Obsidian Wings

On Torture Hypotheticals--Conservative Perspective

--Sebastian

I've written on the topic before, but a recent post by Patterico convinced me to revisit it.  He hasn't finished all his thoughts on the issue, but I'll jump ahead anyway.  I find him reasonable on most topics, so I thought I would throw in my thoughts.  The presentation of his hypothetical is as follows:

Over the weekend, I asked a question about the morality of waterboarding. It was directed primarily at the self-righteous chest-pounders who like to pretend that the moral issues are easy and obvious — that of course we should never consider waterboarding under any circumstances, no matter how dire. The question was:

Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.

They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.

During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information — reliable information — that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.

My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?

Further assume that no less coercive tactic would reveal the information.

I am driving at a moral question here. What I really want to know is: do you consider the waterboarding session to have been the most moral choice under the circumstances?

Self-righteous chest-pounders like nosh, Oregonian, and Semanticleo all checked in at this blog since I put up the post. But none of them answered the question.

It wasn’t easy to get people to answer the question. The thread is over 470 comments, and it consists mostly of obfuscation and evasions. But I have gotten answers from many commenters.

I have follow-up questions for the people who answered the question. But before I get too far into the follow-ups, I want to make sure I have all the liberals here on record answering the question. Especially the self-righteous ones like those named above.

I'm sometimes self-righteous (though I try not to be) and I'm not particularly liberal, but since my overall mindset is closer to his, I thought this might be useful. 

My answer to his hypothetical is 'yes, it would have been worth it'.  I know that isn't everyone's answer, and it will probably cause me lots of grief here, but that is mine.  In extreme situations, where you know that the person knows the information, and you need an immediate answer, IF it were effective, I wouldn't shed too many tears over 3 minutes of waterboarding.  (Though I will note that you took an easy route by not positing 6 hours of off and on waterboarding, or 5 days)

That is my answer to the literal hypothetical.  I think torture is wrong, but on a scale of wrongs--in that situation--I'd get over it. 

My answer to what I think lies behind the hypothetical is rather different.  The hypothetical has nothing to do with the discussion of whether or not we (the United States) ought to be torturing people.  One of the key things that conservatives ought to remember (and which we notice all the time in liberal proposals) is that INTENTIONS DO NOT EQUAL OUTCOMES.  The government is horribly incompetent at all sorts of things and we ought not abandon that insight when analyzing proposals of people who allege that they are our allies (the idea that Bush is a conservative ally is something I'd like to argue about on another day--but my short answer is that he isn't).

As with limitations on free speech, I don't trust the government to be able to fairly and nimbly navigate the rules that would be necessary to  make certain that it only used a legal right to torture  when it was the right choice.  Sadly this is no longer a hypothetical question.  In actual practice, we find that Bush's administration has tortured men who not only didn't know anything about what they were being tortured about, but weren't even affiliated with Al Qaeda. 

Let me say that again.  Bush's administration has tortured men who were factually innocent. 

Not men who got off on technicalities.  Factually Innocent. 

Your hypothetical demands that the government be CERTAIN of the following things:

This man is who we think he is.

This man knows what we think he knows.

No non-torture technique will work.

Patterico, you work with the government.  You know for a fact that it gets things wrong all the time.  Even when we go through the huge and complicated process of a trial, it gets things wrong.  And we aren't talking anything like a trial here.  In reality, we are talking about torturing *suspects*.  That is not a power to be given to the government.

Your hypothetical doesn't speak to the question of what the policy of our government ought to be, because no important part of the hypothetical actually has anything to do with the empirical reality of governmental torture.  You pride yourself at not being distracted by stated intentions which have bad consequences in areas like rent control, housing policy, and education policy.  Don't let Bush wave the national security flag and make you forget everything you know about how the government actually operates.   

Honor Killings

by hilzoy

There's a fascinating article in the NYT magazine today about the controversy over an honor killing in Syria.

"Fawaz later recalled that his wife, Zahra, was sleeping soundly on her side and curled slightly against the pillow when he rose at dawn and readied himself for work at his construction job on the outskirts of Damascus. It was a rainy Sunday morning in January and very cold; as he left, Fawaz turned back one last time to tuck the blanket more snugly around his 16-year-old wife. Zahra slept on without stirring, and her husband locked the door of their tiny apartment carefully behind him.

Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column. Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.

“Fayyez told the police, ‘It is my right to correct this error,’ ” Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. “He said, ‘It’s true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.’ ”

By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo’s life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives. And then in December, how a cousin of Zahra’s, 27-year-old Fawaz, agreed to marry her in order to secure her release and also, he hoped, restore her reputation in the eyes of her family; how, just a month after her wedding to Fawaz, Zahra’s 25-year-old brother, Fayyez, stabbed her as she slept. (...)

In speaking with the police, Zahra’s brother used a colloquial expression, ghasalat al arr (washing away the shame), which means the killing of a woman or girl whose very life has come to be seen as an unbearable stain on the honor of her male relatives. Once this kind of familial sexual shame has been “washed,” the killing is traditionally forgotten as quickly as possible. Under Syrian law, an honor killing is not murder, and the man who commits it is not a murderer. As in many other Arab countries, even if the killer is convicted on the lesser charge of a “crime of honor,” he is usually set free within months. Mentioning the killing — or even the name of the victim — generally becomes taboo.

That this has not happened with Zahra’s story — that her case, far from being ignored, has become something of a cause célèbre, a rallying point for lawyers, Islamic scholars and Syrian officials hoping to change the laws that protect the perpetrators of honor crimes — is a result of a peculiar confluence of circumstances. It is due in part to the efforts of a group of women’s rights activists and in part to the specifics of her story, which has galvanized public sympathy in a way previously unseen in Syria. But at heart it is because of Zahra’s young widower, Fawaz, who had spoken to his bride only once before they became engaged. Now, defying his tribe and their traditions, he has brought a civil lawsuit against Zahra’s killer and is refusing to let her case be forgotten."

To add the final touch of horror to this story, Zahra was kidnapped because a friend of her father's told her that her father was having an affair, and that he would reveal it if she did not join him outside her house. That is how he was able to take her to Damascus and rape her: because she was herself trying to protect her family's honor.

More below the fold.

Michael Gerson: Keep Your Day Job

by hilzoy

Michael Gerson tries his hand at moral philosophy in today's Washington Post:

"So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."

Some argue that a careful determination of our long-term interests -- a fear of bad consequences -- will constrain our selfishness. But this is particularly absurd. Some people are very good at the self-centered exploitation of others. Many get away with it their whole lives. By exercising the will to power, they are maximizing one element of their human nature. In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them? Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not."

Discussion below the fold.

Abstraction

by hilzoy

In his last post, publius writes:

"Maybe I’m expanding it, but I read Klein’s argument as expressing skepticism of abstractions (and policy-by-abstractions), rather than skepticism of the individual abstract values themselves. In this sense, his foreign policy argument seems to be philosophical -- he’s skeptical of theory itself."

This is an interesting point, and an important one to get clear on. I'll take a stab at it below the fold, so as not to distract from Katherine's post. (Katherine: poetry. Me: analysis. At the moment, I'd rather be Katherine. Pout.)

Ezra Klein On Values

by hilzoy

I normally agree with Ezra Klein. Not only that, I think he's one of the sharpest commenters out there. So I don't like saying that I think his article on values in foreign policy is just plain wrong. Unfortunately, though, I do.

Ezra starts off with this:

"I have a confession to make: I am not a values voter. I do not want a foreign policy based upon "the idea that is America." I do not think we should be guided in all things by such glittering concepts as liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith.

In fact, I'm fed up with values. Entirely. They've failed this country. As a lodestar, there is none worse."

He then goes on to make the following points: First, he talks a bit about Anne-Marie Slaughter's new book, which I haven't read and thus cannot comment on. Then, he notes the frequency of various moral terms in Bush's second inaugural, which I think is irrelevant to any interesting point. He notes that concepts like democracy and liberty "do not, themselves, suggest a foreign policy." This is true, but it's also true of any other general concept on which we might seek to base policy. To take this as an objection to basing foreign policy on values implies that we should not base our foreign policy on any general concept at all, since any general concept -- the national interest, democratic values, human rights -- will require some actual thought about how it is to be promoted in a complicated world. The only alternative to basing our foreign policy on something that requires such thought is not to have a coherent foreign policy at all.

Ezra then says that "the language of idealism" enables a style of argument in which one side slams another for not being moral enough to support a given policy whose consequences the slammers have not bothered to understand:

"The language of idealism enabled what my friend Chris Hayes refers to as the "moral blackmail" of the Iraq war: How could anyone who professes to believe in freedom and democracy refuse to devote a couple of tax dollars to freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny?"

Again, this is true of any general basis for foreign policy, since nothing that could serve as such a basis is immune to being advocated by idiots. Compare: "How can you say you care about our national interest when you're not willing to spend a few dollars to gain complete control over Iran's oil reserves by invading it and installing a friendly puppet government that the Iranian people will adore? Huh?" It's even true of what looks like almost no foreign policy at all: a dedication to protecting ourselves from a world we regard as hostile, and with which we refuse to engage. That still requires some actual thought about how to protect ourselves, and leaves us open to what we might call the "self-defense blackmail" argument: How can anyone who professes to want to protect our country refuse to sacrifice a couple of tax dollars to strengthen our version of the Maginot line? How can they say that our plan to build deep-sea platforms from which we can pour molten pitch onto the heads of ocean-going invaders isn't worth it? Don't they care about America??

Ezra ends his article with this:

"What I want is not a foreign policy vision that builds from a foundation of values, but from one of consequences. Whether a policy is concordant with America's view of itself is less important than its likely outcomes. The Paul Wolfowitzes of the world had thought plenty about values and were perfectly capable of discussing their vision of Iraq as a shining city on a Mesopotamian hill. What they hadn't thought about were outcomes -- constraints on our action and capabilities, the likely effects on others' actions of our use of force, etc. Good thing they weren't really pressed on the subject, lest they'd have had to conjure up a postwar plan for a reception that didn't include candy and flowers -- a plan they didn't have. But they weren't questioned, because they were effectively able to keep the conversation focused on values -- do you care about liberty? hate tyranny? believe Arabs can be democratic? -- rather than consequences.

What the Democrats' post-Bush foreign policy vision must do is be able to outlast the Democrats. I have no doubt that President Obama, or President Edwards, or Secretary of State Slaughter can implement a values-based foreign policy I find congenial. What I do fear is what happens when their terms close, and the language that they let Americans remain accustomed to is appropriated by a far more hawkish administration. Much better for Democrats to create a foreign policy framework that a future administration would have to fight against if it wished to revive neoconservatism. Giving them language they can slip right into seems awfully accommodating.

So no more of "the idea that is America." Let's hear the argument that is a wise and sane American foreign policy. Let's hear about conditions for the use of force, and the constraints surrounding it. Let's hear the hardnosed cases for restraint and multilateralism. Don't subsume those points beneath malleable terms like "humility" and "democracy." Popularize the explicit arguments for how American should act. Do that, and our values will be safeguarded, even when their protectors have long since left."

This is the most serious objection, and I'll put my discussion of it below the fold.

We Take Requests! (Sam Brownback Edition)

by hilzoy

In a comment on another thread, Phil asked what I thought of this op-ed on stem cell funding, by Sen. Sam Brownback. What follows is the op-ed, with my comments.

That George Washington Character

by Charles

Last Saturday, while driving home from my session with the OFMBA*, I heard the most enlightening segment about George Washington on NPR's Weekend Edition.  It reminded me, yet again, that our country couldn't have been more fortunate in having an extraordinary man such as Washington as our first president.  The transcript is below the fold, without further comment.

Just Call Me Captain Courageous

by hilzoy

I'm trying to get a handle on conservatives' views about virtue. I've been puzzled for a while, but I only entered full bewilderment when Bill Bennett published his annoying book The Death of Outrage, which argued, iirc, that the fact that more people weren't willing to impeach Bill Clinton just showed that we had completely lost our moral compasses. I said to myself: huh? The mystery deepened when I heard such moral paragons as Rush Limbaugh going on and on about liberals and our lack of concern about morality, and when "moral values" started to be used as though it meant not generosity, decency, kindness, courage, and honor, but a willingness to deprive gays of everything from civil rights to ordinary human kindness.

I mean: I, an ethicist, was baffled. I read and reread Kant and Aristotle and even Edmund Burke, but it still didn't make any sense.

I was particularly puzzled by conservatives' views on courage. When Max Cleland lost his limbs in Vietnam, "there was no bravery involved." Despite having volunteered to serve in Vietnam and receiving a bronze star and three purple hearts, "John Kerry is no war hero." Apparently, conservatives do not count physical bravery as courage, for conservatives. Nor do they seem all that enthusiastic about moral courage -- the willingness to stand up for what you believe in, even when it's unpopular -- to judge by their treatment of apostates in their own ranks.

So what, exactly, do they mean by courage? It's a puzzlement. Luckily for me, a RedState diary explains all. I will display my own bravery below the fold.

How Not To Cover Medical Ethics

by hilzoy

Here's an article from the Daily Mail with the headline: "Outrage as Church backs calls for severely disabled babies to be killed at birth". And here's the Church of England statement that the article is based on. It's called "The ethics of prolonging life in fetuses and the newborn."

Notice a difference? That's right: the Daily Mail talks about killing babies at birth; the CoE statement talks about prolonging life. Moreover, if you read the CoE statement, it doesn't talk about killing at all. What it does say is this:

"This is not incompatible with accepting that it may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing that it will possibly, probably or even certainly result in death. To justify such a course of action two conditions would have to be met. First, there would have to be very strong proportionate reasons for overriding the presupposition that life should be maintained. Second, all reasonable alternatives would have to be fully considered so that the possibly lethal act would only be performed with manifest reluctance."

Note that the only "possibly lethal act" under discussion is 'withholding or withdrawing medical treatment'. Withdrawing or withholding treatment is exactly what it sounds like: it means deciding that while you might keep yourself or someone else alive a little longer by medical means, you choose not to. This is something you can only do when the medical treatment is, in fact, keeping the person in question alive; if you're healthy, you're already doing fine in the absence of medical treatment. "Withholding" chemotherapy from someone who doesn't have cancer is not just OK but obligatory; and if for some reason a healthy person had been put on chemotherapy, "withdrawing" it as soon as possible would be a no-brainer.

When someone is ill, we normally think that she can refuse treatment; and, of course, people do this all the time. They decide, for example, that it's not worth undergoing one more bout of chemotherapy for the sake of one more week, or one more month. When a person can't decide for herself, whether because she is unconscious or because she is not competent to decide (as an infant is not), medical treatment can be withdrawn when whoever is charged with making this decision concludes that it is in the person's best interests, either as that person has defined them or (in the case of children and others who have not had the chance to decide for themselves what they value) as seems reasonable to the person charged with making medical decisions for that person. In the case of children, this normally means: when the child has some incurable medical condition, and when the disadvantages of the treatment to the infant outweigh its advantages.

For instance, if you can keep a newborn alive for one extra day by subjecting her to a major operation, that might well not be worth it: an extra day that she will spend first anaesthetized and undergoing major surgery, and then drugged and in pain, is really not worth the cost to the infant: the pain and suffering. Likewise, if an infant has some disease that she will die of before she reaches her first birthday, and which means that she will spend her short life suffering in the hospital, undergoing a series of increasingly desperate medical procedures, you might decide, at some point, that subjecting her to those procedures was just inhumane. Often, the doctors and nurses charged with treating such an infant are torn apart by cases like this, and part of what tears them apart is the thought: this isn't medicine, it's torture.

More controversially, you might decide not to treat her for some unrelated illness: for instance, if she gets pneumonia, you might decide to allow her to die of it rather than living out her remaining few, painful months. This is something that adults sometimes choose to do: I have known people with horrible terminal illnesses who have decided that if they get pneumonia, they do not wish to be treated. In the case of infants, it's done a lot more rarely, since it's easier to take an adult's word for it that she does not want to be treated than to make that decision on behalf of a child. It is virtually never done when the child does not have an underlying condition that dooms her to a short life of suffering. But in the case of an infant who has a condition that will kill them before they become toddlers, and that will cause them to suffer throughout their short lives, it's not at all obvious to me that pneumonia is not a mercy.

The decision to withhold medical treatment is a horrible decision for all involved. But it is completely different from the decision to kill someone (yourself or another person): to take a gun to that person's head and kill her, or inject her with poison, or beat her to death, or open her veins and let her bleed to death. It's just not the same at all, and the Daily Mail is not doing anyone any favors by pretending that it is. Moreover, they seem to have taken some people in (Sister Toldjah: "It was only a matter of time before ‘active euthanasia’ (as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology call it) started to catch on, especially considering that partial birth abortions are legal in the UK, ‘justifiable’ on the basis that the mother’s health could be ‘at risk’ if the baby is actually born." In fact, the CoE is opposed to active euthanasia.)

The other controversial bit of the CoE's statement is its refusal to rule out the possibility that the costs of treatment might factor into the decision whether or not to terminate treatment. What they actually say about cost is this:

"Great caution should be exercised in bringing questions of cost into the equation when considering what treatment might be provided. The principle of justice inevitably, means that the potential cost of treatment itself, the longer term costs of healthcare and education and the opportunity cost to the NHS in terms of saving other lives have to be considered.

Nevertheless significant and continuing advances in medical technology have frequently come about through the use of initially expensive and risky techniques. Some developments in life support have become routine as skills and knowledge have grown. Where lives are at stake society should be extremely cautious over concluding too readily that new techniques cannot be afforded. There needs, too to be a recognition that people with disability have as much a right to life as everyone else, and that the ongoing cost of caring for them should be shared, not left solely to the families concerned.

The principle of compassion, for a Christian, is key. There are many instances in the life of Christ where he overrode rule-based systems. There may be occasions where, for a Christian, compassion will override the ‘rule’ that life should inevitably be preserved. Disproportionate treatment for the sake of prolonging life is an example of this. The ever-improving understanding of how and why fetuses and neonates experience pain needs to be taken into account in decisions about treatment."

This is hard for me to read as saying something like: if it gets too expensive to care for someone, pull the plug! It reads more like an acknowledgment that there are some circumstances -- hopefully rare, but theoretically possible -- in which cost might be relevant. Suppose, for instance, that an infant has a terminal illness that will kill her before her first birthday, and that makes her suffer, but that her suffering is not quite severe enough to make you think that it would be best to allow her to die, rather than giving her an operation that would prolong her life by a few months. It's a tough call -- she is suffering, the operation will make her suffer more, and it won't do anything more than postpone her early death -- but you don't think you should withhold treatment.

In a case like this, is it obvious that there is, in principle, no information about the cost of the operation that would make you rethink your decision to go ahead with it? What if the operation would require that the entire GDP of your country for the next ten years be devoted solely to paying for this operation? What if we add in the fact that if your country's entire GDP was used to pay for this operation, no one else would be able to get any medical care at all?

To my mind, the most plausible way to read the CoE's statement is as recognizing that there are some situations, like the one I described, in which it would not be crazy to think that financial considerations could come into play, especially in a system like the UK's, in which medical expenditures basically come out of one pot, so that spending in one area has to be balanced by cuts somewhere else; but as urging extreme caution when taking cost into consideration. In any case, the rest of the position paper makes it clear that this only concerns the decision to give or withhold treatment, not the decision to up and kill people. It's not a nutty view. Too bad the Daily Mail chose to present it as if it was.

Limbaugh

by hilzoy

You've probably already heard that Rush Limbaugh said that Michael J. Fox was faking his symptoms in the ad he shot for Claire McCaskill:

"Now, this is Michael J. Fox. He's got Parkinson's disease. And in this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it's purely an act. This is the only time I have ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has. I know he's got it and he's raising money for it, but when I've seen him in public, I've never seen him betray any of the symptoms. But this commercial, he -- he's just all over the place. He can barely control himself. He can control himself enough to stay in the frame of the picture, and he can control himself enough to keep his eyes right on the lens, the teleprompter. But his head and shoulders are moving all over the place, and he is acting like his disease is deteriorating because Jim Talent opposes research that would help him, Michael J. Fox, get cured. (...)

So this is really shameless, folks, this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting, one of the two."

And you've probably also heard that Fox's tremors aren't the result of not taking the medication but a side effect of taking it. In other words: Limbaugh is, as usual, full of it, and a jerk to boot.

But if you haven't yet seen the video of Limbaugh saying these things, you really should. He's flailing around, doing what I imagine is supposed to be an imitation of Michael J. Fox, but in fact looks more like an octopus having a seizure. It's really jawdroppingly appalling.

What has always amazed me about Limbaugh, and some other similar commentators, is how they manage to convince their audiences that they are on the side of morality and decency, when if one thought for a moment about what they actually do, as opposed to the alleged dreadfulness of the people they are describing, it would be pretty clear that morality has nothing to do with them. It's the same paradox you find in any hate-filled demagogue: as long as people listen only to what he is saying about others, and focus on those others and their sins, he is popular in a way that he would never be if people just stopped and asked: what does the fact that he spends all day whipping up hatred and spreading calumny say about him? And why would I listen to someone whose idea of morality seems to involve nothing but anger, contempt, venom and self-righteousness?

Often, it's illuminating to watch someone like that with the sound turned off. But this video could do the trick as well. It's really awful.

And Michael J. Fox's response, which is also on the video I linked to, is a complete contrast: gracious, generous, and somewhat self-effacing. (I didn't think much of Sam Seder, though -- he comes on about halfway through the clip, and as far as I'm concerned I might have stopped watching then.)

Another minor point: suppose, for the moment, that Limbaugh had been right to think that Fox's twitchings were caused by Parkinson's, not by the medication, and that his going off meds would have exacerbated them. I think it's fascinating that Limbaugh believes that for Michael J. Fox to stop taking his medication, to show the effects of his disease unfiltered, would be in some way dishonest. As far as I can tell, that's a lot like saying that people with disabilities ought to hide them from the rest of us; that showing themselves as they are, with their disabilities in plain view, is automatically manipulative, or an attempt to play the victim. I would have thought that someone with a serious and disabling disease like Parkinson's had enough on his plate without having to satisfy Rush Limbaugh's requirements on how the disabled should comport themselves. Shows how much I know.

Civility

by hilzoy

I think it might be time to draw our collective attention to the Posting Rules, and especially to the one that says: "Do not consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake." Consistent abuse or vilification will get you banned. But even a little abuse or vilification is too much.

For one thing, this is supposed to be a blog in which people can disagree, at times vehemently, without crossing the line that separates disagreement from attack. We probably all have our own views about what it's supposed to be, but I think of it as an experiment one of whose points is to try to illustrate, in action, the proposition that it is possible to disagree passionately, without sacrificing or muting that passion, while still treating our opponents decently and with respect. This cannot work if we feel free to abuse one another, or impugn one another's motives or character, without very, very, very good reason. And there are always alternatives, like pointing out other people's mistakes without impugning their characters.

For another, when I am inclined to vilify another person, I am often just wrong about that person and his or her character. We all disagree about all sorts of things. Moreover, we all know about different things. Some of us remember the eighties in detail; others of us were in grade school at the time, or just not paying attention. Most of the readers of this blog know a lot about torture and habeas corpus and the finer points of Social Security; in this respect, we are very, very atypical. (To illustrate: the day after the torture bill passed, before my class started, I asked my students how many of them knew what important piece of legislation had been passed the previous day. Maybe three out of roughly a hundred raised their hands. I then asked how many of them knew what that bill said; none did. My students are good and decent kids, the kind of good and decent kids who would voluntarily decide to take a course in ethics. But I sometimes think that if they showed up here and asked us, in good faith, to explain why we thought the bill was so bad, they'd be absolutely slammed.)

Since we have different beliefs and different pools of knowledge, it is absolutely to be expected that some of us will, from time to time, say things that make others of us wonder: how on earth could an honest person say X? Possibly the reason is that we assume that everyone knows the devastating arguments against X. Possibly it's that we assume that everyone knows X, or that X is as obvious to everyone as it is to us. But this is not a good reason for me to accuse someone else of dishonesty without first asking myself, in all seriousness, whether the person might not just be mistaken, or have written something too quickly so that it came out wrong, or be badly informed; or whether, dare I imagine, I myself might be overestimating the obviousness of what I say.

Some accusations are extremely serious. Anyone who comments on blogs has probably been the object of some of them. I have been accused, personally, of treason, intellectual dishonesty, straightforward dishonesty, and, most recently, of a complete absence of goodness. All of these accusations are ones that I take extremely seriously; and I tend to think that people who make them too easily must not understand what they mean to someone who does take them seriously. If the people who accuse me of treason really understood how serious an accusation that is, I think, they would not make it so lightly.

We all hate that when other people do it to us. We should therefore try hard not to do it ourselves. It's easy to hate bad things when other people do them; but each of us has been assigned, as our primary moral task, ourselves; and not being the sorts of people who lightly toss off accusations that are serious is much more important than accurately registering the sins of others.

If someone is, in fact, a genuinely bad person -- dishonest, treasonous, or dishonorable -- that is always a bad thing; and we should always hope that it is not true -- that when we were tempted to think the worst of him or her, we were wrong. Or, as I said in my first ever post here:

"I think C. S. Lewis gets it right.

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. (Mere Christianity, p. 106)

I think that if one really tries to live by this, one will be inclined to say many fewer harsh things, and those one does say will in general not be said in a way that is needlessly divisive. And if one is aware that really trying to be charitable does not ensure success, then one will also think hard before saying harsh things, in order to be sure that one does not allow oneself to be motivated by the desire to think ill of one's opponents. One will also try to see even really bad people as both comprehensible and redeemable, and if one is in a position to do so, one will try to reach out to them. And one will take seriously the possibility that one is mistaken about them, and even hope that one is.

That being said, I don't think that the answer is not to speculate about people's motives or character. I think I should try to be charitable, to consider seriously the possibility that I am wrong, and to express myself in a way that leaves that possibility open. But I also think that the character of our leaders in particular is extremely important, and that it would not serve us well to stop thinking about this. Moreover, I think that we have enough information to draw some conclusions about their character, and that we can also speculate where we lack conclusive evidence, as long as we are clear that that is what we are doing. But we should always try to remember that politicians are people like everyone else, as liable to confusion and weakness as the rest of us, and that it is no more permissible to say hateful things about them for the hell of it, than it would be to do this to someone we actually know.

At least, that's what I think."

Stem Cell Update

by hilzoy

Just a quick post on this story:

"In an innovative move, a biotech company has found a new way of making stem cells without destroying embryos, touting it as a way to defuse one of the country's fiercest political and ethical debates.

Some opponents of the research said the method still doesn't satisfy their objections and many stem cell scientists and their supporters called it inefficient and politically wrong-headed. (...)

he new method works by taking an embryo at a very early stage of development and removing a single cell, which can be coaxed into spawning an embryonic stem cell line. With only one cell removed, the rest of the embryo retains its full potential for development."

To my mind, the issues involved with this new method aren't made clear enough in the news accounts I've read, so I wanted to try to explain them here.

Any time a new development like this comes along, it's important to recognize that adopting it in place of existing methods would set embryonic stem cell research back for a year or two. That's because people are now pretty good at growing embryonic stem cell lines by the existing methods; they have figured out a lot of techniques that they would have to develop over again for this new method. To someone who believes that embryos are full persons from the moment of conception, this cost would, of course, be worth it. All I mean this point to show is: that there is a real cost to research involved in adopting a new method of deriving stem cells.

That cost makes it important to think hard about whether this technique, or any other substitute that is suggested, really does represent a moral advance over the existing method, which involves the destruction of an embryo. If it does, then it might be worth paying that price. If it doesn't, then it is obviously not worth it.

The main moral problem with this method is this: it might or might not be possible for the cell they remove from the embryo, and which they then grow into embryonic stem cells, to be implanted and develop into a normal infant. If this is not possible, no problem. But if it is possible, then presumably we should treat this cell as an embryo, which is being destroyed to create a stem cell line -- which is, of course, the very same problem the existing method has. This wouldn't be a more moral method of making stem cells at all; it would be exactly like making an embryo divide into identical twins, killing one of them, and saying: look! one of the twins is still alive! so everything is OK!

No one who is opposed to killing a blastocyst should think that this would be in any way an improvement over killing the original blastocyst.

The crucial question, then, is: can this cell develop into an infant? As I said, we don't know. In some species a cell like this can develop into an infant; in others, it can't. We don't know which group humans are in. Moreover, we aren't likely to find out, since to do so we'd have to do some plainly unethical experiments. (Consider: we also don't know whether an infant that did develop in this way would be normal. How would we find out? Trial and error? That would be plainly wrong, and no ethics review board would allow it.)

There are other questions we would need to answer in order to say that this method is morally OK. (For instance, does taking one cell at this stage harm the embryo from which it was taken? We take such cells now for various sorts of genetic tests, but as far as I know no one has studied the resulting kids to see whether or not they are more likely to have, for instance, birth defects.) But if I were opposed to abortion, this one would be a deal-breaker for me.

It would be one thing to delay research if a means of creating stem cells that did not involve destroying embryos were found. In that case, there would be something to debate. But to delay research in order to substitute one technique for another, when the new technique does not solve the problems of the old one, is just silly.

The Third Principle of Sentient Life

by Andrew

"You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand to post."

Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, A Few Good Men

Lieutenant General Mattis certainly doesn't need me to defend him. However, given commentary that suggests soldiers are trained to enjoy shooting people, that armies promote sociopathy, etc., I think perhaps a little time spent in explain what it is armies do would be worthwhile.

Above is probably the most famous line from Aaron Sorkin's excellent play and movie, "A Few Good Men," which chronicles the trial of two Marines accused of murdering their squadmate. For those unfamiliar with the plot, the Marines were ordered to conduct a 'Code Red,' disciplinary action between enlisted men intended to improve the performance of a substandard soldier or Marine, ordered by COL Jessup via the Platoon Commander. Something went wrong and the Marine in question died, and Jessup refused to acknowledge having ordered the Code Red, putting the Marines on trial for murder. In the course of being cross-examined by the defense attorney, COL Jessup gives the above soliliquy, followed by an admission that he did order the Code Red. While I am a fan of the film and I believe the outcome was the correct one, I am not alone among military personnel in acknowledging that while COL Jessup was wrong not to accept responsibility for his actions, the points he makes in the above speech are nonetheless valid.

Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but the profession of arms didn't come much later. Humanity has fought with each other as far back as recorded history, and almost certainly well before that as well. There have always been people who decided that it would be a lot easier to take what someone else has produced rather than doing the hard work of producing it themselves. Early on, that led to crimes like theft and robbery. As humanity formed into tribes that worked together, they moved on to war, the wars growing in scope as humanity developed larger tribes and then nations. As technology advanced and wars became more destructive, humans decided to try and create rules to reduce the destructive effects of war. We even trying forming institutions that would try to avert war, from alliances like the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance (big failures) and NATO (a pretty big success) to international organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations. But, contrary to what people like to believe, when it comes to fighting it doesn't take two to tango. On September 1, 1939, Poland would have been quite happy to remain at peace, but Germany wasn't willing to go along, thus kicking off round two of the First World War (and people think sequels are a relatively new innovation). Going to war isn't like launching missiles from a submarine; as long as one side is willing to turn its key, you have a war.

Many nations prefer to avoid war. From the historical perspective, this is probably an excellent strategy, as wars are expensive and destructive. But avoiding war is, as noted above, not merely a matter of choosing not to fight. As George Washington observed many years ago, "If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War." Nations that have avoided war generally either have strong militaries that can repel potential invaders, or geographic advantages that make conquering them too difficult to justify. (Switzerland, the best example, combines excellent defensive terrain and a capable military to make it far cheaper for any European nation to simply go around them if engaged in war.) And even when nations are strong enough to make invasions unwise, history offers countless examples of leaders who made the mistake of believing they could win a fight despite strong evidence to the contrary. Armies are therefore a necessary evil. If everyone would agree to lay down their arms perhaps it would be otherwise, but there is no reason to believe such a state of affairs would ever obtain. It is therefore incumbent that nations maintain the ability to defend their citizens from the depredations of neighboring states.

War is not violence for the sake of violence. War is focused violence, killing and destruction aimed at a very specific aim. Historically, war's aim has been the conquest of territory. For the United States, war generally seeks to break the enemy's will to resist and therefore end the war. But the destruction and death that war inevitably requires are not random; they are aimed at the targets that strategists believe will lead to the preferred outcome. Sometimes those choices are good; in Kosovo, NATO was able to convince Serbia to withdraw from Kosovo (eventually) by bombing Serbian installations throughout Serbia, causing destruction that was eventually large enough that the Serbian government decided it was unwilling to accept that level of destruction to accomplish its aims in Kosovo. Sometimes those choices are bad; Israel's recent war with Hezbollah and Lebanon appears (and this may prove to be inaccurate as more information surfaces) to have hit many Lebanese targets that damaged Israel's reputation without harming Hezbollah. But in both cases, national militaries selected targets based on their belief that destroying them would end the war in their favor. Even much of the devastation inflicted on Germany and Japan during World War II was done on the mistaken assumption that such a high degree of damage would induce those governments to surrender. Successful wars are the result of violence placed in the correct places.

A good army, then, is one capable of fighting successful wars. This sounds like circular reasoning, but if we posit that successful warfighting requires certain characteristics, we can divine the characteristics of a successful army. As noted above, successful armies apply the appropriate amount of violence against the appropriate targets. Accomplishing this requires a number of things: good intelligence, intelligent leadership, an understanding of the art and science of war, and, above all, good soldiers. Good soldiers can overcome a lot of deficiencies. For those who enjoy a little history, studying the events early on the morning of June 6, 1944 is a good case study in the value of good soldiers. American airborne troopers jumped into Normandy and into a disaster. Due to the volume of German antiaircraft fire and the inexperience of the pilots, few if any of the paratroopers landed in their drop zones. Instead they were scattered far and wide across the Cotentin Peninsula, often alone or in groups of only 3-5 soldiers. Some had officer or NCO leadership, others were only groups of privates. They very easily could have done little more than mill about aimlessly, waiting for light or for leadership to find them. But they knew their objectives, and they knew the importance of their mission, so those small groups did whatever they could to find their objectives and complete their missions. The individual initiative of hundreds of soldiers made the airdrop a success despite conditions far worse than what the planners had envisioned, and helped to make D-Day a success. Creating a successful army, then, depends on getting good soldiers.

Despite humanity's proclivity for fighting, finding the right men for an army is not easy. One must find people willing to risk their lives for generally abstract principles. The number of people willing and able to accept those risks are not large. Then those individuals must be trained. On the one hand, soldiers have to be trained to kill other human beings, something that is thankfully quite difficult for most civilized people. On the other hand, soldiers have to kill the right people; armies that simply kill everything they see are not effective in modern war, not to mention the rather stark ethical issues such conduct would raise. So armies must train soldiers to be ready to pull the trigger, but who identify their targets before doing so to ensure they are killing the right people, something that goes against the self-preservation instinct. That requires something that can overcome self-preservation.

What makes people risk their life by going into combat? One possibility would be some kind of mental problem; sociopaths might well enjoy the opportunity to kill others with legal sanction. But even members of the military aren't always at war, and sociopaths have difficulty functioning normally enough to avoid suspicion when their unit isn't actually in combat. And because the military doesn't want people who kill for the sake of killing, sociopaths don't really last long. Even the man suspected of raping and murdering an Iraqi girl and her family was put out of the Army due to personality problems shortly after his return from Iraq. The military neither wants to recruit sociopaths, nor does it want to create them. So it must find another method, and the means most commonly used it a cause. That cause is, unsurprisingly, patriotism: while people have many reasons for choosing military service, it is rare that patriotism doesn't play a role. Military personnel believe, as a rule, that their service is in some purpose, that it is not simply killing for the sake of killing.

It is therefore wholly unsurprising to me that LTG Mattis would say that it's fun to kill some people. I don't believe he means it is literally fun to pull the trigger and see another human being die, but that eliminating the enemies of his country is a good feeling because his actions have real meaning. I understand, as I suspect does LTG Mattis, that some people will disagree with that meaning, but for us it exists. We are risking our lives in the service of something greater than ourselves, and that is a good feeling. (Particularly when you survive the experience.)

Which brings me back to COL Jessup's comments. I am quite confident that the comments to this post will include people who wish to inform me that I am foolish or stupid to believe that military service is a noble calling. Others will point out that what we're doing in Iraq is bad, and therefore our service there is not helping our country or that we're sick individuals because we look forward to the opportunity to eliminate the enemies of our country. Even in unambiguously good causes there will always be those who believe military service is a bad thing, and there are no small number of people who live in a fantasy world where we could all get along if it wasn't for military people instigating wars, as if the human race as a whole has a natural tendency for peace that the military undermines. I hope that, for those who actually seek understanding of the military, I have done some little good in explaining who we are and what we believe.

Why do you like them so much?
Because they stand upon a wall and say, 'Nothing's going to hurt you. Not tonight. Not on my watch.'

Blog Whodunits

by Charles

I just love a good mystery, and Eric Scheie at Classical Values has almost too much fun (starting here and following up here) tracking down the identity of oft-quoted George Harleigh, said to be a retired political science professor from Southern Illinois University.  Problem is, there is no evidence that the man exists.  The "reporter" who used Mr. Harleigh as a source is Doug Thompson from Capitol Hill Blue.  Interestingly, Thompson has been furiously trying to wipe all references of Harleigh from his website, but there remain caches where Harleigh's name still lives.

Thompson was chumped three years ago by an "intelligence consultant" source (Terrance J. Wilkinson) who allegedly had close ties to the CIA.  As a result, his explosive story on Bush and uranium fizzled.  Looks like Thompson still hasn't learned his lesson.  I have a hazy recollection of Thompson back in the late 1990s when I was reading freerepublic.  He struck me as somewhere on the Buchanan-Raimondo-Rockwell axis (which would be an odd axis), but I could be mistaken.

Today's other mystery involves the five sock puppets (allegedly) who were haunting Glenn Greenwald's two IP addresses.  Ace, Patterico (follow-up here), Dan Riehl and Jeff Goldstein found characters such as Ellison, Wilson, Thomas Ellers, Sam Mathews and Ryan who had not only written from the same IP addresses as Greenwald, but all are remarkably like-minded.  Ellers made multiple appearances at QandO defending Greenwald and attacking his critics.  As Riehl noted, "Ryan" even had an e-mail exchange with Greenwald (sort of like me in the living room e-mailing my son in the playroom perhaps?).  Greenwald denies that it was he who wrote under those synonyms, but left unsaid was whether he was aware of these pseudonyms operating under his roof.  [Update:  Actually, he did say refer to "those in the same household" and that "others have left comments", so I take it that he did know.  So, for sock puppetry not to have occurred, four Americans (judging by the syntax) were in his house in Brazil, each of them making highly similar comments.  The mystery deepens.]  Using my keen powers of deduction, there are several possibilities:

• Greenwald is not being truthful.
• Brazil (where Greenwald happens to live most of the time) has an unusual "party line" IP system, where multiple Internet users can all access the same IP.  Not only that, those Brazil-residing users with English surnames are all big fans of Greenwald and have a thorough working knowledge of his bio.
• The right-of-center bloggers conspiratorially colluded, forging the IP to make it look like sock puppetry was taking place.
• Greenwald lives in a sort of commune and all these commenters really do exist, each having nearly disturbingly similar opinions of both Mr. Greenwald and his detractors.
• His live-in partner was the sock puppet master. 

The mystery is still unsolved, but my best guess is that it was the Partner in the Brazil House with the Keyboard.

This Is Not How To Argue About Stem Cells

by hilzoy

Robert George and Eric Cohen have a very disingenuous op-ed on stem cells in today's Washington Post. They start out by describing the Korean stem cell scandal, in which Hwang Woo Suk, a Korean researcher who had claimed to clone human embryos, turned out to have faked his research. George and Cohen note that "some dismiss the South Korean fraud as the work of a few bad scientific apples". That "some" includes me. I think that the fact that one researcher seems to have engaged in egregious scientific fraud does not carry any wider implications about stem cell research, any more than the forgery of Hitler's diaries implies that the study of history is inherently corrupt.

Silly me! As George and Cohen explain:

"In the end, the lesson of the cloning scandal is not simply that specific research guidelines were violated; it is that human cloning, even for research, is so morally problematic that its practitioners will always be covering their tracks, especially as they try to meet the false expectations of miraculous progress that they have helped create."

Really? I can see arguing something like this about, say, Josef Mengele. Someone who routinely killed his subjects, performed unanaesthetized and unnecessary surgery on them, and in one case sewed a pair of twins together in an effort to create Siamese twins, cannot possibly have straightforwardly believed that what he was doing was morally unproblematic. Mengele had to either believe, explicitly, that what he was doing was wrong, or else be hiding the truth from himself. In either case he would have to have completely ignored his conscience. And someone who can completely ignore his conscience in one part of his life would be more likely than other people to ignore it elsewhere. Or so one might argue.

Whether or not this argument works, though, you can't make it about people who sincerely believe that what they are doing is right, not because they are hiding from the awful truth, but just because they honestly don't see anything wrong with it. Stem cell researchers generally do believe that what they're doing is not morally wrong, and they believe this because, according to them, there really is no problem with killing a five-day-old blastocyst. To say that stem cell research is morally corrupting despite this fact would be like saying that gays who are not tormented by guilt because they do not think that being gay is wrong are nonetheless more likely than other people to rob banks. After all, an anti-gay activist might say, I believe that homosexuality is wrong, and people who do one wrong thing are more likely than other people to do another. That's just silly.

Oddly enough, though they spend about half of their column on the Korean scandal, George and Cohen's point isn't really about that scandal, or even about what they call "research cloning" and the scientific community calls "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT). It's about three bills that will shortly come up before the Senate:

"Last week the Senate agreed to consider three bioethics bills: one that would permit federal funding for research on embryos left over in fertility clinics, one that would prohibit fetal farming and one that would fund various alternative methods of producing genetically controlled, pluripotent stem cells -- just the kind of stem cells we would get from cloning, but without the embryo destruction."

The supposed relevance of the Korean scandal to these bills is as follows. Researchers have said that SCNT would be helpful to them. This is true, for reasons I explained here (scroll down to 'The Main Issue'.) George and Cohen draw this conclusion: "If cloning is really so important for research, then overturning the Bush administration policy to fund research on "spare" IVF embryos is not very useful."

Let's consider a few analogies to this alleged argument.

(1) "If microscopes are really so important for research, then buying Petri dishes and cell culture medium is not very useful."

(2) "If having working brakes is so important for a car, then having an engine that actually runs, or a steering wheel that can steer, must not be very useful."

(3) "If having a cool haircut is so important to teenagers, then they must not care very much about wearing cool clothes."

Newsflash: it is possible for two things to be important for one purpose at the same time! It's amazing, I know, but trust me on this one: the fact that I would be very happy if the air conditioning guys called me back does not mean that literally nothing else would "be very useful" to me. Maybe I, and stem cell researchers, are just very demanding people, and that's why we are capable of finding not just one but several things useful, all at the very same time. Or maybe that's how human life works, and George and Cohen are just being disingenuous.

***

About "fetal farming": I've been reading scary references to "fetal farming" for several years now, all of them in pro-life publications. Every now and again, I ask some of the stem cell researchers I know whether they have any idea what, exactly, "fetal farming" might be, and they just look bewildered. As far as I can tell, what people who use the term seem to have in mind is this: we create a cloned embryo with some genetic profile that we want. We then implant it in a woman's uterus, and let it grow for a while, until it has reached the specific stage we need it to get to. Then we abort the fetus and harvest its tissue.

Right.

I have no problem whatsoever with banning the implantation of any cloned embryo, ever. That's fine by me*. Moreover, it's also fine with the research community, which has consistently supported a ban on implanting cloned embryos, and on keeping them alive for more than fourteen days. (This is partly because you can't get embryonic stem cells from an embryo that's more than five or six days old.) George and Cohen seem to think that this is just a temporary ruse -- that once researchers gain the ability to engage in somatic cell nuclear transfer, they will turn their attention to legalizing "fetal farming". To which I can only say: well, let's finally enact a ban on implanting cloned embryos, and then we can see whether or not George and Cohen's dark imaginings actually materialize. While we're at it, we could also ban harvesting fetuses to make cunning little fetus-skin coats, just to be on the safe side. After all, you never know what those scientists might be up to next.

George and Cohen's final point is to recommend work on so-called "alternative methods" of deriving embryonic stem cells.

"Instead of engaging in fraud and coverup, or conducting experiments that violate the moral principles of many citizens, we should look to scientific creativity for an answer. Since the cloning fraud, many scientists -- such as Markus Grompe at Oregon Health & Science University and Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT -- have been doing just that. And others, such as Kevin Eggan at Harvard, may have found a technique, called "cell fusion," that would create new, versatile, genetically controlled stem cell lines by fusing existing stem cells and ordinary DNA. Scientists in Japan just announced that they may have found a way to do this without even needing an existing stem cell line.

In other words: all the benefits of research cloning without the ethical problems."

I have nothing against funding research into these methods provided that this is not seen as an alternative to funding embryonic stem cell research. Some of the techniques seem unlikely to work, and some represent no moral advance over SCNT, since they require the destruction of a being that could develop into a human child. (See here (subscription wall, alas) and my slightly out of date explanation here.) Kevin Eggan's technique requires the use of embryonic stem cells, and moreover yields cells with twice the normal complement of genes, which makes them unusable in therapy. From the NEJM (sorry, subscription):

"There is some risk that people who are seeking to place restrictions on research into the biology of human embryonic stem cells may misinterpret these findings, arguing that the new technique represents an alternative approach to the generation of "chromosomally tailored" human embryonic stem cells that have therapeutic potential. Kevin Eggan, one of the investigators in this study, says he is "very disappointed" by this prospect and emphasizes that the study "does not deliver a methodology that can replace human embryonic stem cells." Although this finding will inspire further studies to identify and determine the mechanism of action of the critical factors that reprogram chromosomes, the hybrid cells cannot generate embryonic stem cells and, because they are tetraploid, their therapeutic potential is nil."

Oh well.

The last technique mentioned by George and Cohen was announced (sorry; subscription again) just a week ago, and the experiments behind the announcement have not yet been published. It sounds very interesting, but it's hard to evaluate without more information. According to scientists who were at the meeting where this result was announced,

"But scientists caution that Yamanaka's report has not eliminated the need for work on embryonic stem cells. Researchers must test the same four factors in human cells. And it is not entirely clear whether the reprogrammed cells can do everything that embryonic cells can. Although many of the genes they express are the same, many are not.

Yamanaka's report came just a day after the US Senate said it would vote on relaxing rules on embryonic research later this year. Some have argued that progress in reprogramming has made work on embryonic stem cells unnecessary, and they may seize on Yamanaka's work to bolster this position. But scientists at the Toronto meeting said that would be a mistake."

I don't know Eric Cohen's work very well, but I normally respect Robert George. I don't think that this column, with its lack of decent arguments and lurid fantasies, is worthy of him. There are serious debates to be had on this topic, but this column doesn't contain any of them.

Andrea Clark And Medical Futility

by hilzoy

In a comment on an earlier thread, DaveC asked me to comment on the case of Andrea Clark, a Texas woman whose hospital had planned to discontinue life-support treatment. Yesterday, the hospital decided to continue treating her. But that doesn't make the underlying issues go away, and since this is neither the first nor (in all likelihood) the last such case, I'll discuss them below the fold. But it's important to recognize one crucial point about cases like Andrea Clark's: They are not about whether or not a hospital can decide to kill people. In this country, no hospital can do that legally. They are about whether a hospital should be required to go on providing care that it believes is futile.

Forensic Vagina Inspectors

by hilzoy

When I ask myself what exactly is it that makes killing a person such a terrible thing, the answers I come up with generally involve the possession of consciousness or sentience. It's a terrible thing to cause someone pain, as killing her often does. It's worse to kill a being who can feel not only pain but emotions, and who can participate in social relationships. And it's worst of all to kill someone who is capable of autonomy: to cut short the story that someone is trying to tell with her life, or to pull the curtain down on all her hopes and plans and dreams. She has the right to decide what to do with her life, I think; and for someone else to barge in and end it without consulting her -- to tear apart the web of relationships, aspirations, idiosyncrasies, and so forth that is her life, and to ignore completely her right to decide for herself what to make of it -- is unconscionable.

I could go on and list more reasons for objecting to killing people. All the items I could list, however, require the possession of some sort of sentience or consciousness, or on the fact that the person in question has developed sentience or consciousness, but has temporarily lost it. (Thus, it is wrong to kill someone who is in a coma, since this person retains the right to determine what to do with her life, just as she retains, for instance, her property rights, or her marriage. It does not follow from the fact that someone can remain married while in a coma that someone who had been in a coma all her life could get married. Likewise, I think, for the right to autonomy: it is retained when all consciousness has been temporarily lost, but is not possessed by those who have never been conscious to start with.)

For this reason, I think that there is no reason to object to think that abortions that take place before the earliest point at which these sorts of considerations kick in are morally wrong*. The first to appear is the capacity to feel pain, and it probably does not occur before the third trimester. The third trimester begins at 27 weeks; according to the CDC (PDF: Table 16, p. 166), 98.6% of abortions in this country are performed before the 21st week, and 94% before the end of the first trimester. So even if, to be on the safe side, I were to conclude that abortions after, say, the 22nd week were immoral, the vast majority of abortions in this country would still be OK by my lights.

Not everyone agrees, of course. But it's harder than you'd think to be consistently pro-life.

About Morality

by hilzoy

Once upon a time, I went to a gathering of liberals and conservatives that was intended to promote dialogue and understanding between the two groups; and I was struck by the fact that whenever someone learned that I was an ethicist, they immediately assumed that I was a conservative. This seemed odd to me: it was several decades over a decade* ago, before 'moral values' had emerged as a political term, and at that point I couldn't imagine why anyone would suppose that conservatives had a lock on moral values.

(This was not just partisanship, or a reflection of the fact that my moral beliefs underwrite my political views. It was also due to my having spent several decades being lectured by conservatives about my "excessively idealistic" views -- e.g., about how it was silly to think that we shouldn't support, say, Guatemala in the early '80s "just" because it was murderous and repressive. It was genuinely surprising to discover that the very people who had made these arguments were regarded as champions of morality.)

These days it's more obvious why someone might think that. But it's deeply regrettable. There is a straightforward moral case to be made not just against the current crop of Republican politicians, but also, I think, for liberal values. But as long as we cede moral language to conservatives, we will not be able to make this case effectively. Nor will we be able to speak to the legitimate fears of people who (correctly) think that morality is extremely important, who are worried that it's under seige, and who (mistakenly) suppose that only conservatives are willing to speak up for them, or that defending morality involves an obsession with preventing gay marriage, or something like that.

If we want to reclaim moral language, however, we need to get comfortable with the idea of making moral judgments. Some of you already are, of course, but some of the reactions to my Evil post made me think that some of you are not. Therefore, I have written a short primer. It's meant for those who are not fully comfortable making moral judgments, or using the language of morality. Many of you probably don't need it. It also contains only the issues that happened to occur to me. I'll write about others on request.

New! Improved! X-Phi!

by hilzoy

(Warning: not everyone will find the topic of this post at all interesting. Nor should they: there's no reason that I can see why anyone has to know or care what philosophy is or how it's done. Unless, of course, they want to publish something about it...)

I have this peculiar idea that when I write about something, I should either know what I'm talking about or say up front that I'm just speculating. It is, I have always thought, a part of being responsible: I should not present my guesses as if they were facts, especially when someone might read what I say and think I know what I'm talking about. Evidently, however, this is just one more bit of evidence that bloggers don't hold themselves to the same standards as journalists. At any rate, that's what I'd have to conclude if I were uncharitable enough to take this article in Slate as representative of journalism.

It's about something called "experimental philosophy" (or "X-phi") that, according to Jon Lackman, the article's author, poses a deep challenge to philosophy. Why?

Capitalism's Anti-Human Paradox

Capitalism is seen by many as the salvation of the species, permitting us to triumph over the forces of nature, ensure long-term prosperity, raise the universal standard of living, and ward off the sort of needless wars that widespread poverty and lack of access to resources incite. To perpetuate that assertion, however, purists must develop parallel moralistic systems of excuses and societal standards. Not doing well in a capitalistic system? It must be because you're lazy or stupid or unambitious or because you're a bad person, and therefore if you fall between the cracks and get trampled by the system you really only have yourself to blame. We're too busy making money to care.

More than just a lack of compassion, however, there seems to be built into capitalism mechanisms that crush humanistic programs, such as basic universal healthcare. Consider what's happening in increasingly capitalistic China:

China's economic reforms have turned an almost uniformly poor nation into an increasingly prosperous one in the space of a mere generation. But the collapse of socialized medicine and staggering cost increases have opened a yawning gap between health care in the cities and the rural areas, where the former system of free clinics has disintegrated.

In the last several years China has experimented with reforms aimed at improving health care for peasants. The most important is an insurance plan in which participating farmers must make an annual payment of a little more than a dollar to gain eligibility for basic medical treatments.

Many peasants have complained that even the dollar payment is too big a burden and that in any event the coverage the plan theoretically provides is inadequate.

The government, which under President Hu Jintao has made rural living standards a top priority, has recently announced an expansion of this experiment, with increased fees and increased coverage, but it has yet to make an impact on the health crisis.

As a result, according to the government's own estimates, in less than a generation a rural population that once enjoyed universal, if rudimentary, coverage is now 79 percent uninsured. [emphasis mine]

Now I've blogged long enough to know that posts like this elicit absolutist retorts of how communism or socialism are even bigger human disasters so I should just get over it (as if it were blasphemous to suggest Capitalism [or *gasp* American Capitalism] might stand a bit of tweaking with an eye toward making it more human). Then comes the condescending advice to just wait, it may take a while, but eventually the Chinese will see overall improvement. Sure, they'll never have the sort of universal health care they had before, but at least those who can tap into the system will have widescreen flat TVs and SUVs and plastic surgery and other things important to their well-being. And the poor who would have gotten better care under the old system, and married, and had children, and enjoyed sunsets and laughter...ah, well, sh*t happens.

Indeed, it does:

When Jin Guilian's family took him to a county hospital in this gritty industrial city after a jarring two-day bus ride during which he drifted in and out of consciousness, the doctors took one look at him and said: "How dare you do this to him? This man could die at any moment."

The doctors' next question, though, was about money. How much would the patient's family of peasants and migrant workers be able to pay - up front - to care for Mr. Jin's failing heart and a festering arm that had turned black?

The relatives scraped together enough money for four days in the hospital. But when Mr. Jin, 36, failed to improve, they were forced to move him to an unheated and scantily equipped clinic on the outskirts of Fuyang where stray dogs wandered the grimy, unlighted halls.

But who cares about some distant peasant? What's this got to do with me? Well, since you asked:

The near total absence of adequate health care in much of the countryside has sown deep resentment among the peasantry while helping to spread infectious diseases like hepatitis and tuberculosis and making the country - and the world - more vulnerable to epidemics like severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and possibly bird flu.

So what I am advocating? A bit of research really. We like to think of America as the great historical experiment, so let's lead the way and figure it out so other countries still developing their capitalism can learn from us, rather than having to make it up as they go along, realizing--as they do now--that copying our system spells their demise.

Why is this our responsibility (other than to help prevent a worldwide epidemic of deadly bird flu or SARS)? Because American corporations as setting up shop in China as quickly as they can buy a building, infecting their system with the systemic healthcare delivery disorders we have here at home. Moreover, because an embarssing number of Americans are little better off than the peasants in rural China.

This paradoxical flaw in Capitalism (that a country's poor should face additional hardships as their economy expands) should be a philosphical crisis demanding the best economic minds the industrialized world has form a task force to try and solve it. Instead, we shrug it off, convincing ourselves it's a minor bump on the road to greater global prosperity. But the problem isn't just timing...it is philosophy:

The recent emphasis on profit, meanwhile, has led doctors and other well-trained health care workers to abandon the countryside, with a result that peasants are left at the mercy of unqualified caregivers and outright charlatans who peddle expensive, improperly prescribed drugs and counterfeit medicines.

The answer might be making basic health care much more affordable (so folks can buy it like they do car insurance) by letting the government offer coverage for the less likely but more devastating (to the insurance industry as well as the patient) catastrophic events. I don't know, not being an economist or policy wonk, but clearly the current approach benefits only the HMOs and lobbyists.

Mark Kleiman Is Annoyed, And I Am Perplexed

by hilzoy

I have a lot of respect for Mark Kleiman, and one of the reasons is that he generally stops, thinks, and considers the evidence before forming an opinion. Not in this post, though. He posts an article by a woman who is looking for a kidney donor over the internet. The article itself is thoughtful and moving. Above it, Kleiman writes:

"I missed the essay below when it first appeared in the New York Times, even though the author, Sally Satel, is an old friend. It's a story about the power of the Internet to facilitate good deeds.

Naturally, the "bioethicists" are against it. This reinforces my basic belief that "bioethics" should be punishable by prison time.

Note that the current organ donation system, of which the bioethics crowd is inordinately proud because it's so impersonally "fair," eliminates any incentive for families or communities to mobilize themselves to get their members registered as organ donors, because there's no relationship between who donates organs and who receives them. It would be wonderful, of course, if everyone in the world regarded everyone else in the world as infinitely valuable. But since that's not the case, I don't see either the moral or the practical case against trying to mobilize particularist emotions in the service of altruistic actions. To focus on the relatively trivial question of who gets the inadequate number of cadaveric organs donated, rather than the vital question of how many people sign up as donors, strikes me as reflecting an astonishing degree of moral blindness.

But of course I shouldn't be astonished. This is the sort of reasoning that dominates the pseudo-field of bioethics, and has, by infiltrating the Institutional Review Board process, put a serious crimp in both medical and social-scientific research."

Some problems with this:

The Blame Game

by hilzoy

Via Atrios:

"Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats, it is a call to conscience. And though it requires sacrifice, it brings a deeper fulfillment. We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments. And we find that children and community are the commitments that set us free.

Our public interest depends on private character, on civic duty and family bonds and basic fairness, on uncounted, unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom.

Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love. The most important tasks of a democracy are done by everyone.

I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for gr