Details here.  As David mentioned before, he, Søren and I are all going to be giving papers.

Obviously, a lot of the world’s attention is currently on Iran and the political turmoil there.  I don’t think that this blog is the place to make comments about the disputed presidential election - but I am reminded of a story from a couple of years ago, and it’s worth airing here.

One of the characteristics of the Islamic Republic is that it’s much more complicated than a lot of the Western media would have us believe.  (For example, I once ended up in conversation in a Tehran park near the old American Embassy Den of Espionage with a member of the Baseej* about the comparative merits of British and Persian women - I’d tried to explain political correctness to him, but he didn’t get it.  Wouldn’t you know it: even the fanatics are human.)  Nevertheless, you’d expect the Ayatollahs to have a certain set of fairly predictable ideas about sex, and for those ideas to be fairly rigid and unforgiving.

Not always.

Consider the case of Maryam Khatoon Molkara.  She used to be a man.  Remarkably, her sex-change operation came with the blessing of the religio-civil authorities, who

[are] starting to recognise people with sexual-identity disorders and allowing them to have sex-change operations and obtain new birth certificates. Some [people] are now even recommended for treatment by clerics and the government helps fund operations.

It’s not quite the vision of Islamic theocracy that we might have expected, is it?

[W]hen the chance to have gender-swap treatment arose in the 1970s, she went to see Ayatollah Behbehani, one of the leading religious figures in the country. He performed a typical Iranian religious ceremony, an istikhareh - letting the Koran fall open and interpreting her problems according to the page that was revealed. It was the sura of Maryam, the verses in the Koran that tell the story of Jesus’ mother Mary. Ayatollah Behbehani said he thought this meant that her life would be like Maryam’s - a struggle.

“He said it meant I should have the operation but he said I should write to Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in Iraq and was one of the leading Shia religious experts. Khomeini decided then that it was a religious obligation for me to have the sex change because a person needs a clear sexual identity in order to carry out their religious duties. He said that because of my feelings, I should observe all the rites specific to women, including the way they dress.”

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that surgery became even a possibility, but - all the same - the story is surprising and gives a glimpse into the regime in Iran.  Grim and stony-faced it may often be, but that’s not the whole story.  And even if you think that the Ayatollah’s judgement was based on the silliest of arguments - and, frankly, I do - it’s still interesting to see someone coming to the right sort of decision for the wrong sort of reason.

And, of course, the story gives us a nice example of the danger of ad hominem reasoning.  People - even Koranic literalists - are often very surprising.

There’s more on transsexuality in Iran here, here, and here, and lots more via Google and YouTube.

*ERRATUM: It was a member of the Komitè, the religious police.  Meh.  Tomayto tomahto.

A little while ago, I mentioned Jamie Ross’ admirable Cancerous Capers blog.  Well - for all the best reasons - there won’t be any more updates.  His reason?  Having cancer was tedious enough; but with radiotherapy over, banging on about not having it would be even more tedious.  Assuming he gets the all-clear in a couple of months, there’ll be nothing more to add.

Good.  I wish him well.

I can stop, you know.  Any time.  Honest.

Perhaps as something of a counterbalance to the generally pro-decriminalisation stuff I’ve been posting for the past couple of months, it’s worth pointing to Alexandre Erler’s piece on the issue on the Practical Ethics blog.  The tone of the post is thoughtful and more sympathetic to the current state of affairs than the kind of thing I’ve been citing so far, admitting that

there might be something to the idea that decriminalizing the use of cannabis (and other drugs) would send the wrong message: presumably, we wouldn’t want a substance to be made freely available if its only possible use was to allow those who purchased it to kill themselves. And there is some scientific evidence that cannabis is actually more harmful than tobacco. Suppose this evidence were conclusive: it might then be argued that a state’s commitment to liberal principles cannot justify its endorsing the use of just any substance by its citizens, no matter how harmful it might be. A limit must be placed somewhere, and one might argue that cannabis (and “tougher” drugs), but not tobacco, goes beyond that limit. This line of argument might be the best way of developing idea that decriminalizing cannabis “would send the wrong message”. But even if it is, its proponents need to clearly present it in an open debate, and they might also need further scientific evidence to back up their claims about the harmfulness of cannabis use. The term “drug” is not a magic word that can justify prohibiting the use of any substance it is properly applied to.

There’s a lot that’s right about this - especially about the (mis)use of the word “drugs” and the way it gets used in a morally (and moralistically) loaded manner.  Just as there is no such thing as a bad food, there is no such thing as a bad drug - it’s what you do with it that makes the difference.  (The Greeks knew that: their word “pharmakon” was wonderfully equivocal.  A poison is just a drug you can’t handle.)

I’m not so sure about the safety restriction, though.  I can think of plenty of people who’d insist that there is no limit to the idiocy that people should be allowed to commit, as long as it’s an “authentic” action on their part, and noone else - or, at least, noone who hasn’t consented - is hurt.  Often, these people cite R v Brown as a paradigm example of the law getting things wrong (or protesting a wee bit too much): it should, they say, have been much more permissive.  Though I’m not much of a fan of Mill, I have to admit that something like the Harm Principle is, at least pragmatically, attractive: the Brown ruling does seem to me to hit the wrong note.  This being the case, it’d be harder to accept the assumption about the free availability of deadly substances; and, mutatis mutandis, the same would apply to drug policy.

The real question concerns the unconsented harm to others that may be caused, and how to balance that with the demands of liberty.  On this, it would seem that there is an argument of at least some sort against cannabis use: but even there, it’s only limited.  We’d have to say, I think, that public cannabis use ought to be restricted for just the same reason that public smoking or drink-driving ought to be - but that’s really no big deal, and concerns the circumstances of cannabis use more than cannabis use in itself (or harder drug use, for that matter), which would remain something of which we might disapprove, but not something that we’d be entitled to ban outright.

So the end point would seem to be that we ought to be careful about these things.  It’s remarkably trivial.

It’s another one of those posts about drug policy, I’m aftaid: this week’s All in the Mind covered the Portuguese experiment with decriminalisation (about which I posted recently), and is available to listen for the next few days.  Depressingly, one of the contributors dropped a fairly broad hint - accurately, I think - that the UK would not be willing to make any comparable experiment, not because of any evidence against its advisability, but because of the cowardice of MPs and the bone-headedness of the commentariat (and electorate) to whom they’re in thrall - this is about 13 minutes in.  (On which notion, remember this?)  The same contributor also pointed out that the three main political parties have been forced by this reality to admit tacitly that criminalisation probably isn’t the best move, but cannot actually say that this is what they think clearly and publicly - hence they’re not only pushing a policy that plainly doesn’t work, but also one in which they really don’t believe.

By spooky synchronicity, over at Practical Ethics, Roger Crisp considers the recent pulling of Release’s “Nice People Take Drugs” adverts, and suggests that

[m]odern attitudes to drugs mirror those of advocates of temperance in the nineteenth century, who were moved by the terrible harms done to individuals, families, and communities by the abuse of alcohol. Few these days campaign for the prohibition of alcohol, and it is widely thought that a licensing system can mitigate a good deal of the harm of alcohol without unduly restricting the liberty of individuals to consume alcohol should they wish

- which seems to be on the money.  Noone who argues for a reform of the drug laws is saying that there should be a free-for-all: it’s just a matter of pointing out that humans like getting off their chops (as do other animals, apparently), and that we aren’t going to let small considerations like legality and wisdom get in the way, so we might as well grow up about it and come up with a policy that reflects this.

Meanwhile, Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science column addresses similar concerns through the lens of the US’ reaction to the WHO’s report on cocaine in the 1990s.  I don’t want to give away the plot, but it’s fair to say that the word “petulant” could be used with justice.

Maybe it’s all those essays I’ve been marking that’ve melted my brain a bit and made me unduly receptive to the potential for puerile jokes about pregnancy porn… but I saw this on the BBC News front page last night, and it made me giggle…

A short time ago, I mentioned George Pitcher’s extraordinarily lame showing on the Today programme, when he was invited to talk about assisted suicide.  I included a link to his blog - and, I admit it, this was partly intended so that he’d get an “incoming link” notification and either make a comment here, or refer to my post there.

As far as I can tell, he’s done neither.  However, he has excelled himself when it comes to euthanasia paranoia.  He posted on the subject on the day of the Radio 4 interview, and you can read the full thing here if you really want.  I’m going to pick on a short extract:

And another thing: We have a growing elderly population, living longer, and palliative care is very expensive. It couldn’t be that the Government sees the ballooning NHS budget and realises that one way to save a bit would be for our senior citizens to be encouraged to top themselves?

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

Ahhh… wild speculation and scaremongering dressed as argument.  Rewarding stuff.

Of course, I’d like to think that things couldn’t get stupider… but, it seems, they can.  One should never underoverestimate the contributors to Telegraph blogs.  “BritishPatriot” has to have his poorly-spelled say on the subject:

In 1970 when Aborion was legalised they said it would only be used in extreme circumstances, we now have abortion clinics, err, sorry pregnancy advice centres in every town where potential mothers are lulled into aborting what they are told are ‘just cells’
7.2 Million British Babies later, we face a Demographics Timebomb.
Now they want to sterilise our Schoolgirls.
This Euthenasia drive they are trying ti get us to agree to is so they can asset strip the British Elderly then do away with them in their Privatised ‘clinic’
The EU doesn’t want you, they know you will not vote for the EU so they are getting rid of you every way they can.
WAKE UP !!!!

If I don’t contribute to this blog for a while, it’ll be for one of two reasons.  Either Gordon Brown and the entire staff of the European Commission will personally have come round to my house to euthanise me (coldly ignoring my cries of “No!  Really!  I’m all in favour of the EU and would sign up to Schengen and the Euro lickety-split!”), or I’ll have bought shares in Bacofoil and have moved to a private island in the Carribean.

Because there seems to be a growing market in tinfoil hats that needs to be exploited.

I have to admit that I’m a bit suspicious of empirical work in ethics: my general instinct is to be less interested in what people actually think or do or want than in what they ought to think or do or want.  But it’s also true that empirical work can confirm or cast doubt on predictions about how a moral claim or policy is received or implemented - it has a role to play in assessing “pure” - or “armchair”, if you prefer - ethics.  It can help us survey the ethical landscape.  And, every now and then, it can reveal something that makes you go wow.

Rosie Steele’s paper in this latest JME is one of those.  It compares attitudes to abortion among medical students in Northern Ireland and Norway, and there’s some incredible results.  Of cultural interest is the number of students in either case who profess a religious belief.  Now, that Norn Iron should have more people describing themselves as religious than Norway isn’t entirely a surprise: anyone who’s even half awake has probably noticed that religion plays a bigger part in everyday life in Ulster than in most other places.  But it’s nevertheless a surprise to see just how big the difference is: almost half of the Oslo students claimed no religious affliliation, while only 5% of those in Belfast made a similar claim.

That abortions are much harder to get in Northern Ireland than in Norway doubtless goes some way to explain the finding that “students at [Oslo] were much more likely to have seen an abortion during their training than those at [Belfast]” - there’re fewer to see, I’d guess.  Nevertheless,

[h]alf of the students at [Belfast] would be unwilling to watch an abortion. However, the [Belfast] students stated that abortion had not been adequately covered during their medical school teaching.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons.  One has to do with the question of willingness, and what difference that makes.  Granted that it’s hard to force students to observe a given procedure, there’s still an interesting question to be asked about the scope of the right to opt out.  Would it be permissible to say, “You want to be a medic; this is a medical procedure; your private conscience cannot hold the curriculum hostage”, or should there be an opt-out for students who don’t want to learn about things?  (Or to practice them, for that matter…)  After all, it’s possible that at some stage in a doctor’s career there’ll be cause to perform an abortion - possibly in an emergency situation, for example - and it doesn’t seem too wild to suppose that at least a basic idea of what goes where is the sort of thing that we might expect.  I do wonder how students expect to be better taught about abortion if they’re unwilling to observe one, too - although that musing is tempered by the thought that, perhaps, if there was better or more teaching about the procedure they’d be more willing at least to observe it in practice.

Steele’s paper concludes:

This study demonstrates considerable differences in attitudes between medical students at [Oslo] and [Belfast], with 78.2% of the [Oslo] students being pro-abortion versus only 14.3% of the [Belfast] students. The majority of participants from [Oslo] were in favour of abortion for all scenarios relating to the mother and fetus. Students at [Belfast] seemed to agree more readily with abortion when they did not perceive the situation to be the woman’s responsibility—for example, when there is a threat to her life or health or she has been a raped. For less serious conditions relating to mother and fetus, the [Belfast] students were less likely to be in favour of abortion. These differences probably reflect the differing religious, legal and educational experiences of the two groups of students.

The nice thing about a blog is that I can speculate without having to produce too much evidence - and so I’ll end by responding to that conclusion with one word: Probably?

Not so long ago, I blogged about the government’s stupid-and-scary response to the drubbing it got at the ECHR concerning the retention of genetic information gathered from arrestees.

It would appear that the police have managed to make the policy even more dispiriting than it was already: they’re arresting people in order that they can obtain their DNA.  Quoted in the Telegraph, an unnamed officer (and if I was going to say anything this imbecilic, I’d want to dissociate my name from it if at all possible as well) says

[i]t is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.  We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future.

Oh, come off it.  Notice how in one sentence he says that a DNA database is preventative - because that’s really how most criminals work, isn’t it, Columbo? - and in the next he all but admits that it isn’t.

Anders Sandberg has fun taking apart some of the government’s claims about the use of retained genetic information: he’s suspicious of the idea that 1 crime in 15 is solved using genetic information.  I agree with him that this does seem a bit high, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.  I can see how that might work - though it implies that the forensic science bods are remarkably busy with genes.

But the larger point remains this: while (as Anders admits) there might be a reason to have everyone’s DNA stored on the database, it’s not obvious either that it’d be all that good a way of preventing crime, or that it’d feature in the sort of world we’d want to inhabit anyway.  

That promise was to observe the difference between academic ethics and activism, and to eschew the latter.

But please, please, please take a couple of minutes to read this article and the statement that goes with it, and then to sign the petition.

This is not about putting the boot into the British Chiropractic Association.  It’s about preventing the BCA - or anyone else - putting the boot into people who publicly and in good faith dispute their scientific claims.  It’s not about saying that Singh was correct in his criticism; it’s about his - or anyone else’s - right to test others’ claims in case they’re mistaken or misleading.  It’s about the manifest injustice of the well-funded being able not only to refuse to play the scientific scrutiny game, but also to stop others playing it.