Practical Ethics

Pandemic Vaccination: Who to Vaccinate?

Fears of the spread of pandemic influenza in the UK continue to grow. Three apparently previously healthy patients have died here. There are now plans for widespread immunisation later in the year - though initially this is likely to be restricted to those at highest risk, and those in 'vital' professions.

Who should be vaccinated? This is a question of distributive justice.

Refusing Cochlear Implants: Is It Child Neglect?

Australian Graeme Clark developed the cochlear implant, or bionic ear, in the 1970s. It does not amplify sound but directly stimulates any functioning auditory nerves in the inner ear. The Australian Government has promised a screening program of all babies for deafness from 2011. At present, only 70 percent children who might benefit are picked up early. The earlier deafness is detected, the more effective treatment can be.

Lobby group Deaf Australia says the implant "implies that deaf people are ill or incomplete individuals, are lonely and unhappy, cannot communicate effectively with others and are all desperately searching for a cure for their condition. [This] demeans deaf people, belittles their culture and language and makes no acknowledgment of the diversity of lives deaf people lead, or their many achievements."
Some deaf parents have denied their children cochlear implants. Is this right?

Is it Worth Living Longer?

Research recently published in Nature suggests that the drug rapamycin may have the potential to extend human life span by decades: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8139816.stm

If the life is of ‘positive’ value, it might seem obvious that the drug is worth taking. But not everyone would agree. The Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus famously argued that, since it marks the end of conscious life, ‘death nothing to us’. Fearing death makes as much sense as regretting you weren’t around for all that time before your birth.

Pandemic ethics: Party to the flu (or vigilante vaccination)

A public health expert has warned yesterday against the idea of swine-flu parties, arguing that it may undermine the fight against the emerging pandemic. But others, including James Delingpole in the Telegraph have embraced the idea, hoping that mild influenza now will protect against more serious illness later. Exposure parties might be thought of as a form of vigilante vaccination against influenza.

Shining monkey, sadistic conclusion?

Japanese researchers have genetically modified marmoset monkeys, and demonstrated that the modification can be inherited by their offspring. The modification was the standard green fluorescent protein making the monkey's glow green under UV light, a marker to demonstrate that the modification worked (BBC shows a picture of their feet glowing "an eerie green", while the picture in Nature's News and Views shows the cute monkeys in normal light and the original paper shows both). The long-term aim is to be able to produce transgenic primates that could act as disease models for humans - many conditions do not map well onto mice and rats. But is it acceptable to introduce heritable illness conditions into animals?

Self-control matters - but to what extent can it be taught?

Recently in the news, a report published by the independent think-tank Demos reminds us of the importance of the capacity for self-control (it also mentions empathy, to which most of the following remarks apply) in determining life outcomes. It argues that self-control lessons should be taught at school if children, particularly from deprived backgrounds, are to be given the tools they need to succeed in life – low-self-control has for instance been shown to positively correlate with length of unemployment or criminal behaviour, and negatively with academic achievement. The report echoes renewed interest in the United States in a now famous experiment by Walter Mischel on deferred gratification, dating back to the late 1960s. Mischel tested the capacity of a group of four-year olds to resist the temptation to eat straightaway a marshmallow he had given them. The children who were able to refrain turned out to be better adjusted, more dependable and to do better academically on the whole later in life.

 

The report by Demos makes important points and its proposals deserve to be supported. Nevertheless, even if they are put into practice, we might still feel concerned about how effective we can expect them to be. There is indeed a body of evidence suggesting that the capacity for self-control is to a large extent genetically determined (Wright & Beaver, 2005; Beaver & al., 2009).

 

Designer Babies and Slippery Slopes

Designer babies are in the news again. The LA Fertility Institutes, headed by a 1970s IVF pioneer, have offered the opportunity for potential parents to choose traits such as the eye and hair colour of their children: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7918296.stm

Unsurprisingly, slippery slope arguments have already begun to appear: http://www.theage.com.au/world/la-delivers-first-designerbaby-clinic-20090302-8meq.html Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Centre for Genetics and Society, has said: ‘The concern is that we'll be creating a society with new sorts of discrimination. Now it’s eye and hair colour. What happens if it’s height and intelligence?’

Slopes can be slippery in different ways, and they can be more or less slippery. The strongest form of slippery slope argument points to a logical implication: if you accept A (which you seem to think is good), then you must accept B (which presumably you think is bad). Pretty clearly, we don’t have an argument of that kind in the present case. There’s no logical inconsistency in  being in favour of parents’ being allowed to select certain traits of their children, while being against discrimination. Nor of course is the existence of selection itself inconsistent with the absence of discrimination.

A more common form of the argument appeals to the lack of a non-arbitrary stopping point. The idea is that you should not accept A because A might conceivably lead to B, and you could find no non-arbitrary place to draw the line between A and B. That doesn’t seem to be Darnovsky’s argument, however, since it wouldn’t be arbitrary to stop selection if it were clearly leading to discrimination, but to permit it up to that point.

The argument here is essentially an appeal to consequences. As stated, however, it is clearly too strong. The concern cannot plausibly that we will be creating a society with new forms of discrimination. Rather, the idea must be that trait-selection may lead to these new forms of discrimination. So we can imagine a world in which people whose parents haven’t selected for certain eye or hair colours are discriminated against, which we can certainly accept would be undesirable.

The main issue here is how likely it is that discrimination on grounds of eye or hair colour will arise. On the face of it, it looks rather unlikely. People’s tastes in eye and hair colour vary a lot, so not everyone would go for (say) blue-eyed and blond children. And these kinds of characteristics anyway do not at present seem to be the basis for any systematic discrimination.

But, the argument suggests, selection for eye and hair colour may lead to selection for height and intelligence, and these may provide the basis for new kinds of discrimination. Again, however, it’s not clear why trait-selection even of these characteristics would lead to new forms of discrimination. There may be discrimination against short people now, in which case trait-selection wouldn’t be creating anything new. And if there isn’t any, then it’s not clear why it should be created merely through there being more tall people around.

Appeals to slippery slopes often rely on the idea that things could get out of control. Once you’re on that slope, you’re just going to keep slipping down and there’s nothing you can do. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with trait-selection. If it does turn out to have consequences we’d prefer to avoid, then we can stop doing it. Fertility clinics do not operate in a legislative vacuum.

So there’s no strong argument here for preventing those few parents who want to choose the eye or hair colour of their children to get on with it. Even if there is a slope, it is not especially slippery -- we can get off at any time.

The Lost Genius objection to pre-natal testing for autism

In an opinion piece on the BBC website this week Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has questioned the wisdom of adopting pre-natal screening for autism, raising the possibility that it would prevent the existence of future great mathematicians. This is a variant of a common objection to pre-natal testing or to genetic enhancement.

Keeping Viagra in the bedchamber and out of the arena?

Viagra may not just be a performance enhancer in the bedroom, but also on the sports arena. Researchers are studying whether it helps dilate athlete's blood vessels and improve their oxygen-carrying capacity. If it is found to improve performance it will likely be put it on the list of banned substances for athletes. But should it? 

Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

Following the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical Sciences building is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been revisited in the media—see, for example, here , here, and here.

The number of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in importance. So, what is being done to address this issue?