue why.

Debating could be characterized by three features: a context of disagreement, open-minded participants, and an expectation that one can rationally convince his/her interlocutor. Then, people who debate do so because they believe that agreement is possible. The achievement of agreement is the aim of  dialogue.

Nevertheless, the desire to reach agreement shouldn’t lead us to forget that debate is fruitful only under certain conditions. Some of them include limitations of time and the number of participants, because the decision must be made, or agreement reached, within a reasonable span of time. But there are also other limitations in the debating process. We might begin with the expectation that one can rationally convince one’s interlocutor about the rightness of one’s position but we reach difficulties when incommensurable views are confronted. Some examples are found in debates on taxes, euthanasia or models of education. Here what is morally significant for some persons is not so for others. So, concepts such as “a dignified life” or “quality of education” have different meanings for each side of the debate. Accordingly, the arguments one side presents will not be convincing to the other side. In these cases, the expectation that one can rationally convince one’s interlocutor will generate polarization processes toward antagonist positions (see Haidt, J. “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail. A Social Intuitionist approach to Moral judgement”, Psychological Review, 108, 2001, p.823). Even more, each person will think that his/her interlocutor is not morally motivated (Schulz, Kathryn. Being wrong. Adventures in the margin of error. London: Portobello Books, 2010, pp.107-110).

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