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Chemical castration and homosexuality

Last week the Sydney Herald published details about an Australian Doctor who has been struck off as a GP (although not as a Radiologist) after prescribing Cyprostat to an 18 year man in order to treat his homosexuality.1 Both men were members of the Exclusive Brethren Church and the patient was taken to see Dr Craddock by a member of the church after being advised that there are treatments for homosexuality.

The Medical Council of New South Wales criticized him for not taking an appropriate medical history, not doing a physical examination, not referring his patient for counselling and not ordering medical tests to detect adverse reactions to the drug. Dr Craddock admitted that he did not do these things and, given that his departure from sound clinical skills occurred when using a powerful medical for such a radical purpose, it is not surprising that the court reached a finding of unsatisfactory, professional conduct.Read More »Chemical castration and homosexuality

“Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm

By Brian D. Earp

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“Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm

Should abortions be allowed in the case of rape? Republican Todd Akin—running for the U.S. Senate from the state of Missouri—thinks not. His reasoning is as follows:

From what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy resulting from rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

There appears to be no scientific basis for the claim that the trauma of forced intercourse can interrupt ovulation or in any other way prevent a pregnancy; indeed pregnancy is just as likely after rape as after consensual sex, according to the evidence I have seen. This news article sums up the relevant data – though please note that one of my readers [see comments] takes issue with the standard interpretation of the most frequently-cited studies.

Let’s start, for now, then, with a bit of data that is not in question: thousands of pregnancies per year, in the U.S. alone, ensue from cases of reported rape or incest–either through the caveat of Akin’s theory that “maybe [the body’s defenses] didn’t work or something” or through the medically orthodox explanation that the body has no such defense. Assuming that falsely reporting rape is relatively rare, as seems to be the case; and acknowledging that many rapes are never reported in the first place, we should be able to agree that pregnancies resulting from rape are a life-changing reality for thousands of women on an annual basis. By “rape” I mean any penetrative act done without clear consent; and here I’m calling attention to the sub-set of such acts that result in conception. I won’t say much about the term “legitimate” — which I find troubling in a hundred ways — simply because other writers have gone to town on it, and I want to say something new.

Now, given everything I’ve just said, what could be going on with Todd Akin’s moral reasoning for him to casually downplay the relevance of rape and incest to the abortion debate while maintaining, as he does, that there should be no exceptions to anti-abortionism even in those cases? Psychologist Brittany Liu uses the notion of “moral coherence” to provide an explanation:

Read More »“Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm

A Lack of Olympic Spirit

This morning, the men’s Olympic under 80 kg Taekwondo competition takes place. However, the British competitor widely regarded as the world’s best fighter in that category will not be taking part. Instead, a competitor ranked 59th in the world will be fighting in his place. Neither the British Taekwondo Association, nor the British Olympic association, nor the World Taekwondo Federation come out of the affair looking good. In particular, the latter two bodies seem to have shown either a basic ignorance of human nature, or a wilful refusal to resolve a gross injustice.

Read More »A Lack of Olympic Spirit

On being yourself

‘I was always the life and soul of the party, flirting with everyone’, wrote Lucille Howe, in ‘Fabulous Magazine’, (22 July 2012), ‘but I wanted John to fall in love with the real, quieter me’. In the same article, Charlotte Ruhle notes how her psychotherapy helped her to recover from a broken relationship. ‘[My] friends started saying I….seemed more like my old self.‘
The media, and indeed our ordinary conversations, are awash with this sort of language. Not only are we conscious – having a sense that there is an ‘I’ that is in some sort of continuity with the ‘I’ that existed yesterday, will hopefully exist tomorrow, and to whom things happen – but we have firm convictions about the nature of the ‘I’. When it is not allowed to express itself – to ‘be itself’, we complain. Depending on our education, we say that we’re ‘out of sorts’, ‘not myself’, or ‘ontologically vertiginous’.Read More »On being yourself

Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology

It is hardly a keen insight to note that there are a lot of problems in the world today, and that there are also lots of suggested solutions. Often these can be classified under three different labels:

  • “Good guy” solutions which rely on changing individual people’s attitudes and behaviours.
  • Institutional solutions which rely on designing good institutions to address the problem.
  • Technological solutions which count on technology to resolve the problem.

In this view, it is tremendously good news that scientists are getting closer to producing artificial organs. If this goal is achieved, it will be a technological solution to the problem of transplant organ shortages – and technological solutions tend to be better than institutional solutions, which are generally much better than “good guy” solutions. The “good guy” solution to organ donation was to count on people to volunteer to donate when they died. Better institutions (such as an opt-out system where you have to make a special effort not to be a donor, rather than a special effort to be a donor) have resulted in much improved donation rates. But cheap artificial organs would really be the ultimate solution.

Of course I don’t denigrate the use of getting people on your side, nor the motivations of those who sincerely want to change things. But changes to people’s attitudes only tend to stick around as long term solutions if this is translated into actual institutional or technological changes.

Take slavery, for instance. Read More »Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology

To kill or to violate?

By Charles Foster

A highly intelligent 32 year old woman has profound anorexia. She has had it for years. It is complicated by alcohol and opiate dependency, and by personality disorder. Her BMI is 11.3. A healthy BMI is around 20. Less than 17.7 is in the anorexic range. Less than 14 indicates dangerous weight loss. Over the last 4 years her BMI has been well below 14. She describes her life as ‘pure torment’. All the things she wanted to do have been frustrated by her illness. She feels unable to give anything to the world, or to take anything out. For years she has had intense treatment for her anorexia and related conditions. On about 10 occasions she has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. One of those periods lasted almost 4 months. Twice she has executed advance decisions refusing life-saving or life-prolonging treatment.
There are only two options: death or the violation of her autonomy . If she is not admitted against her will to hospital, detained there for not less than a year, and forcibly fed under physical or chemical restraint, she will die. She understands this perfectly well. She doesn’t actively seek death, but doesn’t want to be force fed. As well as the anorexic’s usual horror of calories, the forcible medical administration of nutrition reminds her horribly of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.Read More »To kill or to violate?

Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …

Love drugs and science reporting in the media: Setting the record straight 

By Brian D. Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Anders Sandberg

Love. It makes the world go round. It is the reason we have survived as a species. It is the subject of our art, literature, and music—and it is largely the product of chemical reactions within the brain.

No wonder science is starting to unravel the ways in which we can influence it, and perhaps even control it.

Just as Darwin’s finding that we are descended from apes shocked people in the nineteenth century, so people will be shocked to find that our most lofty social ideal is something we share with our mammalian cousins and which is the subject of scientific scrutiny and even chemistry-book manipulation.

In 2008, two of us (Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg) published an article in the journal Neuroethics on the topic of “love drugs” – a term we use to refer to pharmacological interventions based on existing and future bio-technologies that could work to strengthen the bond between romantic partners. All three of us have an article just published in the journal Philosophy & Technology in which we build upon that earlier work. Interested readers will take the time to study those papers in full, but we have a feeling that much of the population will stop at a handful of media reports that have recently summarized our ideas, including at least one article that we think has the potential to mislead. Let us set the record straight.

Read More »Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …