Bioethics

Ethics Article of the Week: George Will On His Son’s Birthday

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Happy birthday, Jon.

Conservative columnist George Will has only occasionally mentioned his Down Syndrome-inflicted son Jon in his columns, but when he has, it has provided an extra dimension to Jon’s father, who usually comes across in print and on TV as cynical, dour, and archly intellectual. Today is Jon’s birthday, so Will devotes the full column to him, his challenges, and, when all is said and done, ethics.

It’s a beautifully written piece, as Will’s columns often are, and a tender one. More importantly, however, it is an essay that should provoke thought, beginning with the fact that the only reason Will wrote this column is that he and his wife chose, 40 years ago, to do what 90% of all parents informed that their gestating child has Down Syndrome refuse to do: allow the child to be born.

The column is here

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Graphics: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Chess Lesson: The Tale of the Kidney and the Ungrateful Boss”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

New commenter Christine has a valuable personal experience to relate, as an individual who donated a kidney to a stranger herself.  The main thrust of her post covers a topic that I have written on before but did not mention in this case, though I should have. Someone who performs a kind and generous act counting on rewards, copious thanks and gratitude, is  doing it for the wrong reasons. The act itself is all that matters. Certainly, gratitude is the right way to respond to generosity, but an act done in anticipation of personal benefits isn’t really altruistic. It is opportunistic. This is a cliché to be sure, but true nonetheless: the generous act must be its own reward.

Here is Christine’s Comment of the Day on the post, Ethics Chess Lesson: The Tale of the Kidney and the Ungrateful Boss.

I want to also commend Christine for following the comment policies, which many of the new visitors here who commented on this post did not do. I prefer full named on posts, but I only require that I am informed of  every commenter’s real name and have a valid e-mail address within a reasonable time of their first submitted comment. One way or the other virtually all of the regular commenters here have managed to do this, and it makes a difference, even in my responses. I regard such commenters as collaborators , not just marauders, and most of the time, I treat them accordingly:  tgt, Steven, Lianne, Margy, Glenn, Tim, both Michaels, Karl, Neil, Karla, Rick, blameblakeart, Barry, gregory, Eric, Curmudgeon, Eeyore, Julian, King Kool, Joshua, Jay, Tom, Bill, Danielle, Elizabeth, Patrice, Ed, Bob, The Ethics Sage and Jeff…I know there are others.   Thanks to all of you for letting me know who you are.

Now, Christine: Continue reading →

“Baby-Killing” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 173 Comments

No "moral right to life"?

Aided by Rick Santorum’s over-heated rhetoric, the concept of infanticide (I’m against it, by the way) has been hot in the marketplace of ideas lately.

A group of medical ethicists at Oxford made headlines by arguing that parents ought to have the option of killing their newborns because they are “morally irrelevant” and thus ending their lives is no different from abortion. After some recent examples of the press mangling the real message of scholarly papers, I was dubious about the news reports, but son of a gun, that’s what these ethicists wrote.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was authored by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, who argue, Continue reading →

Weekend Ethics Catch-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you took an ethics break this last weekend of February, here’s your Ethics Alarms make-up assignment:

 

Robot Ethics: Let’s Not Get Silly About It

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today seems to be “Ethics Questions That We Shouldn’t Have To Ask Day,” and Andrew Sullivan, over at the Daily Beast, phrases his entry this way:

“Is Sex With A Robot Adultery?”

Sherry Jackson as a robot on the original "Star Trek." Lovely, convincing, but still basically a toaster.

Gee, I don’t know, Andrew: is sex with a toaster adultery? What has Sullivan asking such nonsense is a new book called Robot Ethics, which has some legitimate issues to explore, and then some other phony controversies included to get publicity and interviews. The field of robot ethics still includes little that hasn’t been thoroughly explored by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but as a few of these dilemmas are likely to enter reality from science fiction in the foreseeable future, it is reasonable to dust off the issues again as long as we don’t get silly about it. Getting overly excited for the Boston Globe, however, Josh Rothman writes: Continue reading →

Matrix Chicken Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yum-yum!

Architecture Student and artist André Ford has sparked an ethics debate after proposing that chickens be raised for meat in vertical racks after  their frontal cortexes have been severed, rendering them brain-dead and essentially growing meat. The question is, would this practice be more ethical than current factory farming, less ethical, or does it make no difference?

Ford’s system would have the chickens suspended and immobile, with their feet removed. Tubes would supply water and nutrients directly into them while other tubes would carry away their waste. The chickens, of course, wouldn’t feel a thing, which one could argue is a superior state to the well-documented stress and misery they would experience in traditional chicken farms. Meanwhile, the costs of raising chickens would be (theoretically) reduced, in part because far less space would be required, and the process would also be cleaner—again, theoretically. Continue reading →

BREAKING NEWS: Whales Aren’t Slaves! PETA Shocked!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"Thank you! And for my next number, 'Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen!'"

PETA’s cretinous and offensive lawsuit equating Sea World’s whales with enslaved human beings—just the latest in the organization’s irresponsible “look at us!” tactics—was laughed out of court, as everybody but a breathless NPR interviewer knew it would be. This was yet another example of a lawsuit that any common sense-imbued layman would accurately call frivolous, but a bar association discipline committee would not. A lawyer can ethically take on a lawsuit he or she knows is stupid, foolish, silly, or a “hail Mary” shot, as long as there is a good faith belief that it might/could possibly/ gee, with a little luck and they don’t think about it too carefully prevail. And looking at some of the rulings that come down from various benches and verdicts that creep out of some jury boxes, that means almost no case is unethically frivolous in a legal sense. That doesn’t mean that it is responsible and right for lawyers to help plaintiffs like PETA bring such wasteful lawsuits, just that it isn’t a breach of professional ethics to do so. Continue reading →

The Susan G. Komen Foundation-Planned Parenthood Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Unlike the 26 U.S. Senators who are unethically abusing their positions by presuming to demand that an independent non profit organization expend its funds according to their interests, I am not going to tell the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation how to pursue its mission…because as with the Senators, it is none of my business. Ethics is my business, and the full-blown ethics train wreck surrounding the Foundation’s decision to end its substantial financial support of Planned Parenthood has been created by dishonesty, misrepresentation and a lack of fairness from all directions.

Here are some unpopular ethics truths in this fiasco. Continue reading →

Tales Of Ethics Dunces Past: Recalling the Self-Indulgent Suicide of Hunter Thompson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t claim that I am surprised that my post about the suicide of Don Cornelius attracted comments that either showed a misunderstanding of what I wrote or a stubborn determination to change the subject. It was not a post about the virtues of suicide, but about how suicide’sethical calculations may be changing as a broken medical care system increasingly makes the final years and months of the elderly a burden that crushes families and constricts the quality of life  for the nation generally. In short, killing yourself for your country may have to become an accepted practice, an ethical and courageous act, if something doesn’t change. Killing yourself for yourself—to avoid pain, problems, or the consequences of your own actions, should always be considered wrong, for wrong it is.

Jeff Hibbert, one of my favorite contributors here and also one with a great memory, reminded me that I had written on this topic once before. I had forgotten, but that post may be a useful contrast to the Cornelius post. There is not a word of it that I don’t still believe. It concerned the 2005 suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the cult “gonzo journalist” who lived like frat boy and  wrote like angel. Here it is:

Hunter Thompson’s values were admittedly always a little out of whack, but nothing diminished the self-styled “gonzo journalist” in this world so much as his manner of leaving it. He shot himself to death last February while talking on the phone to his wife, with both his son and grandson in his house with him. Nice. That should guarantee some lucky psychoanalyst or three a comfy income for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Don Cornelius, Suicide…and Ethics Hero?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Soul Train” creator and pop culture icon Don Cornelius took his own life at 75 yesterday, using a gunshot to the head to do it. Suicide always conjures up feelings of special sadness for the deceased, sometimes mixed with anger. The act can be cruel and devastating to family members and friends; often it leaves behind crushing problems, financial and otherwise, that the living have to deal with. Suicide is stigmatized in our culture as a coward’s way out of earthly problems; many religions consider it a sin, and many legal systems consider suicide a crime. Yet it may be that American culture will have to undergo a major cultural transformation in the matter of taking one’s own life. While morality tends to ossify, ethics is fluid and adaptable. Changing conditions and new realities can, in rare circumstances, cause societies to conclude that what was once considered right is really wrong, and what was once condemned as wrong is in society’s best interests. I think we may reach that point with suicide. Continue reading →