Reduce carbon emissions: Turn humans into hobbits

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 20 March 2012
tags : bioethics, utilitarianism

Even more weirdness

All all bioethicists crazy? Or only the utilitarians?

Newspapers have their “silly season” of shock-horror absurdities in the slow news summer months. How about bioethics journals? When two very loopy articles in peer-reviewed journals surface in as many weeks, their silly season is clearly February and March.

First two Italian/Australians asserted in the Journal of Medical Ethics that infanticide was morally permissible. That created a firestorm of commentary which badly tarnished the prestige of bioethics as a serious discipline.

Now an American, a Swede and a Briton are about to publish an even weirder article in a journal called Environment, Ethics and Policy. Their proposal is to combat climate change with human engineering. People who are smaller and shorter and eat less meat will help reduce both their own carbon footprint and bovine flatulence (which is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases).

The details of their essay are so extraordinary that some caveats are needed to ensure that the authors get a fair hearing. First of all, although engineering children is clearly eugenics, the authors insist that it is the nice kind of eugenics, the privatised voluntary kind, not the government-enforced mandatory kind.

Second, these are thought experiments, not practical proposals. And third, the eccentricity of the solutions is justified by the urgency of the problem. International agreements on carbon emissions are not working and the feasibility of geo-engineering the planet by changing the chemistry of the oceans or sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with giant sponges seems remote.

Human engineering
So imaginative solutions are needed – which the three bioethicists, who come from New York University and from Oxford, supply. In spades.

Their most eye-popping brainwave is turning us into hobbits. “For instance,” one author, S. Matthew Liao, of New York University, told The Atlantic, “if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.”

Another intriguing proposal is inducing positive attitudes towards the environment with drugs, although Liao sees it as a way of boosting willpower rather than inducing beliefs.

“If you crave steak, and that craving prevents you from making a decision you otherwise want to make, in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have that steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing.”

Then there is population control. Liao dismisses the one-child policy advocated by some environmental groups as coercive. He favours a child-per-family quota based on volume and weight rather than number. Parents could have three small-sized children or two medium-sized children or one really large basketball player.

Preposterous?

Don’t be too quick to judge. Another author, Rebecca Roache, of Oxford told the Guardian that most great ideas often seem preposterous at first.

“Human engineering may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but this does not mean it could not turn out to be feasible and promising: telephones, ‘test tube babies’, and personal computers are all important aspects of modern life that were once regarded as bizarre and unrealistic.”

The article has even been criticised by other bioethicists, the Swedish author, Anders Sandberg, admitted to the Guardian. But he is unperturbed by labels like “eco-Nazis” and “eugenicists”. “We are fairly typical liberal academics thinking about the world,” Sandburg says.

Well, if Liao, Roache and Sandberg are typical, there is something wrong with liberal academics. They have blithely overlooked so many social, political and moral objections and have such a feeble grasp on what makes us human that they bring all of bioethics into disrepute – just as the authors of the infanticide paper did.


Whence the craziness?
What is the source of these common-sense defying conjectures? After all, writing science fiction is not part of an ordinary bioethicist’s job description. Most of them are busy chipping away at the coal face, clarifying the conundrums that crop up every day of a doctor’s life. It’s simply not true that bioethics is one of “the world’s most unnecessary occupations”, along with aromatherapists, golf pros, journalism professors and American vice-presidents, as Andrew Ferguson sneered recently in The Weekly Standard.

As bioethics blogger Wesley J. Smith points out, we owe a lot to bioethicists who think deeply about the problems arising from technological mastery over the human body. Thinkers like Leon Kass or Gilbert Meilander or Margaret Somerville have helped to clarify the issues.

Respectable bioethicists can be controversial, but only a few have slipped their moorings from common sense and floated off to la-la land. These are the academics who are regularly pilloried in the media. Where do they come from?


Bioethics firebugs
My hunch is that most media wildfires are lit by utilitarians. If you examine the academic credentials of the five academics involved in these recent papers, all of them had links with Oxford and/or Monash University in Melbourne, both redoubts of utilitarianism. The notorious Peter Singer worked for many years at Monash, and his student, Julian Savulescu, now heads up the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford.

You might think that utilitarianism, whose foundational principle is the greatest good for the greatest number, is a left-brain theory for bean-counters. The first utilitarian, the 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, taught that the most ethical solution could be reached with his “felicific calculus” – balancing pleasures and pains without need for any transcendent realities.

But there is a right-brain side to this dry-as-dust philosophy. Highly logical people are often drawn to weird forms of spirituality. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, is a beacon of incandescent weirdness for succeeding generations. He specified in his willthat his body was to be preserved, dressed in his best clothes, and displayed in a glass cabinet to inspire “pilgrims [and] votaries of the greatest-happiness principle”. For years before his death – so it is said -- he jangled in his pockets the glass eyes which were to adorn his mummified skull. It was an odd way to become immortal.

One of the most significant theorists of utilitarianism, the 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, also founded a Society for Psychical Research, which conducted sympathetic investigations into spiritualism – séances, communications with the dead and so on.

Utilitarians don’t believe in human nature, but only in a sliding scale of consciousness. Persons are beings (animal or human) who are capable of anticipating the future and of having wants and desires for the future. There is nothing stable and unchanging about human nature. So utilitarians are free to redefine what human beings are and what they can be. The less adventurous ones, like Peter Singer, are content to include some animals and to exclude infants and comatose adults. The more ambitious ones, like Julian Savulescu, an Oxford bioethicist, dream of enhancing our present condition with drugs and genetic engineering.

Moving to another level, there are transhumanists who have visions of Humanity 2.0. These humans of the future will be stronger and faster, vastly more intelligent and even more altruistic and peaceful. Some fantasise about achieving immortality by uploading their minds onto computers. This is a logical extension of the utilitarian mindset. If the boundaries of the future are not set by human nature, humanity is just a work in progress, a plaything for imaginative bioethicists.

Strictly speaking, transhumanists are not utilitarians, but utilitarian axioms underpin transhumanism. As Savulescu told an ethics journal a couple of years ago, the two approaches make a nice fit:

“Transhumanism has a kind of group-think or quasi-religious quality that does not suit well my nature. I prefer to stand outside it and make my own arguments. But their hearts (and minds) are in the right place. We agree on most things.”

Despite the prestige that Singer and Savulescu and other utilitarians have, at least in the media, loopiness is hard-wired into their philosophy. A utilitarian bioethicist is always going to be a loose cannon, rolling wildly around the deck in ethical storms, splintering and smashing the fragile public image of his or her profession. If other bioethicists want to repair their dented prestige, shunning utilitarian colleagues would be a good place to start.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 


Retrieved March 21, 2012 from MercatorNet

More Bioethical Silliness

Yet another Modest Proposal: save the world from climate change by genetically engineering your kids

by Michael Cook | 17 Mar 2012 |

Modest proposals, in sense given the phrase by the great 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift, are flavour of the month in the bioethics community. Hot on the heels of an infanticide proposal in a leading journal comes a modest proposal to genetically modify children to save the world from climate change.

In a soon-to-be-published article in Ethics, Policy and Environment, three bioethicists, from New York University and from Oxford, float some quite eye-popping ideas. An interview with the S. Matthew Liao, of NYU, in The Atlantic sparked a firestorm on blogs.

Dr Liao explained that human engineering must be explored because other solutions for climate change, like international agreements and geoengineering, are clearly not working.

Among his suggestions are drugs to provoke aversion to meat to wean people off eating animals. This would help enormously, because half of the world’s greenhouse emissions may come from livestock farming.


Genetic modification and drugs to make people smaller is another solution. “For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.”

One of the most intriguing proposals is inducing positive attitudes towards the environment with drugs, although he sees it as a way of boosting willpower rather than inducing beliefs.

“If you crave steak, and that craving prevents you from making a decision you otherwise want to make, in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have that steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing.”

He proposes an interesting twist on the one or two-child policy advocated by some environmental groups: a child-per-family quota based on volume and weight rather than number:

“…given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says ‘you can only have one or two children.’ A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.”

Preposterous? Not so fast. “Human engineering may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but this does not mean it could not turn out to be feasible and promising: telephones, ‘test tube babies’, and personal computers are all important aspects of modern life that were once regarded as bizarre and unrealistic,” another author, Rebecca Roache told the Guardian.

The article has been criticised even by colleagues, Anders Sandberg told the Guardian. But the authors are unperturbed by labels like “eco-Nazis” and “eugenicists”. “We are fairly typical liberal academics thinking about the world,” Sandburg says.

Daleks are utilitarians, but are utilitarians Daleks?

Daleks are utilitarians, but are utilitarians Daleks?Richard Umbers | Thursday, 6 October 2011

Psychology researchers may have discovered a disturbing angle to utilitarian reasoning.

Instructing doctors to kill the dying rather than waiting for them to die is icky. But think of the quality of the organs they could donate! This is the argument some Belgian transplant surgeons used to justify taking organs from patients who had just chosen to be euthanased.

Creating rabbit-man chimeras for experimentation seems like sci-fi gone wrong. But imagine the cures that could be discovered! This is the argument used by some British stem cell researchers to justify the creation of hybrid cells.

A number of policy makers and bioethicists would have us put the “yuck factor” to one side in our moral choices in favour of utilitarian outcomes. In the words of one British MP arguing for the creation of hybrid embryos, "If human benefit can be derived… then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a 'yuck' factor."

The assumption here is that our initial emotions and intuitions are deemed to be a bad guide to the proper policy description that a deliberation of costs and benefits would yield. As Peter Singer, the Australian uber-utilitarian, has written, ““In everyday life… our reasoning is likely to be nothing more than a rationalization for our intuitive responses … the emotional dog is wagging the rational tail.”

Well, however authoritative this might sound, it is false. Emotions are good guides to correct moral judgement and we should wager our prefrontal cortex to back them.

Utilitarianism has a superficially plausible method for solving moral decisions: the greatest good for the greatest number. If I can save five people from a speeding train by pushing a fat guy onto the railway track, why not? Out of six people, five are still alive.

But unless moral judgements can make room for imagination and empathy we could well end up with psychopaths making their way onto bioethics panels and, as far as output is concerned, nobody would be the wiser for that. Utilitarianism masks the need for real thought about means and ends and not just the most efficient techniques that get us to the outcomes we want.

Does the linkage between utilitarians and psychopaths sound extreme?

Perhaps, but two American academics have recently published a paper in the peer-reviewed psychology journal Cognition which correlates anti-social personality traits with utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. This is not an ad hominempiece that says utilitarians are losers but it is statistically significant evidence that people lacking in moral character traits are overwhelmingly utilitarians. In the words of Daniel M. Bartels, of Columbia University, and David A. Pizarro, of Cornell University:

"We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral."

Would you push the fat guy off the footbridge? In most surveys 90 percent of respondents say that they would not. Over the last 10 years this has been interpreted as evidence of emotionally clouded moral judgement. Nine out of ten people, academics have concluded, allow their passions to impede their reasoning. Those individuals who can “correctly” choose to save the five lives at the expense of the fat man are people who typically have a higher working memory or who are more deliberative thinkers. They think like Peter Singer or Julian Savulescu orSteven Pinker.

For several years utilitarianism has been feted as a rational person’s normative ethical theory. The star of utilitarianism has been rising among policy makers and ethics committees when they debate issues like euthanasia. In the light of Bartels and Pizarro, however, we can also say that utilitarianism is the choice of the emotionally impaired.

Here is how the experiment was conducted. About 200 undergraduates (with a roughly even split between men and women) were paid US$3 each to answer 14 sacrificial dilemmas and a “battery of individual difference measures” with questions relating to enjoyment at the viewing of fist-fights, indifference to getting out of bed in the morning or whether we should just tell people what they want to hear. Participants who scored higher on the psychopathy, no meaning and Machiavellianism scales indicated a greater preference for utilitarian options in the ethical dilemmas.

The problem is that real world problems are different to the train track scenarios presented. These sacrificial dilemmas cannot discriminate between those who are thinking through the issue and those who are thugs. If psychopaths can pass the ethics test with flying colours then we need to revisit the nature of the test rather than revise our moral intuitions as evolutionarily backward.

There is a lesson in this. Of course, the fact that utilitarians tend to be psychopaths is not necessarily an argument against utilitarian ideas. But it should make us cautious about endorsing utilitarian arguments simply because they yield neat, all-end-tied-up answers. Doctors, nurses, administrators and politicians often have to deliberate agonising dilemmas. They should beware of utilitarian advisors who smirk that no dilemma is really agonising – it’s just a matter of counting up the plusses and minuses.

So when you hear ethicists arguing for euthanasia, or abortion, or embryonic stem cell research, it’s quite likely that they are really Daleks (of Doctor Who fame) in humanoid disguise, repeating “exterminate, exterminate!” Those deadly salt and pepper shakers were once like us but technology has turned them into rationally superior monsters devoid of all other emotions but anger. Their characteristic warning is “resistance is useless”. But, believe me, resisting utilitarians is not just worthwhile – it’s essential if we want to retain our humanity.

Father Richard Umbers teaches philosophy in Sydney. 

Retrieved from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/daleks_are_utilitarians_but_are_utilitarians_daleks

Pragmatic Inhumanity: Scandalous Research in Guatemala

Michael Cook 

Thursday, 22 September 2011

“Ethically impossible”

Are there any lessons for the future in the scandalous story of American syphilis research in Guatemala?

For the past year, it has been bioethical bow, scrape and grovel time in Washington DC. After learning that American public health researchers had infected hundreds of Guatemalans with venereal diseases between 1946 and 1948, President Obama had to telephone his Guatemalan counterpart to apologize. He then set up a commission to investigate the appalling story of coercion and deception. A detailed historical report was published on September 13.

The tale came to light long after the doctors and participants had passed away. After World War II thousands of STD-infected servicemen were being demobbed. American public health officials needed to know more about the effectiveness of the new miracle drug penicillin to control the spread of STDs in the US. After research on volunteers in an Indiana prison, they went to Guatemala.

With the cooperation of local officials, Dr John C. Cutler, a Public Health Service physician, first selected men in the Guatemala National Penitentiary, then men in an army barracks, and then men and women in the National Mental Health Hospital.

The Commission concluded that researchers deliberately exposed about 1,300 inmates, psychiatric patients, soldiers and commercial sex workers to syphilis, gonorrhoea or chancroid. Permissions were obtained from government authorities but not from individuals.

Initially the doctors used prostitutes with the disease to infect the prisoners (since sexual visits were allowed by law in Guatemalan prisons). When “normal exposure” failed to infect, they did direct inoculations. These were made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men’s penises, forearms or faces after lightly abrading them. In some cases they used spinal punctures. The subjects were given penicillin after they contracted the illness.

In the 1950s Dr Cutler also worked on a project which became an even bigger scandal, the Tuskegee syphilis study. But he eventually became “a much beloved professor” at the graduate school of public health at the University of Pittsburgh. He died in 2003. The findings of his research in Guatemala were never published and his notes gathered dust in university archives – until they were unearthed by a historian at Wellesley College, Susan M. Reverby. Like most of the research done by Nazi doctors, it had been a waste of time. “What stings the most in terms of bad science is that it never passed peer review and was never published,” one member of the commission said.

Even by the standards of the time, this project was regarded as unethical. After all, only a few months before, Nazi death camp doctors had been condemned to death and long prison terms for medical experiments conducted without informed consent. Principles later formalised as the Nuremberg code of medical ethics had been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1947. In April 1947, New York Times science editor Waldemar Kaempffert observed, as if it were universally accepted, that deliberately injecting human subjects with syphilis microbes was “ethically impossible”.

Dr Cutler pushed ahead anyway. "The attitude toward the Guatemalan people was pretty much what you'd expect if they were doing research on rabbits," said a member of Obama’s commission, bioethicist John Arras, of the University of Virginia.

Failure to obtain consent from the research subjects was bad enough, but Dr Cutler was also deceitful. In a 1947 letter to a colleague, he admitted that he was deceiving the research subjects. “As you can imagine,” he wrote, “we are holding our breaths, and we are explaining to the patients and others concerned with but a few key exceptions, that the treatment is a new one utilizing serum followed by penicillin. This double talk keeps me hopping at times.”

Cutler’s higher-ups in the public health hierarchy were more squeamish but they did not stop the project. His superior confided, “I am a bit, in fact more than a bit, leery of the experiment with the insane people. They cannot give consent, do not know what is going on, and if some goody organization got wind of the work, they would raise a lot of smoke.” When the US Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, was told of the project, he commented, “You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.” But he did not stop it.

For Dr Arras, a single anecdote is enough to show how immoral the research had been. One of Cutler’s patients was Berta, a psychiatric patient who had been injected with syphilis and not given treatment for three months. On August 23, 1947 he observed that Berta was dying (why is not clear). That same day, he put gonorrhoeal pus from a male subject into both of Berta’s eyes, as well as in her urethra and rectum. He also re-infected her with syphilis. Several days later, Berta’s eyes were filled with pus and she was bleeding from her urethra. She died on August 27.

Bioethics today tends to be more concerned with protocols than with harshly judgmental words like “right” and “wrong”. But President Obama’s bioethics commission did not hesitate to describe the Guatemala experiments as “reprehensible” and “morally wrong”.

What lessons from this shameful episode can be applied to contemporary medical research?

One, says the commission with great common sense, is “never to take ethics for granted, let alone confuse ethical principles with burdensome obstacles to be overcome or evaded”. Another is that “the quest for scientific knowledge without regard to relevant ethical standards can blind researchers to the humanity of the people they enlist into research”.

The commission is following up the historical investigation with a report to President Obama into how well human research subjects are protected nowadays. With the proliferation of clinical trials by drug companies in countries like Russia, India and China, there is certainly a need to ensure that people’s health does not suffer because of lax oversight or dangerous experiments. A National Institutes of Health database currently lists 113,717 trials in 176 countries. Some of them are bound to be deadly.

However, now that this dark chapter in medical history has been exposed, shouldn’t it provoke broader questions about ethical standards in reproductive health research, the field in which Dr Cutler worked throughout his career? Abortion clinics, assisted reproduction, and population control were all started by men and women whose utilitarian philosophy was much the same as Dr Cutler's.

The commission did not follow this up. This is a pity, because he almost certainly brought with him the pragmatic inhumanity which had corrupted his work in Guatemala and elsewhere.

After leaving the Public Health Service in 1967, Dr Cutler helped establish a public health program at the University of Pittsburgh. His wife Eliese served on the board of Planned Parenthood, and “he worked tirelessly to find better ways to provide affordable reproductive health-care services to women who need them”, according to his obituary. The University named a lecture series after him (and dropped it after his scandalous research became public). One of the lectures, “John Cutler’s Quiet Legacy” lauded him for making “Sexual health… a vibrant field at University of Pittsburgh” and for “embracing new public health challenges, no matter how controversial”. “John Cutler is smiling!!” was the message of the final PowerPoint slide.

Smiling about what, exactly?

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 

Retrieved October 2, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ethically_impossible