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Ethics

Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument “scientistic” because those who take (a variation of) its first two premises to be obvious are led to exaggerate the importance of scientific measurement for determining what’s morally right, and correspondingly to underestimate the importance of moral reasoning and moral philosophy.

Read More »Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

Benefit cuts for large, workless families

The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that

The number of children that you have is a choice and what we're saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make choices but they also have to have responsibility for those choices . . . It's not going to be the role of the state to finance those choices.

Two quite different arguments might be offered in support of such a move.

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Science and Morality

Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an 'ought' from a series of mere 'is' statements, a mistake pointed out by David… Read More »Science and Morality

Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead

by Rebecca Roache

The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine.  Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, this points to the worrying conclusion that some parents who have chosen a homeopathic alternative to the MMR vaccine believe that their children are immune to measles, mumps, and rubella, when in fact they are unprotected against these diseases.

This development marks another blow for the ongoing campaign to ensure that children receive the recommended vaccinations.  Sir Sandy Macara, ex-chairman of the British Medical Association, has claimed that the UK has lower immunisation rates than some developing countries in which people have poor access to healthcare.  The percentage of the UK population currently vaccinated against MMR falls well below the level needed to achieve ‘herd immunity’ – where the number of immune individuals in the population prevents the spread of disease, thereby protecting those who are not immune – and recent outbreaks of measles in Wales has led the Welsh Assembly to consider making the MMR vaccine compulsory.  Such a move would be highly controversial, but is this a price worth paying to protect public health?

Read More »Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead

Spying on people for fun and profit

A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to report something useful. Not unexpectedly the anti-CCTV groups really dislike the idea. The Information Commissioner is somewhat sceptical but allowed a beta test to go ahead, as long as users had to pay for using it – this would allow their details to be checked and would reduce risks for misuse. However, at least one subscribe "thought it was his civic duty to sign up". Civic duty or profit-making voyerism?

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Incidentally… avoiding the problem of incidental findings

A new study from the Mayo clinic in the United States points to a frequent problem in certain types of medical research. When healthy volunteers or patients with a given condition take part in research studies they may have brain scans, CAT scans, blood tests or genetic tests that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. These tests are not done for the benefit of the individual, they are designed to answer a research question. But sometimes, quite often according to the authors of this new study, researchers may spot something on the scan that shouldn’t be there, and that could indicate a previously undiagnosed health condition. These ‘incidental findings’ generate an ethical dilemma for researchers. Should they tell the research participant about the shadow seen on their scan? Do they have an obligation to reveal to a research participant that they have found them to carry a gene increasing their risk for breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease? There is much agonising by ethics committees, ethicists and researchers about the problem of incidental findings, but there is a simple way of avoiding the problem. Anonymise research databases and tests so that there is no possibility of determining which participant has the breast cancer gene, or the lump in their kidney.

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Should we rid the world of carnivores if we could?

by Alexandre Erler

In a provocative piece for the New York Times, Jeff McMahan remarks that cruelty pervades the natural world: he stresses the vast amount of suffering and the violent deaths inflicted by predators on their innocent victims. He then invites us to consider a daring way of preventing such suffering and deaths: “Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones.  Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy.  If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?” McMahan’s conclusion, which he describes himself as “heretical”, is that we do have a moral reason to desire the extinction of carnivorous species, and that it would be good to bring about their extinction if this could be done “without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation”.

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Religion and Virtue: The Pope’s Truncated Vision

The Pope arrived in Britain today, held out his “hand of friendship” and called on all the British people to remember:

Your forefathers’ respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity come to you from a faith that remains a mighty force for good in your kingdom, to the great benefit of Christians and non-Christians alike.

So far, so respectable. Many (though by no means all) historical British leaders were of course Christians, and Christianity does teach respect for truth and justice, mercy and charity, in broad terms at least. (Some will disagree that the Pope’s faith teaches justice or respect for truth when it comes to contraception, HIV, gay rights, and women’s rights, and some may point out that historically this faith was neither particularly merciful nor just – but let us put these quibbles aside.) It is not unreasonable to think that historical Britons drew their morals from their faith, and that this benefitted us in the present day, even if it is debatable whether faith was or remains a “mighty force for good”.

My problem is with what the Pope then went on to say:

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Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?

A colleague recently emailed me. Her daughter, just turned
12, had come back from school bearing an information leaflet about HPV vaccination
with the Glaxo Cervarix vaccine, and a consent form for the parent to sign.

The consent form nodded inelegantly to Gillick, asserting that ‘[t]he decision to consent or refuse is
legally [the girl’s], as long as she understands the issues in giving consent.’
There was no indication given, in the consent form or the accompanying
literature, as to whether and if so how that understanding would be tested. The
reality is that it won’t be tested at all.

Read More »Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?