The Objectivist
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
On July 19, 2006, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that permitted the federal government to fund research on embryonic stem cells from embryos that were left over from in vitro fertilization procedures. This is consistent with his earlier decision in 2001 that made federal funds available for research concerning currently existing stem cell lines, but not new ones. Bush’s stated reason for vetoing the bill was that it would support the taking of human life. He stated that, "Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value."
Despite the overblown rhetoric, his argument here probably rests on the notion that embryos have a right (that is, are owed a moral duty) not to be used in research aimed at generating treatments for cancer, spinal cord injury, heart damage, and other maladies. But do embryos have such a right?
An embryo is a human being in the sense that is alive (it metabolizes nutrients, grows, etc.) and is human (rather than, say, a frog). However, those who think it is okay to eat are meat likely reject the notion that all living things have a right against being killed. Ducks are alive and tasty.
In general, whether something is a human being is not relevant to whether it has rights. If there were intelligent alien beings (for example, ET or Barney) who had lives like ours, they would have the same rights that we do and for the same reasons. This tells us that it is not a biological category that determines who has rights. Rather, it has to do with whether something is a person. The exact conditions of personhood are controversial, but they are related to quality of thought or emotion. Specifically, persons have rationality, self-consciousness, complex emotions, or something along these lines.
The stem-cell opponents' best response here is to argue that embryos have rights against others because if left alone, they will naturally develop into persons. The proponents argue that this is analogous to newborn infants who are thought to have rights despite not yet being persons.
One problem with this natural-future theory is that it doesn't result in all embryos having rights against being killed. Some embryos have genetic defects that ensure that they won’t develop into persons. For example, some embryos have genetic defects that will cause them to be severely retarded or not live more than a year or two. However, some opponents might accept this conclusion.
A second problem is that a being's natural future is irrelevant. Consider a newborn with a bowel obstruction who will die unless a surgeon operates on him. In some areas such a newborn will likely receive the surgery (e.g., Dunkirk) and in some areas he won't. Focusing on a newborn’s natural future makes its status depend on things such as whether it will develop without medical care (natural as pre-technological) or its likely future (natural as the statistically likely outcome). Clearly both are irrelevant in explaining whether a newborn has a right not to be killed. A newborn's moral status doesn't depend on whether surgeons live nearby. This shows that the natural-future argument is mistaken.
This result is unsurprising. Theories that focus on whether something is natural have a history of failing. Theologians and philosophers who argue that only natural sex is permissible invariably fail to explain why this is the case.
Embryos aren't persons and don't have a right not to be killed. Hence, they are fair game for stem cell experiments. The obvious objection is that my argument would support the claim that newborns also lack rights and this is a jaw-dropping absurdity. But why is this conclusion absurd? Attributes like the newborn's pre-technological future and statistically likely future are irrelevant. The parents’ relation to the newborn might suggest that there is a right in the parents, but not the newborn. For example, a person might love his dog but that doesn't result in his dog having rights that an unloved dog doesn't.
It might also be objected that stem-cell research will bring about a general lack of respect for human life that will coarsen our society. For example, the 2004 President’s Council on Bioethics raised this concern. Opponents then claim that such coarsening will then bring about suicide, murder, indifference to others’ suffering, etc. I haven't seen any evidence for this claim, so it looks like mere guesswork to me. In addition, even if such an effect were to be present, the costs of this effect would have to be weighed against benefits in fighting other maladies like cancer and heart failure. In short, President Bush's argument against funding stem-cell research is unconvincing.
17 August 2006
07 August 2006
Stem Cell Controversy: Veto City
The Objectivist
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
Embryonic stem cells are cells that are taken from a three to five day old embryo. An embryo at that stage is largely undeveloped in it consists of a basketball-like clump of around 50-150 cells. The embryonic stem cells can renew themselves for a long time and can generate cells with a variety of functions (e.g., they can generate cells that are part of the heart, lung, and skin). These attributes lead some medical researchers to believe that such cells hold promise in treating diseases such as Parkison’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes and toward treating spinal cord injury and heart failure. On July 19, 2006, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have permitted the government to fund research on embryonic stem cells that were left over from in vitro fertilization procedures. The research is controversial because it involves either destroying an embryo or cloning.
The destruction of embryos led President Bush to argue that the bill was unacceptable because “it would support the taking of innocent human life.” In my next column, I will argue that this was incorrect since early human life is different from personhood and it is persons who have a right against being killed. In this column, I want to focus on two flawed arguments that are common in Congress and the relevant scientific and ethical communities.
Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) and columnist Mitch Album have argued for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research because it puts an otherwise wasted resource to good use. Album, for example, quotes Dr. Sue O’Shea, director of the Michigan Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as stating that per in vitro treatment, roughly 20-30 embryos are created and then thrown away. He then argues that performing research on these embryos is surely as respectful toward them as throwing them out. Album dismisses the claim that they would otherwise be adopted since there have been only 128 adoptions of such embryos in the past nine years and there are 400,000 frozen embryos. Note that stem-cell opponents dispute this second figure.
The problem with this argument is that it treats letting a human being die and killing him as morally equivalent. This is counterintuitive. For example, consider if we had several patients who were going to die within 24 hours and whose organs could be harvested to save others only if we killed them, albeit painlessly, and surgically removed their organs. We would fail to respect these patients if we killed them even though doing so would make the world a better place. This argument does show that for someone who thinks that human embryos are human lives, in vitro fertilization clinics are horror shows, but this is not the issue that Congress and the President addressed.
Some ethics committees (such as The President’s Council on Bioethics in 2004) have suggested that embryonic stem cell research is morally permissible only if the embryo is dismantled early in its development (specifically before it is ten to fourteen days old). A closely related position is that it is permissible if done before this point. As summarized by William Saletan, the ethics committees often cite a rough convergence of different features of the embryo: individuality (twinning won’t occur), organization (the division and differentiation of cells), implantation (attachment to the uterine wall), and the development of a nervous system. It’s clear that none of these changes matter. Consider twinning. Imagine that in adulthood, a single human could divide into two persons similar to how an amoeba divides. This wouldn’t show that killing an adult is permissible. Given this, it’s hard to see how it’s relevant in the context of embryos. Organization is similarly irrelevant. In judging the value of an early stage in human life there’s no reason why it should matter whether a relatively small number of cells are organized or not. Implantation is also irrelevant in that a being’s rights or value can’t depend on what it’s connected to. The concern over whether the embryo has a nervous system is just a backdoor method of focusing on consciousness. However, since plenty of animals we eat every day are conscious, this is plainly irrelevant.
In any case, regardless of whether embryonic stem cell research is permissible, it doesn’t follow that the government should support it. Michael Tanner of the CATO Institute points out that stem-cell research is already legal and well funded by the private sector. He notes that in 2005 such research received $102 million in venture-capital funding and is also pursued by corporate giants such as Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, and Novartis. Since federal funding will likely displace private funding, and poses a substantial threat of politicizing research, it will likely make things worse. The inefficiency of the government is well established and the chance of the research not being politicized via the politics of abortion is incredibly small. Remember this is the same group of buffoons that jumped into the middle of the Terry Schiavo fiasco. In the end, then, Bush was correct to veto the bill, but not for the reason he gave.
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
Embryonic stem cells are cells that are taken from a three to five day old embryo. An embryo at that stage is largely undeveloped in it consists of a basketball-like clump of around 50-150 cells. The embryonic stem cells can renew themselves for a long time and can generate cells with a variety of functions (e.g., they can generate cells that are part of the heart, lung, and skin). These attributes lead some medical researchers to believe that such cells hold promise in treating diseases such as Parkison’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes and toward treating spinal cord injury and heart failure. On July 19, 2006, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have permitted the government to fund research on embryonic stem cells that were left over from in vitro fertilization procedures. The research is controversial because it involves either destroying an embryo or cloning.
The destruction of embryos led President Bush to argue that the bill was unacceptable because “it would support the taking of innocent human life.” In my next column, I will argue that this was incorrect since early human life is different from personhood and it is persons who have a right against being killed. In this column, I want to focus on two flawed arguments that are common in Congress and the relevant scientific and ethical communities.
Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) and columnist Mitch Album have argued for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research because it puts an otherwise wasted resource to good use. Album, for example, quotes Dr. Sue O’Shea, director of the Michigan Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as stating that per in vitro treatment, roughly 20-30 embryos are created and then thrown away. He then argues that performing research on these embryos is surely as respectful toward them as throwing them out. Album dismisses the claim that they would otherwise be adopted since there have been only 128 adoptions of such embryos in the past nine years and there are 400,000 frozen embryos. Note that stem-cell opponents dispute this second figure.
The problem with this argument is that it treats letting a human being die and killing him as morally equivalent. This is counterintuitive. For example, consider if we had several patients who were going to die within 24 hours and whose organs could be harvested to save others only if we killed them, albeit painlessly, and surgically removed their organs. We would fail to respect these patients if we killed them even though doing so would make the world a better place. This argument does show that for someone who thinks that human embryos are human lives, in vitro fertilization clinics are horror shows, but this is not the issue that Congress and the President addressed.
Some ethics committees (such as The President’s Council on Bioethics in 2004) have suggested that embryonic stem cell research is morally permissible only if the embryo is dismantled early in its development (specifically before it is ten to fourteen days old). A closely related position is that it is permissible if done before this point. As summarized by William Saletan, the ethics committees often cite a rough convergence of different features of the embryo: individuality (twinning won’t occur), organization (the division and differentiation of cells), implantation (attachment to the uterine wall), and the development of a nervous system. It’s clear that none of these changes matter. Consider twinning. Imagine that in adulthood, a single human could divide into two persons similar to how an amoeba divides. This wouldn’t show that killing an adult is permissible. Given this, it’s hard to see how it’s relevant in the context of embryos. Organization is similarly irrelevant. In judging the value of an early stage in human life there’s no reason why it should matter whether a relatively small number of cells are organized or not. Implantation is also irrelevant in that a being’s rights or value can’t depend on what it’s connected to. The concern over whether the embryo has a nervous system is just a backdoor method of focusing on consciousness. However, since plenty of animals we eat every day are conscious, this is plainly irrelevant.
In any case, regardless of whether embryonic stem cell research is permissible, it doesn’t follow that the government should support it. Michael Tanner of the CATO Institute points out that stem-cell research is already legal and well funded by the private sector. He notes that in 2005 such research received $102 million in venture-capital funding and is also pursued by corporate giants such as Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, and Novartis. Since federal funding will likely displace private funding, and poses a substantial threat of politicizing research, it will likely make things worse. The inefficiency of the government is well established and the chance of the research not being politicized via the politics of abortion is incredibly small. Remember this is the same group of buffoons that jumped into the middle of the Terry Schiavo fiasco. In the end, then, Bush was correct to veto the bill, but not for the reason he gave.
26 July 2006
On Reparations
The Objectivist
REPARATIONS: DESERVEDLY MARGINALIZED
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
7/19/06
The movement for reparations for slavery has failed so far. It has led to an unsuccessful lawsuit against such corporations as JP Morgan, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Union Pacific, and Aetna Insurance. The initial suit, filed in 2002, was for $1.4 trillion. Since 1989, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill that establishes a commission to study reparation proposals. More ominously, however, some cities (for example, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit) require firms contracting with the city to disclose whether they or their predecessor profited from slavery. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see this as a first step toward reparations.
Reparations are owed to persons who were enslaved. Unfortunately they are dead. However, slavery didn’t harm the slaves’ descendants. A practice harms an individual if it makes him worse off than he otherwise would be. For example, the progressive-tax system harms a high-income taxpayer since he would pay less were it not in place. Thus, we can judge that a practice harmed a person only if we can compare how well he does with and without the practice. However, this can’t be done in the context of slavery since the descendants wouldn’t have existed but for slavery. This is because a person’s parents are an essential feature of him and slavery affected who parented with whom. That is, had slavery not occurred, the reproductive patterns would have been very different and current descendants would never have been born. Since descendants wouldn’t have been better off had they never been born, slavery didn’t harm them.
In contrast, some other cases of justified reparations are a good idea since they are given to actual victims. Consider, for example, the $20,000 paid to each Japanese-American interned by the U.S. and the $5.2 billion fund to compensate persons who were forced to work in Germany during WWII. As a side note, Michael Levin points out that were the approximately 40 million American blacks to be given the same $20,000, the cost would be $800 billion plus administrative costs, roughly the amount that the U.S. government spent in 2005 on social security and medicare.
Some proponents of reparations argue that it is owed for things other than slavery, such as discrimination or Jim Crow laws. The problem with this claim is that the amount of compensation is mere guesswork. The white-black differences don’t provide a useful guideline since there are a number of other factors that explain at least some of the differences. For example, blacks engage in a number of behaviors that put them behind the eight ball such as having children out of wedlock (over two-thirds of black children born in 2003 were born out of wedlock, 76% in Louisiana), criminality (blacks were more than half of the murderers and robbers in 2002), and poor performance in school (the black dropout rate is 11% versus 7% for whites and 4% for Asians). These behaviors are the sort of things that persons are responsible for doing and that can’t be placed on the doorstep of slave-owners and Jim Crow laws. In addition, as previously noted in this column, some of the differences might be due to genetics. If this is correct, then the black-white difference will not be a useful measure of the effects of past injustice.
Other proponents argue that reparations are owed because U.S. citizens received vast benefits from slavery. This is a mistake since an individual doesn’t owe reparations for merely having benefited from injustice unless he was in some way responsible for it. For example, if a tennis player (e.g., Steffi Graf) wins more tournaments and earns more money as a result of a crazed fan stabbing her rival, she doesn’t owe her rival money, even though she benefited from the stabbing. What’s true of an individual is also true of U.S. citizens in general.
What is particularly disconcerting about the claim to reparations is that blacks are richer and freer in the U.S. than anywhere else. Nor are U.S. taxpayers stingy with regard to the poor black community. As Levin points out in Why Race Matters, given the overrepresentation of blacks among welfare recipients and the progressive nature of state and federal income taxes, an enormous amount of money is transferred from non-black taxpayers to American blacks every year. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the taxpayers gave an amount equal to a Marshall Plan to blacks every three years and this doesn’t take into account the valuable benefits of preferential treatment in education and hiring.
Reparations are owed, but unfortunately, the persons owed them are dead. It is a sad fact of the world that some injustices can’t be repaired.
The Constructivist
7/26/06
I've stopped contributing to our "Taking Sides" column, as preparations for my Fulbright year have been intense this month. For the next year, I'll be teaching and writing in Japan, so will only respond informally on this blog to The Objectivist's columns when he hasn't been able to line up guest columnists.
In terms of reparations, I agree that the standard versions of corrective or restorative justice that underlie most successful reparations claims (such as to survivors of Nazi forced labor/death camps or American internment camps) make the case for reparations to African Americans for slavery and de jure segregation difficult to sustain. These standard versions require there to be clear ways of identifying surviving victims and calculating what is owed to them, along with clear lines of state and/or corporate responsibility. Generally, even claims that meet these criteria are denied or delayed until most survivors have perished of other causes; payouts, when low, seem to insult the magnitude of the pain and suffering of the victims, yet when they are high, they invite charges of corruption in administration. Consider the controversies over Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, which may be interpreted to provide warrant for reparations being owed by IBM, and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, which is a vigorous condemnation of lawyers and organizations that have profited by prosecuting reparations claims for Jewish victims.
Still, there are points in The Objectivist's argument that bear contesting. Whereas Michael Levin's Why Race Matters argues that welfare state benefits to African Americans are as good as reparations, not only is this a form of distributive rather than restorative justice, but as Ira Katznelson documents in When Affirmative Action Was White, Southern national and state legislators colluded in excluding African Americans from much of the New Deal and limiting their benefits when exclusion proved impossible. Indeed, as George Lipsitz shows in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, even as the system of de jure segregation was being dismantled during and after the World War II years, practices such as red-lining ensured that the suburbs would be overwhelmingly white. Much of the wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans documented in such studies as Melvin Oliver's and Thomas Shapiro's Black Wealth/White Wealth, Dalton Conley's Being Black, Living in the Red, and Michael Brown et al.'s Whitewashing Race can be attributed to the disparity in home ownership rates post-WWII as white veterans and workers were offered easy credit and new housing in the suburbs that were not made available to African Americans. There are plenty of surviving victims of these social policies who could make strong cases against banks and local, state, and federal governments. State and corporate malfeasance and negligence could provide grounds for some kind of benefits to Africans Americans as a class for the cumulative effect of these relatively recent discriminations. If the government can calculate what is owed to the families of the victims of 9/11, it can certainly undertake a Truth and Reconciliation-style inquiry into the fiscal impact of systematic racial discrimination and oppression from the New Deal to the Great Society.
For further reading on these and related issues, I recommend consulting University of Dayton law professor Vernellia Randall's Apology and Reparations for Slavery page and University of Maryland professor Robert Fullinwider's The Case for Reparations.
REPARATIONS: DESERVEDLY MARGINALIZED
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
7/19/06
The movement for reparations for slavery has failed so far. It has led to an unsuccessful lawsuit against such corporations as JP Morgan, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Union Pacific, and Aetna Insurance. The initial suit, filed in 2002, was for $1.4 trillion. Since 1989, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill that establishes a commission to study reparation proposals. More ominously, however, some cities (for example, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit) require firms contracting with the city to disclose whether they or their predecessor profited from slavery. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see this as a first step toward reparations.
Reparations are owed to persons who were enslaved. Unfortunately they are dead. However, slavery didn’t harm the slaves’ descendants. A practice harms an individual if it makes him worse off than he otherwise would be. For example, the progressive-tax system harms a high-income taxpayer since he would pay less were it not in place. Thus, we can judge that a practice harmed a person only if we can compare how well he does with and without the practice. However, this can’t be done in the context of slavery since the descendants wouldn’t have existed but for slavery. This is because a person’s parents are an essential feature of him and slavery affected who parented with whom. That is, had slavery not occurred, the reproductive patterns would have been very different and current descendants would never have been born. Since descendants wouldn’t have been better off had they never been born, slavery didn’t harm them.
In contrast, some other cases of justified reparations are a good idea since they are given to actual victims. Consider, for example, the $20,000 paid to each Japanese-American interned by the U.S. and the $5.2 billion fund to compensate persons who were forced to work in Germany during WWII. As a side note, Michael Levin points out that were the approximately 40 million American blacks to be given the same $20,000, the cost would be $800 billion plus administrative costs, roughly the amount that the U.S. government spent in 2005 on social security and medicare.
Some proponents of reparations argue that it is owed for things other than slavery, such as discrimination or Jim Crow laws. The problem with this claim is that the amount of compensation is mere guesswork. The white-black differences don’t provide a useful guideline since there are a number of other factors that explain at least some of the differences. For example, blacks engage in a number of behaviors that put them behind the eight ball such as having children out of wedlock (over two-thirds of black children born in 2003 were born out of wedlock, 76% in Louisiana), criminality (blacks were more than half of the murderers and robbers in 2002), and poor performance in school (the black dropout rate is 11% versus 7% for whites and 4% for Asians). These behaviors are the sort of things that persons are responsible for doing and that can’t be placed on the doorstep of slave-owners and Jim Crow laws. In addition, as previously noted in this column, some of the differences might be due to genetics. If this is correct, then the black-white difference will not be a useful measure of the effects of past injustice.
Other proponents argue that reparations are owed because U.S. citizens received vast benefits from slavery. This is a mistake since an individual doesn’t owe reparations for merely having benefited from injustice unless he was in some way responsible for it. For example, if a tennis player (e.g., Steffi Graf) wins more tournaments and earns more money as a result of a crazed fan stabbing her rival, she doesn’t owe her rival money, even though she benefited from the stabbing. What’s true of an individual is also true of U.S. citizens in general.
What is particularly disconcerting about the claim to reparations is that blacks are richer and freer in the U.S. than anywhere else. Nor are U.S. taxpayers stingy with regard to the poor black community. As Levin points out in Why Race Matters, given the overrepresentation of blacks among welfare recipients and the progressive nature of state and federal income taxes, an enormous amount of money is transferred from non-black taxpayers to American blacks every year. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the taxpayers gave an amount equal to a Marshall Plan to blacks every three years and this doesn’t take into account the valuable benefits of preferential treatment in education and hiring.
Reparations are owed, but unfortunately, the persons owed them are dead. It is a sad fact of the world that some injustices can’t be repaired.
The Constructivist
7/26/06
I've stopped contributing to our "Taking Sides" column, as preparations for my Fulbright year have been intense this month. For the next year, I'll be teaching and writing in Japan, so will only respond informally on this blog to The Objectivist's columns when he hasn't been able to line up guest columnists.
In terms of reparations, I agree that the standard versions of corrective or restorative justice that underlie most successful reparations claims (such as to survivors of Nazi forced labor/death camps or American internment camps) make the case for reparations to African Americans for slavery and de jure segregation difficult to sustain. These standard versions require there to be clear ways of identifying surviving victims and calculating what is owed to them, along with clear lines of state and/or corporate responsibility. Generally, even claims that meet these criteria are denied or delayed until most survivors have perished of other causes; payouts, when low, seem to insult the magnitude of the pain and suffering of the victims, yet when they are high, they invite charges of corruption in administration. Consider the controversies over Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, which may be interpreted to provide warrant for reparations being owed by IBM, and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, which is a vigorous condemnation of lawyers and organizations that have profited by prosecuting reparations claims for Jewish victims.
Still, there are points in The Objectivist's argument that bear contesting. Whereas Michael Levin's Why Race Matters argues that welfare state benefits to African Americans are as good as reparations, not only is this a form of distributive rather than restorative justice, but as Ira Katznelson documents in When Affirmative Action Was White, Southern national and state legislators colluded in excluding African Americans from much of the New Deal and limiting their benefits when exclusion proved impossible. Indeed, as George Lipsitz shows in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, even as the system of de jure segregation was being dismantled during and after the World War II years, practices such as red-lining ensured that the suburbs would be overwhelmingly white. Much of the wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans documented in such studies as Melvin Oliver's and Thomas Shapiro's Black Wealth/White Wealth, Dalton Conley's Being Black, Living in the Red, and Michael Brown et al.'s Whitewashing Race can be attributed to the disparity in home ownership rates post-WWII as white veterans and workers were offered easy credit and new housing in the suburbs that were not made available to African Americans. There are plenty of surviving victims of these social policies who could make strong cases against banks and local, state, and federal governments. State and corporate malfeasance and negligence could provide grounds for some kind of benefits to Africans Americans as a class for the cumulative effect of these relatively recent discriminations. If the government can calculate what is owed to the families of the victims of 9/11, it can certainly undertake a Truth and Reconciliation-style inquiry into the fiscal impact of systematic racial discrimination and oppression from the New Deal to the Great Society.
For further reading on these and related issues, I recommend consulting University of Dayton law professor Vernellia Randall's Apology and Reparations for Slavery page and University of Maryland professor Robert Fullinwider's The Case for Reparations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
