Practical Ethics

The Racist Shopper

By: David Edmonds

The Equality Bill is currently making its way through the two unequal chambers of the British parliament.  It’s radical and wide-ranging and the debate about it has been heated, but the most interesting contribution has come from the upper chamber, the House of Lords.  In a thoughtful speech, Bhikhu Parekh, a political theorist, advanced an argument in support of positive action.  He said that in some circumstances one’s sex could in itself be a qualification for a post.

Take a hospital whose obstetrics and gynaecology department is all-male. Many women would like to be seen by a female gynaecologist, but there is none. A vacancy occurs. We have two candidates, a male and a female, with equal medical or academic qualifications and equal professional experience. The woman doctor could be appointed, either as a form of positive action, or by simply saying that the needs of the organisation require that her gender is an important part of the qualification itself. In other words, what is called positive action here is not simply an add-on in a situation where there is equality of qualification or experience, rather it is built into the structure of the assessment criteria themselves, so that she is appointed because she has an additional qualification, by virtue of her gender, which others do not have.
 

Easing the passing: Death booths, misrepresentations and the 'Ugh factor'

Death is in the air. To stop us being engulfed by the ‘silver tsunami’,  Martin Amis urges the construction of euthanasia booths, and encourages the elderly to go to them for a martini, a medal and a pharmaceutical nudge into the void. Terry Pratchett talks cosily about ‘shaking death by the hand’ as he sits on his lawn, Tallis on his IPod, drinking some modern Socratic hemlock washed down with vintage brandy. He and his backers in the euthanasia industry shrewdly propose death tribunals who, having heard evidence about individual cases, would sign or withhold a death warrant. Such tribunals, they say, would obviate the risk that vulnerable people might opt unacceptably for euthanasia. The opinion polls consistently indicate considerable public support for a change in the law against assisted suicide. The opponents of assisted dying are caricatured as reactionary bigots, probably fuelled by otiose, antediluvian religious prejudice: people who care more about some dogma of the sanctity of life than about pain, fear, despair and autonomy. The crusade for assisted dying is a campaign by the modern and enlightened against the mediaeval  and  benighted.

Brain imaging and PVS: How excited should we be?

How exciting is the new research on the consciousness of patients diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state (discussed here)? From a scientific point of view, this is an important piece of research. The ability to respond to yes/no questions is surely a reliable indicator of consciousness; once we have identified patients who can pass this test, we can begin to conduct other tests, to see whether the results correlate. We can begin to see whether the evidence of electrical activity in the brain in response to words or to physical discomfort reflect consciousness or are merely indicators of unconscious activity.  The new research also might have great diagnostic value. But we must be careful not to overinterpret the results.

Is the brain half full - or half empty?

There have been dramatic headlines in the media ('Coma Man. I think…I’m alive') following the publication yesterday of a new study using brain scans to detect consciousness in profoundly brain damaged patients. For the first time scientists and doctors have demonstrated that some patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state may be able to communicate using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Persons of the Sea?

You’ve stumbled upon a group of beings. For all you can tell, these beings are self-aware, intelligent, have emotions, solve complex problems, and call each other by name. They have thoughts and feelings and probably experience life in a way that is very similar to your own. Are they persons? And do you have moral obligations towards them?

Thomas White, Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has made news claiming that we have found such a group of beings. In fact, we’ve been living alongside them for a while now. They’re dolphins, and they’re people too. At an upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, White will be arguing that dolphins deserve the status of “nonhuman persons”. The research in marine science now overwhelmingly shows that dolphins have a highly sophisticated type of consciousness and inner world – and their cognitive capacity is second only to humans (yes, they beat chimps). With such high intellectual and emotional abilities, White claims they are entitled to special moral status and protections. The implications for current practices involving dolphins (in the context of fishing, entertainment, research and the military) are serious, since they would be considered chillingly unethical if they involved human persons.

Mind the Gap?

Much attention has been paid over the last week or so to An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, a government-sponsored study which has taken over ten years to produce: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/27/unequal-britain-report

The study contains a huge amount of data, much of it on the gaps between richer and poorer groups. It turns out, for example, that the richest 10% own about one hundred times as the poorest 10%. Many appear to think that such inequality is obviously, in itself, a bad thing -- something any government, especially one with its roots in socialism, ought to be doing something about. But in fact this is far from obvious. Imagine that each person in the poorest group were earning £100,000 p.a., and each in the richest group £10,000,000. Such a result would be described as an economic and political miracle. Or imagine that the government sought to deal with the real gaps between rich and poor merely by 'levelling down' the income of the rich to that of the poor. Given the absence of any trickling down, and the effects on incentives, the outcome of such a policy might well be to make everyone, both existing rich and existing poor, even poorer than they are now. The fact that the gap would have disappeared seems irrelevant in a situation when all have been made worse off.

Professor George’s Unnatural Reasoning

Some of us know Professor Robert George as the ultraconservative Catholic bioethicist from Princeton. It could hardly be said that his writings have dominated discussion in contemporary ethics. It is thus slightly surprising to find out, in recent profile in the New York Times, that Professor George is a thinker of immense influence—the mastermind of the conservative side of the culture wars in the US, having the ear of rightwing political leaders and religious authorities, even of TV commentators. What is Robert George’s exciting new idea? There is nothing terribly surprising about his views. He is of course vehemently opposed to abortion, stem cell research, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. What is supposed to be exciting is that he claims to demonstrate the truth of these familiar conservative views using natural reason alone. Finally conservatives can conclusively prove that liberals are dead wrong, and they don’t even need to mention tradition and religion. Well, Professor George’s arguments might have awed George W. Bush, but on inspection they turn out less than impressive.

 

Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 4: what is owed to other enquirers.

Now we move on to what is owed to other enquirers

keep records of original data  and methods and make such records freely available.

The global temperature record produced by the CRU is one of the four sets of data on which the IPCC has relied, and in the opinion of many commentators it has been the most influential record and for that reason the most important one.  It is therefore a matter of very grave concern that raw data on which it is based no longer exists. It means that no one can check whether the CRU global temperature record is well founded. The fact that it is in line with other records is not the help it appears when we remember that the tuning of the data manipulation underlying those records, and hence the claims for their veracity, has depended significantly on taking the CRU global temperature record as correct. Consequently our acceptance of it depends entirely on the epistemic integrity of the CRU, an integrity which has now been significantly impugned, and is further impugned by the loss of this raw data.

 

What, then, is their attitude to the obligation to share data? This quotation is illuminating ‘The two MMs [critics of Mann’s statistical techniques] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…..We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.’.[1]

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[1] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt

 

Aid Beyond Belief

The days following the devastating earthquake in Haiti saw a surge in fundraising efforts from organizations all over the world. In this charitable climate, the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins set up an aid campaign of his own: Non-Believers Giving Aid. Why donate through his group? In addition to rallying fellow non-believers, Dawkins claims this offers a chance to “counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.” There are a host of issues that could be discussed in relation to the aid effort and belief – why we feel compelled to help distant strangers, the problem of suffering, the idea of natural disasters as divine punishment – but I’ll concentrate on two main objections to Dawkins.

One objection would be that the entire project is simply a shameless propaganda scheme to get more “data” on charity giving among non-believers. Its purpose is to give the non-believers some numbers to point to, some “proof” that they give lots of money to charity. And for that reason, it is just an opportunistic ploy that is deeply inappropriate in a time of real crisis and tragedy.

Obesity and Responsibility

There has been a good deal of discussion about obesity recently, since the Royal College of Surgeons criticized access to weight loss operations in the UK as a ‘postcode lottery’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/21/morbid-obesity-gastric-bands-nhs-costs

One common response – for example by Catherine Bennett in The Observer (  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/24/homeopathy-obesity-gastric-bands ) has been that the question of unfairness shouldn’t be permitted to arise in the first place. Obesity, since it is self-inflicted, should not be treated by the NHS at all. Rather, the money should be spent on treatments for involuntary ailments, such as cataract operations or hip replacements.

Against this, it could be argued that interventions to cause weight loss, such as gastric bands, are in fact a highly effective use of NHS resources, since (a) they tend to work pretty well and (b) they save the costs of further treatment down the line for conditions which would otherwise have been caused by the obesity. This argument, however, fails to deal with the original deflection of responsibility for obesity onto the sufferers themselves. If they bring obesity on themselves, which then gives rise to further medical problems, then plausibly they have brought those problems on themselves as well. The NHS should refrain from treatment throughout.