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Difficulties in assessing the risks of hydraulic fracturing and shale gas extraction: new study shows correlation between birth defects and proximity to gas wells in Colorado.

Natural gas extraction is associated with several known teratogens. A study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on January 28th by researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health and the Department of Epidemiology of Brown University, USA, finds that for those babies born of mothers living with greater density of natural gas wells within a ten mile radius of their residence, there was an increase in congenital heart defects, and a possible link with increase in neural tube defects. 1
This is significant for current debates about the future of methods to extract shale gas inland in the UK, including the use of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking as it is more commonly known). Fracking involves a method for extracting natural gas from impermeable rocks deep within the earth by deep drilling, firstly vertically, then horizontally, and the injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into the wells to cause fissures into the rock (hydraulic fracturing) through which natural gas can escape up to the surface. The aim is that the fracturing will take place beneath the water table so that the water supply is not polluted by the mix of chemicals, methane gas and rock that are produced. The water sand and chemical mix that had been injected into the well is then partially recovered (it is never possible to recover all of it) and this waste fracking fluids, complete with fragments of rock from deep in the earth, must be disposed of. The technology requires that large numbers of wells are drilled in order to extract the gas, and requires the transportation of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to the drill, as well as some method of disposal of the waste. (The precise method of disposal for proposed UK fracking is not yet clear: in the States, evaporation pits are often used, but these are, for good reason, illegal in the EU.)
The debate about the safety of fracking is complex and it is important to tease apart some of the many points that may possibly muddy the debate. One of the difficulties is collating and assessing evidence of harm; another difficulty is in assessing how we extrapolate data of risks and benefits from one situation to another, when there may be variations in geography, geology, techniques used, chemicals used, regulations, and law. There is much to consider, so here I just discuss a couple of points to indicate how complex the debate is. One main lesson should be that simplistic assurances of lack of risk from fracking should be listened to with caution.

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Time to stop the abominable illegality of kidney markets

Do you like the ambiguous title? No, I don’t think illegal kidney markets are intrinsically abominable. Insofar as they are abominable in various respects it is entirely a further consequence of the abominality of making them illegal. The abominable politicians who passed the law and sustain the law are to blame for thousands of deaths every year.

A fundamental argument for a market in kidneys is that they’re my kidneys and it’s up to me what I do with them, so keep your nose out of it. I would also direct you to an earlier argument of mine based on the ultimatum game, in which I show that if it is true that the offers in that game should be fair, then failing to pay donors for kidneys is unfair. But perhaps you’d prefer an argument based on better consequences. Let me give you one:Read More »Time to stop the abominable illegality of kidney markets

“One cup of joe and your brain is ready to go”? – Caffeine as memory enhancer

The first systematic study investigating the effects of caffeine on human performance – sponsored by Coca-Cola – has been published about 100 years ago. Since then, thousands of other studies have been looking at if and in which ways caffeine improves cognitive performance. This question is still debated in science, but there is general consensus that caffeine can be seen as an enhancer for specific functions like mood, attention, concentration and reaction time. These enhancement effects have been shown in studies with the general set-up that participants first took caffeine and then did a performance task. This matches our everyday representation of “wise” caffeine use: if I wanted to enhance my performance with caffeine, I’d take it immediately before the “critical situation”, for example an exam.

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The Texan flautist and the fetus

Imagine that when you woke up this morning, you found yourself lying next to an unconscious stranger. The stranger has a rare life-threatening illness, and unbeknownst to you he was plugged in to your organs during the night. You are now stuck to the stranger. If you disconnect the life support he will die. If, though, you remain connected to him for most of the next year his illness will have recovered, and he can safely ben unplugged. What should you do? Are you obliged to stay attached to the stranger? It might be generous of you to give up your body, and good if you choose to do so, but should we require you to remain connected?

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Kissing Grandparents and Consent

It has been reported that the co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum in the UK has advocated that parents ought to refrain from forcing their child to kiss a grandparent against their will, since this could lead to confusion over sexual consent. Kate Emmerson claims that children should be taught that their bodies are their own from “age zero”, and that the practice of forcing children to kiss a relative against their will is in tension with this message.Read More »Kissing Grandparents and Consent

Pursuing your dreams when drunk

For a long time I wanted to go to Indonesia on a holiday, to see the rice fields, the buffalo’s and the wayang puppets. But for some reason it took me actually years to realize this. The reason why I didn’t go had nothing to do with practical difficulties: I had money, time, a travel companion, it was more a psychological threshold: the travel seemed so important to me that I felt I couldn’t just book it, I was thinking that people would find it decadent to just book a trip to Indonesia, and there always seemed to be some other travel destination that had more priority. Now this story became very popular in the news and on twitter. Luke Harding, a 19-year-old youngster went clubbing in the UK and woke up in the destination of his dreams, Paris.

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Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?

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2013 Uehiro Lectures by Professor Tim Scanlon (Department of Philosophy, Harvard University) We are very grateful to Professor Tim Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University) for delivering the 10th Annual Uehiro Lectures in December 2013, entitled “When Does Equality Matter?” Lecture 1: “Equal Treatment”  AUDIO  Lecture 2:”Equal Status” … Read More »Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?

Oxford Martin School Seminar: Robert Rogers and Paul Van Lange on Social Dilemmas

In a joint event on November 15th, Prof Robert Rogers and Prof Paul van Lange presented their scientific work related to social dilemmas.

Social dilemmas are situations in which private interests conflict with collective interests. This means that people facing a social dilemma have to decide whether to prioritise either their own short-term interests or the long-term interests of a group. Many real-life situations are social dilemmas. For example, as individuals we would (economically) benefit from using public motorways without paying taxes to maintain them, but if all acted according to their self-interest, no motorways would be built and the whole society would be worse off. In the academic literature, the three types of social dilemmas that are discussed most prominently are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Public Goods Dilemma, and the Tragedy of the Commons. All three types have been modelled as experimental games, and research from different fields like psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics uses these games to tackle the question of under which conditions people are willing to cooperate with one another in social dilemmas, instead of maximising their self-interest. The ultimate goal of such research is to be able to give recommendations about how to solve social dilemmas in society.

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Some Thoughts on James Burke’s Vision of the Future

By Luke J. Davies.

Luke is on Twitter! Follow him here.

In 1973 James Burke made a series of predictions about how the world would be in 1993. He got a lot right: the wide spread use of computers at home and in schools; the data collection and storage that use makes possible; the development and approbation of IVF technology; changes in beliefs about privacy, in the form of a higher readiness in the young to give out personal information. Burke was recently asked to make another series of predictions about the state of the world in 80-100 years from now. (Find a short clip here, and a longer one here.)Read More »Some Thoughts on James Burke’s Vision of the Future

Could ad hominem arguments sometimes be OK?

By Brian D. Earp

Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.

Could ad hominem arguments sometimes be OK? 

You aren’t supposed to make ad hominem arguments in academic papers — maybe not anywhere. To get us on the same page, here’s a quick blurb from Wikipedia:

An ad hominem (Latin for “to the man” or “to the person”), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy, more precisely as a genetic fallacy, a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance.

Some initial thoughts. First, there are some clear cut cases where an ad hominem argument is plainly worthless and simply distracting: it doesn’t help us understand things better; it doesn’t wend toward truth. Let’s say that a philosopher makes an argument, X, concerning (say) abortion; and her opponent points out that the philosopher is (say) a known tax cheat — an attempt to discredit her character. Useless. But let’s say that a psychologist makes an argument, Y, about race and IQ (i.e., that black people are less “intelligent” than white people), and his opponent points out that he used to be a member of the KKK. Well, it’s still useless in one sense, in that the psychologist’s prior membership in the KKK can’t by itself disprove his argument; but it does seem useful in another sense, in that it might give us at least a plausible reason to be a little bit more cautious in interpreting the psychologist’s results.

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