Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category

When Hypocrisy Becomes Farce

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

Following shortly on the heels of the announcement by a Church-appointed commission that uncovered pervasive child abuse in nearly every Catholic diocese in Belgium, this weekend the Pope visited the UK and spewed more of his nonsense about “atheist extremism” which he claims threatens “traditional values”.

I didn’t know pederasty was a traditional value. But I guess its a good thing those Belgium priests were not atheists. Who knows what they would have done.

But then rank hypocrisy becomes farce: he blames the holocaust on atheism:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

Ophelia Benson was livid:

That vicious authoritarian theocratic homophobic misogynist hierarchical thug presumes to blame atheists for Nazism when his own fucking church was all but an ally of the Nazis and really was an ally of Mussolini and Franco.

Indeed.  Of course, Hitler was no atheist. He professed belief in Catholicism and was solidly supported by the church during his reign. The Pope’s historical revisionism goes beyond hypocrisy—it is an outright lie.

If you were making a movie about a rabid lunatic who became Pope could you find anyone better than Herr Ratzinger to play the part?

The Face of the Other

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Those of you who have read my work in ethic know that I think the writings of Emmanuel Levinas are especially helpful in explaining moral authority.

One main idea in Levinas’s work is that ethical conduct is a response to “the face of the Other”. In less metaphorical terms, this means that morality gets its authority from our capacity to respond to the vulnerability and particularity of another person which place demands on us that we are compelled to acknowledge.

And now there is some scientific evidence supporting Levinas’s view. Here is John Cookson at Big Think:

Is a person’s propensity toward evil a matter of malfunctioning synapses and neurons?

Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” says it is.  Ever-more-detailed brain scans are revealing the biological origins of psychological issues in “evil” people, from those who are mildly antisocial to serial murderers.

Under each brain’s wrinkly cortex lies the limbic system, an evolutionary heirloom controlling emotion and motivation, among other functions.  Within this limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei that processes our feelings of fear and pleasure.

Murderers and other violent criminals have been shown to have amygdalae that are smaller or that don’t function properly, explains Stone.  One recent study concluded that individuals who exhibit a marker of “limbic neural maldevelopment” have “significantly higher levels of antisocial personality, psychopathy, arrests and convictions compared with controls.”

The amygdala is important because, among its other functions, it allows an individual to respond to the facial expressions of others.  When a person has an abnormal amygdala—one that doesn’t process the facial expressions of emotion—they can have an inability to register the fear and suffering of a victim, says Stone.  This lack of response to the emotions of others predisposes an individual to antisocial, even criminal, behavior.

Perhaps we should stop referring to the “face of the Other” as a metaphor.

Longevity Genes—Who Wants to Know?

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Scientists have apparently uncovered a cluster of “longetivity genes” which protect some people from succumbing to a variety of diseases.

When it becomes affordable to have one’s genome sequenced, perhaps in a few years, a longevity test, though not a foolproof one, may be feasible, if a new claim holds up. Scientists studying the genomes of centenarians in New England say they have identified a set of genetic variants that predicts extreme longevity with 77 percent accuracy.

The centenarians had just as many disease-associated variants as shorter-lived mortals, so their special inheritance must be genes that protect against disease, said the authors of the study, a team led by Paola Sebastiani and Thomas T. Perls of Boston University. Their report appears in Thursday’s issue of Science.

The finding, if confirmed, would complicate proposals for predicting someone’s liability to disease based on disease-causing variants in the person’s genome, since much would depend on whether or not an individual possessed protective genes as well.

This discovery should make it possible to tell individuals the odds of them making it to 100 years old.

Would it be good to know your odds or not?  The answer would seem to be a matter for individuals to answer.

Many people say they would not want access to this information. They prefer the uncertainty, the adventure of not knowing when they are likely to die, and they would experience the demand to organize their lives around knowledge of such probabilities as  a burden. Others would want this information to help them plot out a strategy for living past 100.

So what are you—an adventurer or a planner?

Insurance companies will no doubt be very interested in this information and adjust rates accordingly. Should insurance companies mandate that individuals acquire such a test?  If you are an adventurer it would be an egregious infringement of personal liberty to require individuals to have access to this information.