BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming.  I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed.  Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog.  What follows is the version I submitted; it’s substantially the same, save for a few tweaks that BioNews made to conform with their house style.  (They didn’t like the Latin…)  I am massively grateful to the student who made the point about small people taking more steps to get anywhere.  I’d also like to think that the idea of making people smaller led me to Lilliput, thence to Gulliver, thence to the voyage to Laputa.  It didn’t.  I’m not that clever.  Laputa made its appearance quite unbidden.  But – hey, it works.

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There’s a part of Gulliver’s Travels where Gulliver visits the grand Academy at Lagado, wherein one of the academicians is trying to derive sunbeams from cucumbers.  It’s tempting to wonder at first glance whether there’s something of the Academy to Liao, Sandberg and Roache’s proposed strategy for combating climate change: that we could engineer humanity to be less of a drain on the environment.  Their paper, “Human Engineering and Climate Change” (forthcoming in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, with a pre-publication version here), has already attracted a reasonable amount of media interest, and it’s not hard to see why.  The headline proposal is that we could engineer people to be smaller, on the grounds that smaller people require less food and fuel: a population that is smaller on the whole would have less environmental impact.  (A small part of this – and I’m genuinely fond of this idea – is that heavier people wear out shoes and carpets more quickly, so are more resource-hungry.  On the other hand, as one of my students has pointed out, short people take more steps to get across the room; the carpet might actually suffer more.  Moreover, a small person has a greater surface-to-volume ratio, and so would lose heat more quickly, possibly requiring more central heating and more food.) more…

Across at NewAPPS, Eric Schliesser wonders aloud about how common nootropic drug use is in professional philosophy.  (Nootropics are are “drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods that improve mental functions such as cognition, memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, and concentration” - Wikipedia.)  And, quite rightly, some of the commentators have pointed out that it’s fairly common.

Actually, it’s more than that: it’s pretty much ubiquitous.  The definition of a nootropic drug just offered is pretty wide; we can allow it to cover any substance that improves intellectual capabilities.  Once we take that on board, it’s clear that we’re talking about things like modafinil, beta-blockers… but also about things like caffeine, alcohol and nicotine.  All these things have the capacity to improve our intellectual ability, at least temporarily.  And the last three are all over the place in academia – and probably professional most-other-things too.

(Granted, alcohol also has the ability to impair our intellectual ability after a fairly short while.  But (warning: anecdote posing as data ahead) it’s also the case that some of the best seminars have been those during which wine has flowed; and it’d be hard to imagine a conference that wasn’t at least paritially fuelled by booze.  And while philosophers do seem to have a reputation for drink, I don’t think that the picture is too different in other fields.  Plausibly, not the least of the reasons for this is that much intellectual labour is a shared enterprise – I’m not talking about co-authorship, as the knocking about of ideas – and something that makes you a bit more convivial makes that sharing more likely.)

So I’m going to take it as read that nootropics amplo sensu are common, and probably pervasive, throughout academia – and throughout all areas of life.  Whether nootropic drugs more narrowly defined are common is a slightly different matter: while there are comments to Eric’s post that tell of some use of things like modafinil and beta-blockers, these stories are – obviously – self-selecting.  (Incidentally: the question of nootropic use in academia was asked a few years ago in the THES.)  Nevertheless, I’d imagine that there is a non-negligible number of people working in academia that makes use of such supplements to enhance performance.

But I’m wondering if there might be a more radical question: might there be situations in which we have a responsibility to use them? more…

I recently enjoyed this article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian on vitamin pills and risk compensation – basically arguing that placebos are not harmless, because if we feel we have improved our health then we may take more risks in other areas.

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Does oxytocin come as a liquid?  I can only assume that it does, and that it’s possible to drown in a vat of it.  I’ve come to this conclusion after reading this interview with Patricia Churchland in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  It ought to come as no surprise to those who’re familiar with Churchland’s reductionist approach to metaphysics that she thinks that the same kind of reductionism can be applied to ethics; but I’m going to have to get hold of a copy of her new book, Braintrust, just to make sure that she really is as reductionist as she appears here.  Because, based on the evidence of the interview, her position is… um… odd.

Things start off well enough: her picture seems to have something in common with Aristotle’s, inasmuch as

morality is not about rule-making but instead about the cultivation of moral sentiment through experience, training, and the following of role models.

There’re plenty of people who’d disagree with this, but it’s not a wildly outré position, and there’re plenty of people who’ll accept it, too.  But then… more…

Continuing my recent theme of the impact of language on ethics and decision making I’m presently writing a paper on the use of claims based on justice to object to new technologies such as human enhancement or synthetic biology. In the process of writing this paper I’ve encountered a rather odd gap in our language. It is the case when discussing future technologies that the harms involved are more properly thought of as risks (that is uncertain harms where the probability of the harm is predictable) and hazards (that is uncertain harms where the probability of the harm is not predictable). The same applies to the benefits of future technology but we don’t have the language to directly describe them thusly, ie there is no obvious counterparts to risk and hazard in regards to benefit. This seems odd given that benefits can be just as uncertain as harms.

And while we might think of this as just a linguistic oddity it may actually have an impact on decision making. For example in research ethics it is common to talk about the risks and benefits of research – but this creates

Any suggestions of appropriate terms would be gratefully received!

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has announced that it has opened a consultation on emerging biotechnologies:

The Council is seeking views on the ethical issues posed by emerging biotechnologies. Your views will be valuable in shaping and informing the deliberations of a Working Party that was recently set up to consider this topic.

The Working Party is interested in the way society and policy makers respond to new biotechnologies and how benefits from these technologies can be secured in an ethically appropriate manner. This issue will be considered in light of both current examples of emerging biotechnologies, such as synthetic biology and nanotechnology, and older cases, such as genetically modified crops and assisted reproduction technologies.

All responses will be considered carefully by the Working Party. We aim to publish our final report, including recommendations to policy makers, in autumn 2012.

The consultation document and response form are available to download here.

Over at Practical Ethics, Julian Savulescu has been thinking about the possibilities raised by the observation that brain stimulation would appear to have increased the mathematical ability of trial participants.  He concludes that the observation – and the implicit uses to which it could be put – are ethically important.

One of the arguments he produces is this:

[E]ven those at the top end of mathematical ability might benefit from enhancement.  If one takes those people in the top 1% of the population of IQ, the top quarter of that top 1% produce more than twice as many patents as the bottom quarter.  So even if you are in the top 1%, enhancing your IQ might enhance your creativity and inventiveness.  Kadosh and colleagues begin their article, “Dalton, Keynes, Gauss, Newton, Einstein, and Turing are only a few examples of people who have advanced the quality of human life and knowledge through their exceptional numerical abilities.”  But if we were to enhance the ability of such geniuses by even a tiny per cent, problems would be solved that would otherwise be unlikely to be solved.  Tiny improvements have great effect over large numbers of people over significant periods of time.  An important problem that has remained unsolved or unrecognized could be solved.  It is important to recognize that cognitive enhancement is an important social and economic issue.

There’s something about this that doesn’t add up (arf!). more…