Sandel

I think that Sandel's writing overall is much less aggressive than Harris'. I definitely don't feel that I need to defend my right to my own reasoning as much. I also feel that he isn't coming down so hard at one end of the spectrum. He's more arguing for caution in out pursuit of science and laying out the ways such technology could effect us physically and socially. Which I think would be best.

He also fills in the (probably intentionally) omitted rest of Habermas' point on autonomy. I suspected there was more to his argument and my skepticism of Harris' fairness and depth of understanding turned out to be valid. Habermas makes his point on the reduction of autonomy, and then adds an important caveat: It is something different when those things out of your control are determined by something out of everyone's control. That is to say, It is different when nature or God makes you the way you are than when another person has decided it for you. Though Harris would balk at this assertion, I think it is a valid observation. Intent is very important to human morality; we have two different criminal names for the same result: manslaughter and murder. Anyone could probably forgive someone who killed someone they love on accident, but it would take quite a person to forgive someone who killed a loved one intentionally even though they loose someone either way. If we are arguing pure morality, Intent should have a big effect on our discussion.    

Harris' final chapters

I think a great deal of Harris' book hinges on the idea that one should give little merit or consideration to processes because they are "natural". Which, as I've stated, is not necessarily the whole story. (Human) Morality is specific to humans, and not does not apply to the entire planet or the rules of nature, so you can't say a natural process is either moral or immoral (First parenthesis added because great apes have similar, but different cultural morality). One doesn't say that a wolf murdered another wolf, because "Murder" is an emotionally weighted term and the wolf doesn't know (our) right from wrong. As I once wrote in a paper "[Nature] is a neutral statistician." The fact that this conversation is even taking place is evident of this; The rules of morality are negotiable and do not represent the "Laws of Nature". Those who don't are not arguing by emotional virtue to preserve nature may simply be calling for great caution when disrupting such a complicated and inter-woven system.

He is likely tying the tendency to err with nature, in his mind, to religious appreciation of "God's masterpiece" or at least to that secular feeling of the Numinous. I will say that I am definitely affected by this feeling when climbing a mountain or overlooking a lovely forest, but at the same time I know that humans cannot live by nature's rules alone. Hell, I am a web developer; I couldn't even feed myself without technology. So it is definitely possible to appreciate both the natural and the technological and weigh their merits equally. In fact, as indicated with the rise of green energy, it's probably essential. Why reinvent a bumpy wheel instead of sand it down?

I largely dismissed Kass's arguments because they were easily shot down. Even Harris was able to do it pretty handily. Habermas, on the other hand, had some good, complex points, however culturally influenced (I'm not sure that a person's will is as powerful as the Germans seem to believe. See WWI). It reveals a nuanced aspect of individual suffering vs public benefit. Habermas points out that the potential for the actions of unwise parents to inflict completely, thoroughly irreversible harm is risen ten-fold if you empower them to alter the genetics of their children (Germans are also wary of any claim that certain genes are better than others and should be selected for, for pretty obvious reasons). While it is true that any number of parental decisions can put their children in this position, genetic manipulation IS completely irreversibly, while one could conceivably work one's way out of health or economic problems. So, a child could potentially be existentially or physically harmed to an atrocious extend. BUT most parents will probably (debate-ably) make decent, if not good, decisions concerning the genetic future of their children. These interventions won't come cheap, and parents will probably only resort to them if they are avoiding a terrible disease or providing some great benefit. So, most altered children may benefit greatly from their parents' ability to alter them while a minority may suffer in equal scores. The underlying question here: Is suffering a greater priority than benefit? If the answer is yes, Is there a point where the suffering minority becomes inconsequential? Let's say only 10 children were to suffer as opposed to 20,000 children being altered to avoid their parents' chemical depression? Would this be worth it? 

As a final point, I think genetic alteration may be necessary to continue evolution and is probably the price we pay for every individual getting to mate, whether or not their genes are fit. (It's debatable that my genes would be fit in the strictest sense and I still eagerly await the day my first child is born.) But a true extension of evolution would be alterations only for the sake of adaptions. For example, if the sun begins to cool in the distant future, maybe we ought to be altered to be able to withstand cold or be more suited for space travel.

Enhacing Evolution: Chapters 3 and 4

I'll start with a criticism about Harris' argumentative styling. He often makes jumps from one concept to another with his weak explanations glossed over with his boisterous and aggressive language choices. These are important hinges for his overall narrative and he doesn't seem to be aware of the possibility that not everyone made the jump with him. For example, this whole book seems to assume that the lack of immorality is the same thing as morality (and that there are no degrees of morality and immorality). Anyone who's ever had to make a tough moral decision will beg to differ. Another example is his jump from "The imperative to do good " to "The imperative to make things better." Many would interpret that instead as "The imperative to help those less fortunate" or maybe "The imperative to minimize bad". The concept is vast and largely up for personal interpretation, which is effected by any number of personal traits. It doesn't make sense for to assume that we all think of it the same way that he does.

In terms of these particular chapters, I feel that Harris makes another jump when he seems to claim all therapy as enhancement. One example is vaccines. He provides a quote from an opponent about vaccines being an acceptable alternation because it's stimulating a natural function of the immune system and then proceeds to attack it's nuance with a ham-fisted argument. He says that, similarly, a medical processes that made the brain grow 10% additional cells would be natural because the brain creates cells on it's own. That takes about 2 seconds of thought to dismantle. An immune system would produce antibodies after defeating an illness, whether or not humans intervened. A mostly-dead virus is just easier to for a immune system to handle. No process within the body makes the brain 10% bigger. Either he is unable to understand nuance or he just doesn't care. He uses this line of thinking and then moves on to all therapy being enhancement while I, for one, was thoroughly unconvinced and therefore did not believe his successive arguments held water since they were based on this one.

On his subject of Normalcy: I believe he thinks his opponents all worship normalcy and, by extension, nature like pagans. This is not the entirety of the desire to err toward normalcy. The Eco-system and our bodies are incomprehensibly complicated. It took millions of years for it to become this way, and we can never predict what will happen if we mess with it, or if we will be able to fix it/ it will be able to right it's self. Frankly, we are lucky it's worked out so vastly in our favor. As many-a grandfather will say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In chapter 4, he attempts to address the population problem that would arise if people stopped dying but... I didn't really see an argument in that section of the chapter. All he says is that people will still die of disease and accidents, but if we had the technology to enable immortality by his own logic we would have the technology to almost completely prevent and treat disease. And those wealthy enough to afford the technology aren't likely to meet the kind of accidents that kill. Then he goes on to say people may live until they are 5,000. So? What was the argument? People will still have more children. Did he just ignore this important point? 

Enhancing Evolution Intro through chapter 2

I want to start off by saying that I really disapprove of Harris' tone. When one is discussing a subject as complicated and uncertain as he is, it's pretty disrespectful to refer to your opponent's arguments as "tirades" or "huffing and puffing". This may be an attempt at a casual, humorous writing style, but when it ventures into claims like "...those misguided enough to find virtue in nature and normalcy." you are standing to alienate those who don't agree with you. In fact, it started to read like it was meant to entertain those who already agreed with him. Very irritating.

I also find various shortcomings in his arguments. He tends to reiterate the same point over and over again with different examples. For example, there were multiple times he addressed the "Even if everyone can't have this, it's no reason to suspend it" argument when it was totally unessesary and actually weakened this point-- His first example was by far the best saying "reading used to be only available to an elite few, but it was still good for humanity."

Other points he makes that raise serious flags: He claims that if there were some substance we could release into the environment to kill diseases that harm humans, that is safe for the ecosystem, we should enthusiastically to it and are morally bound to do so. Recent history does have a substance like that. DDT was used to kill typhus-carrying lice and other harmful parasites. It was thought to be so safe that classrooms full of smiling children were filmed being doused with DDT in spray form as PSAs. Later, it was found to not only poison wildlife, but also cause developmental toxicity, diabetes, breast cancer and carcinogenicity. It is now banned. So no, we are not morally bound to pursue these things with such a relentless fervor.

On page 26, he goes into chemical enhancements, seemingly claiming that martial use of performance-enhancing drugs is okay. Meth was also invented as a military, performance-enhancing drug. Soldiers became addicted and wracked with all the problems associated. It wasn't their choice to even take it to begin with. Perhaps the terrible side-effects of these drugs will surface years later, after we've thrown the veterans into the gutters and scorn them for their drug problem. Furthermore, he claims that if everyone in sports was allowed to use steroids, then the advantage would be available to everyone. If steroids were allowed, non-drugged athletes wouldn't be able to compete with the doped athletes. They would have to take steroids to stay in the game, so you are taking their choice in the matter. Steroids also have nasty side-effects that you are now pushing onto all athletes. It becomes less about the triumph and dedication of the individual and more about who can pump the most dope into their bodies without showing their side-effects.

He also spends a lot of time defending the personal intent of a theoretical enhanced person, saying that their enhancement was not pursued for the direct result of having an advantage over non-enhanced people. That doesn't mean they don't have an advantage. By definition, they do. Just as we have an advantage over a person born in a war-torn, poverty-stricken country. Is that fair? No.

Furthermore, if I was arguing his case, I'd bring up that the two aspects of Darwinian evolution within our perception, sexual selection and death by poor adaption, no longer affect us much in the first world: A lonely, poorly adapted person can go on the internet and find someone, somewhere to couple with and most diseases won't kill you before you have time to reproduce. We pay for improvements to individual experience- and biotechnical enhancements may be the way to mitigate that cost.

On Amy Gutmann's "The Ethics of Synthetic Biology, Guiding principles for emerging technologies"

It is good that Amy Gutmann's counsel sought to  layout some principles to guide deliberations about the complex issue of biotechnology, but I feel as though the guidelines they laid out were too vague, and a bit too geared toward pacification to be truly pragmatic, especially if they only remain guidelines. 

For example, the proposed principle Public Beneficence (that is minimizing the risk to the public and maximizing the benefit) sounds really comforting at first, but one just has to look at the Superfund sites in poor neighborhoods to realize the risk will not be bared proportionately should some environmental disaster occur.

Responsible Stewardship may work great for stary-eyed, public-minded researchers but the moment biotechnology become highly profitable this concept will be dust in the wind. BP let oil guzzle into the ocean for weeks and not only moved slowly and reacted callously, but were barely punished.

Fairness and Justice also seemed like a pipe dream. How can one expect fairness and justice from a culture who's CEOs earn over 400 times more than an average employee in the same company? When half of the voting block is still convinced Trickle Down economics are a good idea, then we'll never realize a future in which "the unavoidable burdens of technological advances do not fall disproportionately on any particular individual or group."

Additionally, There's no guarantee that firms will follow these guidelines unless they are enforced by law, and even then it may be hard to monitor until it's too late. In many cases, we only find out about shady business dealing after they've caused some sort of disaster. (See: General Electric or the aforementioned BP) One thing that comes to mind: I recently saw a schematic of a proposed bio-fuel farm in which synthetic bacteria designed to excrete ethanol would live in acres of racks, soaking up sun. But what happens if there's a leak? Do we get a self-replicating oil spill? What if a greedy company head decides to use a public water source irresponsibly and the bacteria are ingested? Projects of this magnitude should be closely monitored and strictly punishable, in my opinion.

Callahan, Brown and Mintrom

An argument that we cannot use Inner Cell Mass cells that come from lines, or that IPS research will forever be tainted because of the embryonic stem cell research that came before it is silly. Much our advanced technology was accelerated by immoral activity (like war or experiment without consent), but we still use it. Are we going to stop using planes are cars? Shoes with ridged soles? In fact, if we are going to refuse any benefit borne out of immorality, every white person should start packing because we'll have to go back to Europe and leave the continent to the descendents of the Native Americans our ancestors murdered to make room for their settlements. This argument is a prime example of how inconsistent American morality can be.

Callahan's point about the certainty of the death of an embryo used in the research vs the hazy future of the research is flawed. An embryo's future as a human child is no where near certain. Even if you discount the fact that the embryo needs a woman's uterus to host it for life to even be a possibility, there's the glaring fact that there's no guarantee it would implant or thrive. That is why they need to make so many embryos for In-vitro fertility treatment. No one can argue the certainty of the future to that degree. Also, if we’re going to start attributing value to potential events in the past and present, the embryos wouldn’t even exist if the researchers had not made them.

Callahan did have very good arguments. First of all, I agree that people shouldn't feel cheated because they develop disease and die. Knowledge of our mortality is a heavy physiological burden to bear, but one would be in better company to look to mythology and literature than Science.
 
We could prevent illness and suffering for more people over more time with more certainty of success if we used the money we're using on stem cell to prevent circumstances that lead to disease. For example, we could work to provide healthy food and nutrition education to those who are not getting it now not only preventing disease, but also promoting health. (The money unfortunately be lost to military spending as it travels the labyrinth it must to be re-routed. Which could spoil this argument.) It also occurred to me that we are spending everyone's money on treatments only the middle class and up could afford, which is also immoral. (You don't see middle class diabetes patients with amputated limbs.) 

We also bump up against the ever-present issue of "Your morals are not everyone's morals." in both Callahan and Brown's pieces. I think this is one of the fundamental contributers to the conflicts in Bioethics.



 

 

Cohen's oversight on the cohesiveness of American Morality.

As a pre-note: It's really weird how relevant my last post was to this week's reading. I didn't read ahead.

I'd first like to state that I found Cohen's piece effectively argued. It was quite refreshing to hear the conservative argument through something other than a mega-phone. The goal of Macklin's piece was, however to both point out the logical inconsistencies in the collective argument of the Republican camp and to complain about their form. While Macklin is correct in her assessment of the logical flaws in the Republican argument- namely, that they start with a set of gross over-generalizations and presumptions about collective morality (more on that later)- Her piece lacks some of the pose and accessibility of Cohen. Not that that is her intellectual "job"- there used to be functioning neutral journalism to translate scholarly work into lay-man's terms. But since we are now lacking that part of the system, Cohen has achieved an arguably more functional style of writing- voters and politicians could read the jargon-less work and understand it.

Devil's advocacy aside, I have my own critiques of Cohen's arguments:

First of all, it's strange to think learned people would discount all the inequalities (the 77 cents a woman makes to a man's dollar, the likelihood that out of two similar applications the one with a Caucasian sounding name will be considered over one with a African-American sounding name, etc, etc, etc.) of the day and assume that equality is, as Brown suggests, a commandment rather than goal. If it were a commandment, there'd be a greater imperative to pursuit equality- We wouldn't need civil rights movements or hate crime laws. People would just have an imprinted desire to achieve it.

Cohen's argument is highly informed by this idea. He claims that people can just feel what is right. This, again, is ignoring a long history of racial discrimination. He also argues that vulnerable stages of human life, just after ovum fertilization and after old age has deteriorated a person's mind and body, are equal in moral importance and therefore should be equal in rights, meaning one should not sacrifice one for the other. This skips right over the glaring fact that not everyone believes an embryo is as important as an aging parent or grandparent.This also assumes we have limitless resources for every would-be child and don't ever have to prioritize. That has never been the case.


I think the core of this particular issue rests in the question “Why are humans special?” My answer to that would be “Because humans can experience a love more self-less than wild animals, knowledge unprecedented on the planet, and the analytical brain capable of appreciating the beauty and complexity of the cosmos." Conservatives would say "Because the potential for human life was created" which, if you remove any religious underpinnings, says“Because a human sperm and egg met.” Well, so do the gametes of all mammals. Where are their protective laws? Is a miscarriage a person? Should we persecute a woman’s uterus for expelling it?

In any case, the answer will vary greatly from person-to-person and you should not build an argument, or policy, on such an unstable foundation.