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.

Personal beleif and Competitive Policy-making

I find it kind of silly that bioethics could be grouped into only three camps and that the two prominent camps are different ends of the spectrum. It seems to me that often in politics different collections of ideas will converge in 2-5 camps and these camps "Win", "Lose" or compromise. Ideas are not considered for their individual merit but instead must be taken as a package deal with a group of politically-branding ideas. I am happy that Foucault didn't fall so easily within a certain palisade, but that might be because he penned his works farther in the past. Could it be that even highly intelligent scholars can succumb to the pressure to pick a competitive side?

Callahan's idea that unconscious beliefs underwrite political policy/ affiliation was very interesting to me. I really believe that to be the case. An example is the unconscious American belief that every person has the same abilities and thus circumstances should be ignored. Everyone is expected to be able to rise from rags to riches and there are folks that absolutely rage over affirmative action. They don't consider that other demographics don't have certain privileges because they assume we are all the same. Even president Obama, arguably a great one-man triumph over circumstance, took time to fawn over Steve Jobs after he died, as both an example and a testament the the potential of the bland everyman. Statistically and logically, that makes no sense. There are countless individuals that worked just as hard (I believe he had a partner that was cut out) but didn't have the series of random luck breaks. Yet many people shape their political opinion around this idea that you, yes you (all of you), can become rich someday and you'll be glad you voted for those tax cuts to high-income households. (Perhaps more so prior to the housing-bubble collapse.)

This overly-competitive governing may have it's origin in the past when people were literally governed by religion. This gives rise to things like the Crusades where one society, including it's government, sought to annihilate the "other"- those that fell outside their government and society. Or  it may lie in the polarized "good" and "evil" of western religion. My beliefs are good, so yours must be the only other option, wrong/evil. And evil must be destroyed. Is this reflected in the two most popular camps of bioethics which inhabit either end of the spectrum? Perhaps.

On a side note, I found a website in German on bioethics I'm fairly confident is only slightly above my German reading level. This makes a cultural comparison a possibility for my project, since I'd want to get my information straight from the source. 

Reflections on Ramman and Tutton and Food Subsidies as a form of biopower.

The main thing that strikes me about Ramman and Tutton's "Life, Science and biopower" is how nuanced and complicated the whole issue of bio-power is. It also requires a great deal of philosophy- As Americans we are promised the pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, but what does that mean logistically, since we are also indirectly promised Freedom? Does my right to Life and Happiness supersede another's right to Freedom in the form of forgoing vaccinations? Should the government have the power protect my life by enforcing the biological altering of another?

The authors state some pretty benign examples where the answer is a resounding yes- Food service workers are required to wash their hands and people are not allowed to defecate in public. But there are examples where this goes way too far- government-enforced eugenics was practiced in several fist world countries, including the USA. The problem with this nuanced approach is the public's appetite for extremist dogma. Critical thinking does not win political platforms in certain parts of the country. 

One other form of bio-power that wasn't well represented is that of social pressure. For example- the government doesn't enforce that we cough into our arms (or hands), but if one was to sit in a crowded room sneezing and coughing they would be confronted by those sharing the space. This is also highly applicable to parenting. So great is the public and personal pressure on parents (especially mothers) to demonstrate near-perfect decision-making for their children, that they can sometimes be exploited quite easily. (See: the gargantuan volume of parenting books.)

It occurred to me that another, less obvious form of biopower might be food subsidies. Because cost largely governs what the poorest of a society eats, government has some control over that very personal aspect of their lives. (And the government could be a lot more helpful in this aspect) We do not generally recognize cost manipulation as a form of control, though.

Another thing that struck me is info-graphic quality of the biopower, bioethics, and biopolitics hierarchy- Biopower is a large part of bioethics which is a large part of biopolitics. Each of these are the most easily definable and probably most focused part of their successor. They're like tributaries feeding into a big, messy river. 

Reflections on Daniel Callahan's "Individual Good and Common good: A communitarian approach to bioethics" And bioethics as they relate to synthetic biology.

1) American culture and Science: A blind march toward advancement. 

This has been a topic of interest for me for most of my college career. As I've argued in previous papers- America has been, up until now, a culture totally absorbed with it's historical spirit of westward expansion. Our scramble toward the promises of an unknown future are devoid of consideration for anyone or anything but the rambunctious individual- The romantic cowboy figure is always alone as he blazes new trails.

Science, unfortunately, often falls under this umbrella. Perfectly compassionate engineers and researchers will overlook the hundreds their "progress"puts out of work, or the rift they cause when their helpful technology is only financially available to a wealthy portion of the population. But it is a cultural problem. They're wearing the blinders we were all handed as children- those which obscure our view of the past, and the parallels of the present.

America is now going through torturous growing pains. (obviously) As we struggle to move from our colonial mindset toward that of a global citizenry, We are starting to question the limits of rugged individualism. This is, indeed, reflected in Callahan's call to move bioethics toward communitarian principles.

2) Biological morality

One disagreement I have with Callahan's sentiments is the vague suggestion that humans aren't equipped with morality when they are without religion. Science shows that some of the core elements of morality- The importance of intent, consideration for others, etc.- have some neurological basis. There are also pragmatic ethics- we all follow certain rules to create a better environment for everyone. It simply makes sense to do so. 

3) Historical bio-politics: Women and anesthetic during childbirth

When  anesthetics first became available for women in childbirth there were two major positions on the issue. The first was that women were meant to suffer during childbirth because that was Eve's (of the Garden of Eden) punishment for disobedience to God. The second was that women shouldn't have to suffer if they didn't need to and that the other camp's argument was old-fashion and ridiculous.

While the second camp had an progressive argument that was full of good intention, we are now starting to find that blocking the sensations of birth can have negative effects. Women's brains release a huge amount of bonding hormones as a response to these sensation- hormones that help them bond with their new babies. This is information women should have before they decide how they want to give birth.

4) Germany- Privacy and public good 

Americans have a hard time agreeing what constitutes a private matter and a public matter. Two volatile examples being Gun Control and Abortion. All the evidence needed is in the reactions to the NSA spying. They ran the gambit of "Whatever" to "This is a cultural crisis".

Germans had a very different reaction in that they were fairly united in being highly repelled. Germans tend to value their privacy with good reason. Unjust spying on citizenry was practiced by two of their most abusive governments. Many Germans, in fact, mask their identity on social media and email with a pseudonym. However, Germany is highly dedicated to it's public good. With generous unemployment, maternity benefits, and education, the proof is in the budget alone. It is also worth noting that Germany is a country with a high output of scientific advancement.

Cultural comparison helps highlight why bioethics are disscussed the way they are in America vs. other leaders in Science.