Practical Ethics

Educating children on matters of food

As evidenced by recent declarations by the Children’s Secretary (see here and here), the British government is determined to fight childhood obesity and to initiate nothing less than a “lifestyle revolution”, resulting in more children leading a healthy and active life. With this aim in view, a free cookbook was recently distributed to 11 year-olds by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. In addition to that, from 2011 cookery lessons will be compulsory in England's secondary schools for children aged 11 to 14, and £3.3 million will be invested in order to recruit and train people capable of teaching cooking skills to children. Parents are also urged to teach their children how to prepare meals from scratch.

These are certainly sensible steps to take. With nine out of 10 British adults and two-thirds of children expected to be overweight or obese by the year 2050 unless action is taken (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/30/obesity), we are clearly dealing with an important public health issue. And given the significance of the link between excess weight and an unhealthy diet (lack of exercise being another major contributing factor), it seems clear that we should teach children what a healthy diet consists in and equip them not to be dependent on the local fast-food chain when the time of the next meal comes. We can hope that the government’s scheme will help to achieve this, and that parents will follow the lead – though it is also necessary that the meals provided in school canteens be in keeping with those aims. However, I would like to suggest that these steps should form part of a wider project meant to educate children on matters of food. We want our children to be healthy, but we should also want them to become autonomous and ethically responsible eaters (and, more generally, consumers).

Climate Change, Abortion, and Impersonality

We are surrounded by many ethical issues, and their complexity makes it tempting to treat each in isolation. But we need to remember that to justify any position requires reference to universal principles, and these principles may well have implications in other areas we find uncomfortable. It’s also the case that thinking about one topic can provide helpful angles on others.

Consider first climate change. European leaders have just announced a climate change pact (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/13/carbon-emissions-eu). One central concern of those advocating measures to slow down and ultimately stop climate change is the well-being of future generations. But, as Derek Parfit brought out especially clearly in his classic Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, ch. 16), we have here a ‘non-identity problem’. Imagine that we allow the climate to change to the point that conditions on earth are significantly less conducive to human habitation than now. It might seem that future generations would be able to complain about our actions now. But in fact these individuals will exist only because of those actions. If we’d adopted different policies, then different individuals would have been born. The only complaint the future individuals might have would be if we had created conditions such that the value of their lives to them was lower than a life of no value at all – that is, a life which would have been better had it ended just as soon as it began. And even that doesn’t seem such a serious wrong, if the future individuals have the opportunity to end their lives in some not too painful a way.

But surely there is something wrong with damaging the environment so that the value of lives lived is much lower than that of lives that might have been lived? This suggests that an important element in ethics is impersonal. By harming the environment, we are doing something very wrong. But we are not wronging any particular persons. Our wrong consists in making the world – in terms of the quality of lives lived within it, independently of exactly who lives those lives – worse than it might have been.

Now consider abortion, which is condemned in the latest Instruction from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae: http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae.pdf  . The official Catholic view here is that a fetus, because it is a human being (which of course it is – a human being at the fetal stage), has the same dignity and moral status as any other human being. So abortion is on the same moral level as the murder of a child.

A common liberal view in our society is that abortion is entirely morally acceptable, while the murder of a child is very wrong. Here the liberal faces a serious problem which the Catholic does not: where to draw the line between a fetal human being and a young child at which moral status emerges. Liberals often claim that moral status develops gradually, but there is something unsatisfactory about this. What seems to make the murder of a young child wrong, as regards the child itself, is that it deprives the child of the rest of its life. But that is true of abortion. Indeed a murdered child may have had at least some valuable life before it is killed.

Ethical impersonality provides a way for liberals about abortion both to accept the Catholic view on moral status and to allow abortion while forbidding the murder of post-birth human beings. The moral wrong done to a fetus through abortion is indeed on roughly the same level as that done to a murdered post-birth human being. But it is very hard to say, from the impersonal point of view, whether either abortion or murder is wrong. We do not know what the optimum population level at any time is, so whether cutting short any particular life is, in itself, good or bad is unclear. But the effect of a murder on the overall level of well-being in the world is significantly greater than that of an abortion. Not only does it cause painful grief among relatives and friends of the murdered, but it increases fear and a sense of insecurity among many people. Murder on a large scale can even make life intolerable for just about everyone concerned, as recent events in the Congo have illustrated.

Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit

The current issue of the Royal Society's journal (Philosophical Transactions) is devoted to geo-engineering. That is, very large scale engineering projects aimed at combatting global warming. For example, one proposal is to release sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere in order to increase the reflectivity of the earth and thus lower the earth's temperature enough to offset global warming. Another proposal is to increase the reflectivity by producing more cloud over the ocean. This could be achieved with a large fleet of wind powered yachts, blowing a fine mist of salt spray into the air and thus seeding cloud formation. Such proposals offer a serious hope for avoiding most of the damage from significant climate change, and yet they are often rejected by environmentalists (for example see yesterday's article in the Guardian by Greenpeace's chief scientist). However, there is a strong case that these environmentalists are mistaken and should be encouraging this research.

The truth about saving water

The last few years have seen some very bad droughts. In the UK, the drought of 2004-2006 was severe enough to nearly require the shutting down of domestic water in London and the fetching of water from public wells (called standpipes). Australia has been suffering from its own decade long drought with devastating consequences. As a result, water-awareness in both countries has been rising. People are at least dimly aware of ideas for saving water, such as turning off the tap while brushing one's teeth. In Australia there was even a government sponsored advertisement recommending taking showers with someone else. However, as a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund shows, even if we stop showering altogether, we will still be using an unsustainable amount of fresh water.

Saving the planet by reducing birth rates

Climate change will impact the well-being of future generations, directly by, for example, increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heavy storms. It will have also indirect impacts on human heath – via cardiovascular diseases or by a rise in epidemics as emerging disease leave the tropic and go North.

 
The beginning of this year, the British Medical Journal declared that since climate change impacts public health, doctors have to deal with it. And in tackling the problem, John Guillebaud, emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College London , and GP Pip Hayes from Exeter suggest that doctors should talk to their patients about climate change and encourage them to think about the environmental impacts of having a big family: see for example the Editorial or an article in the Daily Telegraph, or the Guardian. After all, “each UK birth will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse ags emissions […] than a new birth in Ethiopia.”

 
Fair enough, the world is interconnected: environmental changes involve impacts on the population, and changes in the population impact the environment. But is it sensible to treat environmental problems not primarily as such, but making them problems of family planning?

Unpopular policy and public rationality

The BBC reports that the Japanese town of Kamikatsu has become the first ‘zero waste’ town. Residents compost all of their food waste, and must sort the rest of their rubbish into 34 different categories—all of which they must take to public waste centres, since there are no rubbish collections from people’s homes. It seems that the inhabitants of the town are generally enthusiastic about the scheme, which offers small financial rewards for recycling, and has encouraged people to make an effort to reduce the rubbish they produce.

This is one of those relatively rare, uplifting stories about a scheme designed to reduce environmental damage that is not only successful, but supported by the community. Could something similar work in the UK? Recently, many UK councils reduced domestic refuse collections from once-weekly to once-fortnightly, with recyclable waste being collected in the intervening weeks. Whilst this has boosted the amount of rubbish being recycled, some news reports reveal that the new measures are unpopular, and some councils have bowed to public pressure by re-introducing weekly collections. Given the environmental impact of adding to landfill waste sites, ought the government to placate the public by relaxing measures designed to reduce waste, or should unpopular measures be enforced regardless of public opinion?

The Clash of Environmental Values

GMO and climate change seem currently one of the more upsetting issues not only for environmentalists, but for the wider public as well. Carbon tax proposals like the one released by Canada’s opposition party last week (e.g Financial Times) or requests to the EU by Britain to embrace a more liberal attitude towards GM crops (e.g. The Independent) are the order of the day in many newspapers. 

Precautionary arguments of any sort regarding the release of GMO or greenhouse gases commonly invoke the complex and still badly understood entanglement of different parts of the environment: Present greenhouse gas emissions may trigger a catastrophic runaway climate change: An initial global warming may yield to, say, the release of vast amounts of methane that so far was bound in the permafrost of the Russian or North American tundra; the methane further increases the initial warming.  We simply do not sufficiently understand such type of feedbacks. The same holds true for releasing GMO into the atmosphere: Via horizontal gene transfer to wild types or feral relatives, for example, GMO may yield unpredicted and unwanted side effects.

Releasing greenhouse gases or GMO are both interventions in the complex environmental system. But how, if at all, do these two issues, commonly discussed as separate and isolated questions, interrelate?

Helping others to save the rainforest

The Congo basin rainforest is a natural resource of staggering scale, second only to the amazon in size. It stretches across six countries in the centre of Africa and provides shelter, food, income and fuel for millions of local people. However, like most of the world's remaining forests, it is being destroyed at an unsustainable rate. Like all the world's major rainforests, it lies in developing countries which are desperate for any small income it can provide. This adds to the sense of tragedy: these great resources are being destroyed for what is a relative pittance to conservationists in the rich countries. Happily, this tragic element is starting to be turned around and may give us our best chance at preserving the forest.

Two approaches to climate control

The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”.   Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counterbalance the accelerating impact of our species on the natural environment, while their opponents think we should be getting that species to make radical changes in its way of life before its home becomes uninhabitable.   The article was mainly about plans for carbon capture, but there had been another piece a few days before about much further reaching ideas of geoengineering or ‘ecohacking’ – “using science to change the environment on a vast scale” by such means as screening the whole planet from the sun – which, it seems, might become feasible sooner than we realize.

The Dignity of the Carrot

What are you allowed to do to plants? At least in Switzerland you are not allowed to do research that deeply offend the dignity of plants. The Swiss federal Gene Technology Law stipulates that any scientific research should respect the "dignity of creation". All plant biotechnology grant applications must now state how they take plant dignity into consideration, confusing researchers.  The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) have issued some guidelines (pdf) which make the situation even more confusing. Neither humans nor plants are likely to be helped.