Practical Ethics

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.

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.

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.

The judge is out on juries

Is the traditional jury system in trouble? The first crown court criminal trial in England and Wales without a jury in 350 years is being held right now, dealing with the Heathrow robbery of 2004. The Guardian discusses the problem of keeping potentially prejudicial Internet information from modern juries. Are we seeing an erosion of having fair trials by one's peers, or the start of updating an old system to modern standards?

The Disease Industry

In a recent article, “Sure, It’s Treatable. But Is It a Disorder?” the New York Times warns its readers to “brace yourselves for P.E. – shorthand for premature ejaculation”. If the pharmaceutical industry is to be believed, that may not be bad advice, since according them, “One in three men actually have the condition.” But the advice is not meant to be taken literally. What the reporter really meant was, “brace yourselves for ‘P.E.’ – shorthand for ‘premature ejaculation’”.  According to the article, just as the makers of Viagra have in recent years introduced into the popular lexicon the name of a “modern man’s malady” and it’s acronym – ‘erectile dysfunction’, or ‘E.D.’, we can expect a similar effect as a result of the development and marketing of Priligy: a new pill for “men who ejaculate before copulating or within seconds of beginning.”

The interesting thing about drugs like these is that the condition that they address may not be recognized as a “disease” or “medical disorder” until the drug companies set out to market a “cure” for it. And medicalizing the issue is an essential part of the drug marketing strategy.

Killing is killing - or is it?

In the headlines this week is the tragic story of Frances Inglis, whom a jury at the Old Bailey found guilty of murdering her disabled son Tom and sentenced to nine years in jail. Tom Inglis had been left severely braindamaged after falling from a moving ambulance in 2007, throwing his mother in a state of deep distress. She refused to believe an (apparently isolated) encouraging prognosis from one of the doctors at the hospital, and concluded that it was her duty to release her son from the “living hell” in which he found himself. Horrified on learning that the only legal way of allowing her son to die was an application to the High Court for Tom’s food and water to be withdrawn, Frances Inglis decided to take action on her own. After a first unsuccessful attempt 14 months earlier, she took her son’s life by injecting him with a lethal dose of heroin in November 2008.

 

We're all guinea pigs, and it's not so bad

The outrage provoked by Professor Anthony Mathur’s suggestion that patients should sometimes be obliged to enrol in clinical trials (discussed already on this blog by Steve Clarke: 11 December) continues to rage on.  Armies of shrill autonomists tell us that all our worst nightmares are real: that Mengele walks again.

LIES AND THE IRAQ WAR

By: David Edmonds

The current British inquiry into the Iraq war – led by Sir John Chilcot – is a cathartic exercise.  No issue since New Labour was elected in 1997 has been so divisive.   The war split friends, families and political parties.   While the catastrophic impact of the war is still being felt in Iraq, in Britain the inquiry - it is hoped - will bring some closure. Many critics of the war are looking for one finding.  They don’t want to hear that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair miscalculated.  They want to have confirmed their belief that he intentionally misled – even that he lied.   Oddly, a verdict of ‘lie’ would be regarded as incomparably more serious than a verdict of ‘miscalculation’.   The ‘Liar’ headline would curdle the nation’s blood.

A controversial use of taxpayer funds

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the United States has re-ignited controversy there over abortion, and in particular over the availability of federal government funding to pay for the procedure. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives version of the health care bill passed narrowly, and with a last minute amendment that will restrict provision of abortions. The so-called “Stupak amendment” says that no health care plans receiving any subsidy from the federal government may offer abortions, except in the case where abortion is the result of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life, and it maintains this restriction even if the government subsidies are kept separate from the private payments made into the plans, and no government subsidy is ever used to pay for abortions. The Stupak amendment represents a tightening over existing policy, according to which the federal government is prohibited from directly funding the provision of abortions, but may provide funds for hospitals, for example, that also provide abortions – so long as the hospitals pay for the abortions themselves by some other means.

The argument for Stupak’s additional restrictions on abortion funding is supposed to be that since money is fungible, the old prohibition does not really work to prevent federal funds indirectly playing a role in providing for abortions. Whatever the merits of this argument, it’s worth noting that many of its proponents in congress make it hypocritically; they are more than willing to accept generous campaign contributions drawn from the profits of health insurance companies that provide insurance for abortions as a component of their plans. But I want to focus here on the question of having any restriction of this kind at all. Can the federal government legitimately be prohibited from funding abortion?

Is your fingerprint part of you?

In a report expressing concern about the increasing use of biometric information to protect security and privacy, the Irish Council for Bioethics (ICB) claimed earlier this month that “an individual’s biometric information is an intrinsic element of that person”. Such claims are quite commonly made in relation to genetic information, though the ICB’s extension of the concept to other forms of biological information, such as that acquired from fingerprinting, voice recognition software, and gait analysis, may be novel.

The claim that biometric information is an ‘intrinsic element of the person’ seems designed to invoke powerful intuitions about our ownership of our own body parts: we own our biological information just like we own our kidneys. Indeed, the ICB go on to say that “the right to bodily integrity.... should apply not only to an individual’s body, but also to any information derived from the body, including his/her biometric information”. But both the metaphysical claim that biometric information is an intrinsic element of the person,and the moral claim that it is covered by rights to bodily integrity are highly problematic.