Practical Ethics

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?

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?

Who is watching the watchmen?

Today, British MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still fairly sparse, on Britain' s headlong way towards a surveillance state (see for example this editorial in the Guardian).

 Technologies that allow the state to monitor aspects of private life are not in the realm of science fiction anymore. This is highlighted by the widespread use of network monitoring and data mining suites, which are readily available from major international companies involved in the standardization of processes ensuring the lawfulness of the monitoring. Emerging technologies like nanotech might significantly enhance these existing possibilities and threats to privacy.

Personal Carbon Credits and Fairness Considerations

Not a day seems to pass without some news on the possible catastrophic impacts of climate change. International politics aims at establishing binding regulations for greenhouse gas emissions – but quite rightly gets accused of only paying lip service (though at least last weeks agreement of the G8 states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions might yield the right direction). However, implementation of these emission cuts is up to the individual states – but whichever step a government undertakes, there seems to turn up an interest group that is heavily opposed. The UK's proposed system of personal carbon credits suffers exactly this fate.

In a report published this Monday, the environmental audit committee urged the government to lead the way in allocating individuals an allowance of marketable carbon credits. Under this scheme, people would be given an annual carbon limit for fuel and energy uses. This limit could be exceeded by buying credits from those who use less. Apart form being accused as “costly, bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable”, criticism was also raised as this personal carbon credit scheme might be unfair – just as, for example, a taxation approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would be unfair as well. Some people might have good reason for using more fuel than others as they live in the countryside, drive their old neighbour to the supermarket, etc.

Global Warming and the Hidden Costs of Aviation

A recent study reveals that aviation might pump 20% more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2025 as previously estimated. Vexing is not the possibly underestimated figure; but the fact that this study was only recently uncovered: As covered by The Independent or Spiegel Online, the British environmental association Aviation Environmental Federation now presents the study on their webpage although it was already presented last summer at an international conference in Barcelona. Jeff Gazzard, a spokesman for the Aviation Environmental Federation, is convinced that this omission to make the report publicly available was deliberate. The study contains alarming piece of evidence that challenges the rather liberal approach to aviation of the Kyoto Protocol: Only domestic aviation emissions are accounted for in a countries’ emissions totals, while emissions from international aviation are omitted (see Kyoto Protocol, Decision 2/CP3).

What computer simulations can tell us about the success of international treaties

International negations on climate change sometimes give the impression that a lot of hot air is raised for nothing: Politicians, policy makers and scientists alike gain air miles on their way to countless conferences, thereby emitting non-negligible amounts of greenhouse gases, only to arrive at the lowest common denominator satisfying none of the parties. International treaties resulting from these negations suffer a rather bad reputation.

Recent computer simulations may smoothen the ruffled feathers of all those who see international regulations as the sole remedy to global environmental problems. At the annual meeting of the international research program SCOUT-O3 that ends tomorrow, researchers presented simulation results showing how the Montreal Protocol – originally ratified in 1992 to reduce the emissions of CFCs and other ozone-damaging substances –has contributed to a healthier environment (see newspaper coverage).

The case against love: A recent legislation on incest

Germany’s highest court recently upheld the law making incest a criminal offence that can be prosecuted with up to 2 years. It thereby rejected an appeal from a man who has four children with his sister. The pair fell in love when they met for the first time at adult age, after being brought up separately. Last week, the enforcement of the law, which would amount to 17 month in prison for the man, has been delayed. He and his sister now await the decision of minister of justice of the appropriate federal state.
Prior to and following the decision of the highest court there has been a lively debate on upholding a law that for many seems nothing but a historical relict and lacking sound justification.

Small is beautiful, ain’t it? The EU’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies Research

While some see nanotechnology as the solution to our most pressing current problems, or at least as the basis for rapid future technological progress, others fear that nanotech might yield unprecedented catastrophic consequences. Even outside the genre of science fiction, it has been suggested that nanotech might provide a solution to world poverty and waste disposal: Tiny robots will convert garbage into nutrition simply by reorganizing structures on the molecular or atomic level. Also frequently discussed is the possibility that self-replicating nanobots threaten the existence of our world by converting all matter into their own kind – a dystopia that has come to be known as grey goo.

The European Union has now reacted to the hopes and fears associated with this fairly new technology and provided a code of conduct for responsible nanoscience and nanotechnologies research. This code shall guide scientists, engineers, policymakers, collective as well as individual agents. Such a code of conduct seems indispensable. However, the tentativeness (e.g. in the form of a rather vague appeal to the precautionary principle) and the lack of feasibility of its norms (for example, it argues for a “general culture of responsibility”, see below) actually raises more general questions about the feasibility of regulating scientific research and technological progress.

Corrupted Science. Peer reviewer leaks information to drug manufacturer

A well-known diabetes expert has abused his function as peer reviewer for the renowned The New England Journal of Medicine. The reviewer broke confidentiality and leaked a damaging report about a substantial hike in the risk of heart attack when using the popular diabetes drug rosiglitazone, sold under the brand name Avandia, to the drug’s manufacturer weeks ahead of publication (see Nature or ScienceNews).

Obviously, this scientist violated principal tenets of independence and integrity of scientific journals and all codes of scientific conduct. But there seems to be more to the whole story than the violation of blatant rules by an individual. The NZZ views this incident as the “gateway to a yawning abyss” that opens up a fatal sleaze between medical industry and medical research.

Objective Research Funding? An Approach to quantify the Value of Experiments

The distribution of research funds is clearly not based on purely objective criteria. Most countries have different ways of how to deal with this issue – all face different, but serious problems. Bruce Knuteson (MIT) has developed a formula of which he claims is able to estimate the scientific merit that a proposed experiment will give back per monetary unit before we actually perform it. Knuteson’s formula estimates the gain to be obtained by a proposed experiment in terms of the reduction in information entropy the experiment is expected to provide. This is a seductive concept: Large scientific projects, think of ITER at Cadarache or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – cost the public a lot of money. The ‘right’ distribution of research money is thus not only of interest to promote the future success of scientific research, but also of larger societal interest. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reports on Knuteson’s formula. Can it really help to provide objective and rational criteria for funding the right type of research?